The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eleventh year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read:
From the Penguin Little Black Classics series, nos. 3 through 80:
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate
John Ruskin, Traffic
Pu Songling, Wailing Ghosts
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Three Tang Dynasty Poets
Walt Whitman, On the Beach at Night Alone
Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
Baltasar Gracián, How to Use Your Enemies
John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes
Thomas Hardy, Woman Much Missed
Guy de Maupassant, Femme Fatale
Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
Suetonius, Caligula
Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and Medea
Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Petronius, Trimalchio’s Feast
Johann Peter Hebel, How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light
Hans Christian Andersen, The Tinder Box
Rudyard Kipling, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
Dante, Circles of Hell
Henry Mayhew, Of Street Piemen
Hafez, The nightingales are drunk
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath
Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night
Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
Mary Kingsley, A Hippo Banquet
Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra
Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Well, they are gone, and here must I remain
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
Charles Dickens, The Great Winglebury Duel
Herman Melville, The Maldive Shark
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse’s Story
Nikolay Leskov, The Steel Flea
Honoré de Balzac, The Atheist’s Mass
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
C.P. Cavafy, Remember, Body...
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One
Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart
Nikolai Gogol, The Nose
Samuel Pepys, The Great Fire of London
Edith Wharton, The Reckoning
Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet
Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, My Dearest Father
Plato, Socrates’ Defence
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
Sindbad the Sailor
Sophocles, Antigone We substituted Peter Woodruff’s translation for Robert Fagles’s.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man
Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?
Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci
Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
Shen Fu, The Old Man of the Moon
Aesop, The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon
Matsuo Bashō, Lips too chilled
Emily Brontë, The Night is Darkening Round Me
Joseph Conrad, To-morrow
Richard Hakluyt, The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe
Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings
Charles Darwin, It was snowing butterflies
Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom
Catullus, I Hate and I Love
Homer, Circe and the Cyclops
D. H. Lawrence, Il Duro
Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill
Ovid, The Fall of Icarus
Sappho, Come Close We substituted Mary Barnard’s and Stanley Lombardo’s translations for Aaron Poochigian's New Formalist translation.
Ivan Turgenev, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands
Virgil, O Cruel Alexis
H. G. Wells, A Slip under the Microscope
Herodotus, The Madness of Cambyses
Speaking of Śiva
The Dhammapada
And several non-littles:
Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Kenkō, Essays in Idleness
Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, This Is Not a Novel
Herman Melville, The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles
We are now making our way through Dickens’s Bleak House.
Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Many books. Really many!
comments: 6
An amazing list!
That Penguin series got us to read things we would likely never have encountered otherwise. For me the best discoveries were Akutagawa, Kenkō, and Mayhew.
Methinks "eclectic" accurately describes this list.
Our reading, like our movie-viewing, follows no known map. :)
I don't recall much detail about Bleak House other than it was . . . bleak. Also, when I was going through voir dire for a civil trial jury, the fact I'd read Bleak House combined with my alma mater got me booted from consideration.
It’s got a lot of comedy too, and the house itself is something like a delightful play house. But there is a lot of darkness, and the culture depicted is rotten — poverty, illiteracy, legal mazes, orphans everywhere.
I’ve been told that prosecutors here don’t like seating academic types on a jury, because they question everything. (You’d never want that in a juror, right?) But almost everything here gets plea-bargained before there’s even a trial.
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