Thursday 7 January 2016

2016: Extended Reading Project

Those who’ve been around for a while will have noticed that my reading really expanded and versified last year, particularly with classics and adult novels. I read Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and I *ugh* can’t even talk about it without squealing and flapping my hands around it's so good. I fell back in love with classical mythology and its gods, goddesses and heroes. I've also fallen back in love with classics.

The Mission

And so I’m combining them. One of the first texts I studied at university was Metamophoses by Ovid, but it’s pretty hefty and so I never managed the whole thing. So this year I’m going to embark on what I'm calling an Extended Reading Project and I’ll be reading Metamosphoses by Ovid and Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey.


They're actually not as long as I had first thought – between 400-550 pages – but they're going to take some concentration and I want to savour them! As I studied Metamorphoses (briefly) I’ll be starting with that, and I already have a battered Penguin Classics paperback which helps! I’m not sure about using the translations available in the free Kindle editions – does anyone know if they’re okay? But once I finish it, I give myself full permission to buy the Penguin Clothbound Classics hardback to add to my collection!

The Plan

Metamorphoses
Using my copy, I've worked out that Metamorphoses is divided into 15 books, each comprising of several poems/narratives. I'm planning to read a book a week, which is actually only between 40-70 pages, so that sounds completely doable to me! I’ll be able to read along at a nice pace and research and investigate anything when I need or want to. I’m not going to include this as part of my classics challenge, it’ll just be alongside it.


If this works out this year, I'd love to use it to finally get some of the heftier classics under my belt in 2017; I’m (already) thinking of Vanity Fair, Middlemarch and Anna Karenina…

Tweet me (@sophie_waters) and let me know if you’ll be reading any of these along with me and we can puzzle them out together!

Sophie 

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a good plan! I'm tempted to join you in reading Ovid, I can't remember if I actually read any of the stories at uni!

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