A few weeks ago, Kayleigh (of our library marketing team and the Roaring Twenties blog) and I got to talking about rereading the classics—or reading them for the first time. We’re constantly reading amazing new books, and we love it, but sometimes it leaves us with little time to revisit old favorites or read the books that we really should have read a long time ago. But not anymore!
We’re thrilled to announce English 101: The Harper Perennial Classics Book Club. It’s fairly simple—each month in 2010, Kayleigh and I will read a classic work and review it here on the Olive Reader and on Roaring Twenties. But we don’t want this book club to be just about us! We’d love it if you read along, too, and we’re happy to make it worth your while. On the designated review day (which will usually be the last weekday of a given month), if you blog, twitter, or even just comment on one of our blogs about that month’s book, you’ll be entered to win a copy of the next month’s classic.
For January, we’ve picked a book that I’ve been wanting to read again for a long time—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn! And since this is our first month, all you have to do to win a copy is comment below on why you’d like to read (or re-read) it. I’ll pick five winners, and then we can all get down to reading!
And if you’d like to plan ahead, here is our tentative schedule for the year:
Jan- Tree Grows in Bklyn
Feb – Brave New World
March – Poisonwood Bible
April – So Big
May – Daughter of Fortune
June – To Kill a Mockingbird
July – The Sheltering Sky
August – One Hundred Years of Solitude
September – The Golden Notebook
October – Native Son
November – Unbearable Lightness of Being
December – Their Eyes Were Watching God
The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God and countless other classics, Zora is a veritable literary legend. Recently, Zadie Smith paid her and Their Eyes tribute in Changing My Mind, her book of essays:
“This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston’s skill. She makes “culture” — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called “the romance of oneself,” a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes “black woman-ness” appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions… Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I’m reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally. Things like “She is my sister and I love her.”
Their Eyes is one of my favorites as well, and probably the only dialect-driven novel that I’ve ever been able to enjoy. If you’ve never read it, I encourage you to check it out via the browse inside widget below.
And if you have read it, why not check out one of Zora’s other amazing works?
And stay tuned for fall 2010, when we’ll be doing even more with Zora . . .
If you have not yet been convinced to attend the event for It All Changed in an Instant tomorrow night at Word, perhaps this video can make the case even more eloquently than I can for the awesomeness of the book:
The best books our readers read in 2009, as per the comments on our galley grab bag giveaway:
Ask the Headhunter
The Help
Little Bee (2 votes)
Waiting for Columbus
Her Fearful Symmetry (4 votes)
Last Night in Twisted River
Naamah’s Kiss
Covet
Halfway to the Grave
Angel Time
The Year of the Flood
Sandman Slim
February
Six Months in Sudan
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Anglo Files
Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
The Middle Place
When You Reach Me
Hunting Eichmann
Under the Dome
Olive Kitteridge
Moby Dick
Family Happiness
The Day the Falls Stood Still (2 votes)
Let the Great World Spin
2666
The Song is You
An Echo in the Bone
Galway Bay
Ariel
Unbearable Lightness of Being
Juliet, Naked
The History of Love
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Monsters of Templeton
Half Broke Horses
Swan Thieves
And a special mention of Betsy-Tacy as best discovery of the year by one commenter.
I love this list! So many different books, and I haven’t read any of them. I’ll be emailing the winners shortly, but stay tuned for more giveaways soon!
