Crossing off key lists

Now that I have seen Cymbeline just a couple of weeks ago (and Henry VIII in Stratford last fall), I have now hit 29 out of 38 Shakespeare's plays.  It's not really a personal accomplishment (aside from suffering through some spectacularly uncomfortable seats once in a while), but it has taken a long time to get there.  I'll definitely try to catch Two Gentlemen of Verona on its next pass through Toronto, and probably Timon of Athens.  But I'm very much on the fence regarding The Winter's Tale, which doesn't really appeal to me.  And I'm pretty sure I'll pass on Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus (as I have in the past), so I suspect I probably never will cross the line to see all 38.

This isn't my list of the top 100 novels to read, but it's a pretty good list (compiled from 8 other lists!). Now there is no question it is very parochial, in the sense it is dominated by English and American authors, with only a few key works in translation.  It probably should add Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it definitely should include The Brothers Karamazov* (certainly instead of the Judy Blume book!), and I might have tried to sneak Dostoevsky's Demons on there as well.  It doesn't have Dante's The Divine Comedy or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  And I would probably have swapped London Fields for Amis's Money.  And I would likely add Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet for good measure and probably Fante's The Bandini Quartet (and remove the children's books and Lord of the Rings).  As it turns out, I've read 70 of the ones on the list as it stands.  Pretty good, I'd say.  (I'm not entirely sure I want to go through all 500+ books in the database,** but I'll probably get to that some day...)

There are one or two that I will never read (Little Women and Frazen's The Corrections (where I thought the original New Yorker story was fine, but I couldn't get into this novel)), but eventually I'll probably get most of the way through this list. Since I have hijacked my main reading list yet again, in order to purge a box of random novels from the basement, I may decide that I ought to not forget to tackle a couple of the "classics" each year. From this particular list, the missing ones that are the most compelling are Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Nabokov's Pale Fire and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being ✓. I'll try to get around to one of these by the spring (and I am thinking of reading the newish translation of Don Quixote in the summer/early fall, though I did read a previous translation).

Now I kind of go back and forth on Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (incidentally not on any of these lists, but certainly a classic of world literature). I came thisclose to ordering a copy of the relatively new translation on NYRB today. I held off at the last minute (and actually this is one that I should see if it is at BMV, along with keeping my eyes open for Mann's Buddenbrooks). I'm kind of glad to learn that Doblin's novel, while basically as challenging as Joyce's Ulysses, is under 500 pages, so it wouldn't be anything like the trek through Musil (to say nothing of Proust).  Or even Mann's The Magic Mountain for that matter, which tops out at just over 700 pages. It is a bit of a surprise that Thomas Mann isn't on these top 100 book lists either, as he certainly would have been 25 years ago.

* In fact, going by this guy's own methodology, The Brothers Karamazov needs to be on the list but isn't because he listed the book on two separate rows rather than combining the entries.

** It's actually just a bit under 400 on the mega-list if you remove the children/YA books, the SF/fantasy sets and the non-fiction/memoirs. Of the remaining novels, I've read 160 or just over 42%.