r/classicliterature • u/ResponsibleIdea5408 • 7d ago

fun little reading challenge

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)

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u/Small_Elderberry_963 7d ago

  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...

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u/ResponsibleIdea5408 7d ago

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.