Sunday Debate – Whether To Read Richardson’s Clarissa

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here in the DC area today!  I hope it’s as nice everywhere else!  This week, I feel I’ve gotten a lot of reading accomplished by completing my journey with Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and completing Charles Dickens’s Bleak House for an online read-along.  I also decided to make a return trip to Westeros by beginning my reading of George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings.

This week, I’ve also managed to get some projects done outside, specifically some landscaping that needs to be done, which has made our home look so much better.  I’m in the process of removing some shrubs that have grown out of control, due to the previous owner not doing a good job in pruning and/or taking care of them.  That was pretty much my entire day yesterday, and I’m only about half-way done!

But on to other bookish related stuff.  I was able to get this reading accomplished since my Capitals were eliminated from their chase for Lord Stanley’s chalice.  No hockey = more time for reading essentially, which is a good thing, given that the baby is due in less than 5 weeks now!  I can’t believe how quickly the time has just flown by!

This extra time has allowed me to give some thought to my Classics Club list, especially after I saw Jillian’s Classics Club First Check-in Post over at A Room of One’s Own.  Now, I’ve managed to complete five books off my list, which you can see here:

• Charles Dickens - Bleak House
• J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
• Aristotle - The Metaphysics
• Sun-Tzu - The Art of War
• George Orwell - Animal Farm

Jillian’s post got me to thinking about my list a bit more about whether to make a change to the list.  Mind you, I wasn’t thinking of subtracting any of the books from the list, nor changing any books from the list.  What I was debating with myself was whether to add one book to my list, and that book being, Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady, by Samuel Richardson.

Clarissa first was published in 1747 to high acclaim and is a behemoth, clocking in at more than 1500 pages.  There are a few members of the Classics Club that have been tackling this work and I was tempted then to read it with them, but was reading other things at the same period of time.  Clarissa, if I were to tackle it, would be the longest piece of fiction I’ve ever tackled.  Tolstoy’s War and Peace stands as one of the longest fiction works I’ve read to date.

Not that I’m afraid, mind you, of tackling long works, I’ve done it before, with works such as Shelby Foote’s A Civil War Narrative and last year with Marx’s Das Kapital.  I also need to ensure that I’m not over extending myself.  The list of 103 has some pretty daunting works in it, such as the unabridged version of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hobbes’s The Leviathan, and Joyce’s Ulysses.  The question being, do I want to challenge myself even further?

Clarissa definitely gives me some food for thought for me going forward as I make my way through my Classics Club list.  Are there any books you’ve debated to read that may be challenging?  What are you reading this week?