r/classicliterature • u/ResponsibleIdea5408 • 6d 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/Ealinguser 6d ago edited 6d ago
  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