The Classics Book Tag

My fellow blogger and book lover Elliott Blackwell recently wrote a post called "The Classics Book Tag" on his blog Begin In Wonder. In that post he answered ten questions about classic books and issued a challenge to others to do the same. Here are my ten questions and answers.

1. What is an overhyped classic that you didn't really like? 

That's easy: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. At 55 pages, it is the shortest book I ever hated too much to finish -- and I am sure I had it assigned at least twice in university courses. I think on both occasions I just read the first five pages and the last five pages. I just hated it! I think it is probably an important book to read in the context of discussions about race and colonialization, so someday I may give it another try........................................................ actually no, I probably won't.

2. What is your favourite time period to read about?

Many of my favourite books (not necessarily classics -- yet) are set in/around World War I or II: All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr), The Light Between Oceans (M.L. Stedman), Everyone Brave is Forgiven (Chris Cleave), The Secret Keeper (Kate Morton), just to name a few.

But I think actually my favourite setting (if not time period) for fiction is rural: whether it's the "good country people" of Flannery O'Connor's fiction, or the Avonlea-dwellers in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, or the poor migrants of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I just love reading about -- and writing about -- rural life and the things that go on behind the simple bucolic exterior.

3. What is your favourite fairy tale?

Hansel and Gretel. As a child hearing this story I admired the children's resourcefulness in leaving their breadcrumb trail, and I loved the idea of them nibbling parts of the gingerbread house. I thrilled at the idea of the witch being tricked when Hansel holds out a bone instead of his own finger -- and of course seeing the witch pushed into the oven was great! 

None of the disturbing parts of the story, such as why the children were alone in the forest in the first place, ever bothered me. 

By the way, Jonathan enjoys the PBS show Super Why in which the Super Readers fly into a fairy tale to solve a mystery using the power of words. In the Super Why version of Hansel and Gretel, the children must "ASK FIRST" before biting a piece off the witch's cookie house; once they do, she's perfectly fine with it and doesn't try to eat them at all. (It just  shows you what good manners can accomplish.)

4. What is the classic you are most embarrassed you haven't read yet?

Maybe not exactly embarrassed, but I confess that I have not read any of the great Russian classics except Anna Karenina. I have not read War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, or Crime and Punishment. Nor have I read Hugo's Les Miserables -- not Russian of course, but a large novel (in size and influence) that I've yet to read.

5. What are the top 5 classics you would like to read soon?

A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens. It is one of my brother Lincoln's favourites, and he gave me his copy when we were in PEI this summer.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. I love Wharton's writing, and this is one of hers I haven't read yet.

(Notice how none of these are the same novels as in #4?) 

6. What is your favourite modern book/series based on a classic?

I liked Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and David Wrobleski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, both based on Shakespeare plays. 

I also enjoyed -- much more than I expected to, in fact -- Jo Baker's Longbourn, about a servant in the home of Pride and Prejudice's Bennet family. It's not a sequel to or a rewriting of the original, just a really good stand-alone novel that someone who'd never read P&P could enjoy.

7. What is your favourite movie/TV version of a classic?

I love the BBC version of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, with Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.

8. What is the worst classic-to-movie/TV adaptation you've seen?

The worst for me would have to be The House of Mirth starring Gillian Anderson. Anderson does her best, but this movie has serious casting problems. And the writers made an abysmal, nonsensical decision to combine two characters (Gertie and Grace) into one, obliterating one of the most important subplots of the novel. I could go on and on and on, but this is just an awful treatment of one of my favourite novels.

Two other adaptations I strongly disliked were The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (I gave up after half an hour) and Earthsea, based on Ursula LeGuin's wonderful book A Wizard of Earthsea. That one is brutal.

9. Favourite editions you'd like to collect more classics from?

I don't have an answer here; I don't collect any particular versions.

10. What is one under-hyped classic you would recommend to someone?

Make that two -- and they're very different:

Silence by Shusaku Endo - about Portuguese missionaries to Japan in the 1600's.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith - about a teenage girl, Cassandra Mortmain, who lives in a tumbledown castle with her eccentric family in 1930's England. I think of Cassandra as a cross between Anne of Green Gables and Jane Austen's Emma. She's delightful.


Well, it's been fun answering these questions. I always enjoy thinking, talking, and writing about books.