A big bucket list

Having enjoyed reading many things in many genres over many years I’ve recently decided to create a checklist of some of the world’s literary classics, and maybe (a very big maybe) actually completing checking them off if given time and continued interest. It’s a bucket list, sort of like climbing Mount Everest or parachuting out of a perfectly good airplane (neither of which I will ever do), of things I want to read before I step into Mr. Shakespeare’s undiscovered country. Not because I think they will better season me for my passage, or that Saint Peter will swing the gate open any wider because I read both Homer’s and Vergil’s accounts of Troy, accompanied Dante on his strolls through hell, and finished the complete Canterbury Tales (not just the prologue and a couple of stories that I was expected to teach), but because I wanted to know what I missed.  Which is a question that should drive avid readers. Please don’t think I am a martyr for a cause; I’m enjoying this journey and have infused it with plenty of modern tales, including not a few murder mysteries. Whodunits are my go-to comfort reads.

Long before I set this new goal I read War and Peace, Les Misérables, Crime and Punishment and of course Hamlet (many, many times with my Senior IV students over 40 years) and even James Joyce’s Ulysses, which took three attempts and several martinis.

Since starting this new adventure I’ve completed poet Seamus Heaney’s brilliant translation of Beowulf again, Dante’s Inferno (another poet’s – Robert Pinsky – retelling), and Don Quixote. I’m now well into Virgil’s The Aeneid, Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend, and Ted Hughes’ Tales of Ovid. And the first volume of Livy’s first century BC History of Rome sits staring at me from my bookshelf, daring me (it looks pretty daunting).

If this sounds like something you might want to tackle (making and continually modifying your own checklist) let’s stay in touch (ronrozelle108@att.net). Delight (as well as misery) loves company. If you take the plunge I suggest you find editions that have copious footnotes throughout and extensive endnotes. The Barnes & Noble Classics paperbacks are excellent.