But I *Really* Like The Button..

And everybody else got one for their book blogs...

I will undoubtedly be consigned to one of the seven circles of Purgatory for signing up for yet another reading challenge (particularly during Jan and Feb which professionally speaking are very high stress-high activity time periods). But since nineteenth century classics are the thing I can read with least resistance at present, here is my list for The Winter Reading Classics Challenge:

(1) Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
(2) Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
(3) The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
(4) Howards End - E.M. Forster
(5) Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
(6) Silas Marner - George Eliot
(7) Middlemarch - George Eliot
(8) Update to List 12/20/06 - The Odyssey (R. Fagles, translator)

There are both long and short books on that list so I'm sure I'll manage five out of that seven. How long, after all, can Silas Marner take to read? And before you ask, I actually am embarassed that I've never read Huckleberry Finn before. (So much so that I thought I probably ought to splurge and buy the Annotated Version so that I would at least be able to comment more thoroughly. But I resisted that wicked Amazon recommendation. I also resisted buying The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin which was admittedly less of a difficulty.)

There were others I considered. I've still never read Don Quixote or Anna Karenina and the Norton Critical editions of those are on my TBR stack, inducing guilt as well. Didi of Minute Marginalia and I will negotiate another title to go in on together. She was muttering about Lost Horizons (which I've read many times before) and the Aeneid (which I haven't). [Update added to list - #8 - Didi actually wanted to read the translation of The Odyssey by Robert Fagles which has been out for a while. We've agreed to do that one.]

One cheery note -- The Christian Science Monitor gave Indiscretion by Jude Morgan a wonderful review and the book is actually living up to the press it received!