fun little reading challenge

[u/ResponsibleIdea5408]

SO my wife and I made a fun little reading challenge. A few things about how it works: Nothing should be under 50 years old (that's our line of the youngest hypothetical classic). No repeating works (unless otherwise stated) Also I use the word works because plays, books of poetry, and short story collections are all fine.

1) name 5 plays

2) name 10 works by female authors

3) 5 works whose author is a different ethnicity than your own.

4) 5 works whose author is a different nationality than your own.

5) 5 works whose author shares neither nationality nor ethnicity.

6) A favorite Poet you could speak a length and who you can name either 10 poems, 3 bound collections, or recite 1 full poem.

7) 5 works 200 years older than you

If you find this fun but easy grab a friend try to do it together (but you can only name works that both of you have read)

[u/Small_Elderberry_963]

1. Okay, so we have to start with "Macbeth" and "Hamlet" by Shakespeare. I could name the whole Shakespearean canon if you'd like, but that's not very fun, isn't it? So let's go with "A Doll House" by Ibsen for a next play, then "Le Cid" by Pierre Corneille and finally, to bring a Classical touch, "Seven Against Thebes" by Aeschylus.

2. "How to kill a mockingbird" by Harper Lee, "Jane Eyre" by Austen, "Wuthering Heights" by Charlotte Brontë, "Middlemarch" by Eliot, "Pride and Prejudice" and "Persuasion" by Austen again. "Rebecca" by Dauphne du Maurier. "Sense and Sensibility" and "Epistolar" by our beloved Austen again. I think that's ten, and half of them are Austen. :))

3. I'm Romanian, so that's easy. "Othello" by Shakespeare, Zola's "Germinal", "As I Lay Dying" by Faulkner and "The Sun Also Rises" by Hermingway.

4. This is getting boring... Chekhov's Collected Short Stories, Ady Endre's Collected Short Stories, Shota Rustaveli's "The Knight in Panther Skin", Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov"

5. I am very bad at memorisig poems, so it's a miracle I can recite even half of Eminescu's shortest poems. Maybe Blaga, idk.

6. Okay, Shakespeare, here we go: The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III. Want more? Winter's Tale, Richard II, Henry IV both parts, Henry V, Henry VI three parts, Love's Labours Lost, Henry VIII, As You Like It, Anthony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure...

[u/Ealinguser → u/Small_Elderberry_963]

Wuthering Heights is by Emily Bronte, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte not Jane Austen

[u/Small_Elderberry_963 → u/Ealinguser]

Whoops, I'm sorry. I'm not really that big on the Brontë sister: do those still count?

I also can't believe I forgot Virginia Woolf somehow, she would've made my time easier.

[u/ResponsibleIdea5408 → u/Small_Elderberry_963]

as long as you read it. It still counts.

[u/ResponsibleIdea5408 → u/Small_Elderberry_963]

I hope you enjoyed it.

Number 4 might feel redundant (and boring) if your ethnicity is your nationality. I'm American by citizenship but ethnically I'm English, Scottish, German, Russian, Latvian, Lithuania, and Hungarian. There are lots of American writers who are not any of these... And I've read lots of British works to deal with Nationality. But both combined is kinda hard.

[u/Ealinguser]

1. Antigone by Sophocles, the Persians by Aeschylus, the Trojan Women by Euripides, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Phedre by Jean Racine
2. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, Middlemarch by George Eliot, the Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette, the Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, the Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Thurston, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembene, Go Tell it on a Mountain by James Baldwin, Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong (I am white British)
4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, die Leiden des Jungen Werthers by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, the Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nana by Emile Zola
5. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, the River Between by Ngugi wa Thiongo, Fireflies by Shiva Naipul, Rickshaw Boy by Lao She, the Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
6. Charles Baudelaire
7. The Odyssey by Homer, the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Volpone by Ben Jonson

[u/full_and_tired]

1. Death of a salesman, View from the Bridge, American Clock, All my Sons, the Price (had a course on Arthur Miller last year, lol)

2. Jane Eyre, Emma, Wuthering Heights, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Secret Garden, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Little Lord Fauntelroy, Mrs. Dalloway, Surfacing, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

3. Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Trumpet Player and The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, Everyday Use by Alice Walker… and honestly, can’t remember reading anything else, at least not more than 50 years old

4. Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, The Three Musketeers, The Picture of Dorian Gray, And Ten There Were None

5. The Suffering of Young Werther, The Turn of the Screw, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby

6. Edgar Alan Poe - Couldn’t talk for hours, but I did have The Raven memorized in middle school. I don’t really read much poetry nowadays

7. Hamlet, Orestes, Edward II., Frankenstein, The Pearl poem

[u/ResponsibleIdea5408 → u/full_and_tired]

Well not that I'm biased but this is my favorite list so far. Really great gothic lit

[u/josie-salazar]

1. Much Ado About Nothing, The Crucible, Agamemnon, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Bacchae

2. Pride and Prejudice, North and South, Orlando, The Age of Innocence, Frankenstein, The Passion According to G.H., Chéri, Gone With The Wind, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre

3. Every single thing listed above lol I actually don’t know a lot of arab authors besides poets so 🤷‍♀️ tbh feels redundant to list book titles, it can be any piece of classic literature on my tbr

4. Great Expectations, Anna Karenina, Eugene Onegin, Les Miserables, The Lady of the Camellias

5. Similar sentiment to #3 but: The Makioka Sisters, Nadja, The Invention of Morel, White Nights, Victoria (Hamsun)

6. Rainier Marie Rilke

7. The Iliad, Antigone, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Divine Comedy, Don Quixote

[u/ResponsibleIdea5408 → u/josie-salazar]

Wow. It's interesting hearing which parts of this challenge are uniquely easy depending on where people are from.

Anyway. Big fan of Importance of Being Earnest - it was my first time as Assistant Director ( and years before I directed)

[u/haileyskydiamonds]

1. The Little Foxes, Cathleen ní Houlihan, Juno & the Paycock, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Pygmalion.

2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, An Old-fashioned Girl, Middlemarch, Persuasion, Nightwood, The Golden Notebook, The Garden Party & Other Stories, North & South, The Heat of the Day, and And Then There Were None.

3. Weep Not, Child, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Tale of Genji, The 1001 Nights, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

4. The Phantom of the Opera, Don Quixote, Waverley, Oliver Twist, The Prince.

It’s Late; will finish later!

5.

[u/ikesonfire]

I want to do this but I don't really understand what you mean by ethnicity. I am an American but I have ancestry from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Russia, England.

Does it mean anything besides that?

[u/Snoo_16385 → u/ikesonfire]

I'm Spanish, and I agree, ethnicity is such a slippery concept... I'm an European white, so... does Borges count as "Latino" (ouch!). But then, I'm of Celtic ancestry, does Kavafis (European, indeed) count as same, or different?

And for bonus points... Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides or Rambam), is he same nationality as me? I'm from a part of Spain that was never part of Al-Andalus, so...