Monthly Archives: January 2016

Metamorphoses – Book I

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“Sing, Ovid, to me of Metamorphoses, and breath all these stories into my mind as a remembrance of your fine craft” ……….  But since there are so many mythological stories in this book, and Metamorphoses is either referred to, or used as a basis for stories in so many other works of literature, I’ve decided to compile reasonably detailed posts.  My mind is certainly not going to hold such detail, so my blog will have to.

Book I

Prologue / The Creation / The Four Ages / The Giants / Lycaon / The Flood/ Deucalion & Pyrrha / Python / Apollo & Daphne / Io & Jove / Syrinx / Io & Jove / Phaeton

“My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes; may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.”
Creation begins featureless and confused, both land and seas uninhabitable.  Opposites battle and there is chaos.  “A god” and nature come together to bring unity and organization to the world, and there are two possibilities as to the birth of man:

  1. He is created from a divine seed
  2. Prometheus made him from new-made earth and rainwater.  

To man, “he gave a face that is held high; he had man stand erect, his eyes upon the stars ….”

During the first or golden age, laws and punishment do not exist as all kept faith by righteousness. and man only needed to gather as the harvest was plentiful.

Saturn is banished and his son, Jove’s rule begins, starting the second or silver age.  Jove split the year into seasons, and the change of weather prompted men to build houses.  As the bullock groaned under their yokes we sense a decline in the ease of life.

The third bronze age begat more cruelty and battle, yet it was not sacrilegious.

The fourth and last age, the age of iron, began the foulest of all ages and “the earth saw the flight of faith and modesty and truth” and in their place sprang up wicked behaviour.  Instead of accepting the earth in an almost innocent way, only seeking to fulfill their basic needs, men instead began to seek beyond their needs to their wants, exploring and pursuing treasures which corrupted their simple faith.  The lust for gold and iron brought wars, and distrust and familial discontent and strife followed.
Jove must contend first with the Giants, who attempt to gain control of the sky, and then man who is now scattered all over the earth, doing what he will.  They are tainted and like a pestilence, and he longs to eradicate their infestation. Yet the other gods are worried; if Jove eradicates man, who will worship them, so Jove employs a new plan, enlisting different gods to create a flood and only two people survive:  Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, and his wife, Pyrrha.
Deucalion & Pyrrha (1635)
Giovanni Maria Bottalla
source Wikimedia Commons

Deucalion is overcome when he sees the devastation of the earth and decides to pray to the oracle but is told that they need to throw behind them the bones of the great mother.  Pyrrha is terrified that she needs to offend the Shade of her mother, but her husband says the great mother is earth and they need only throw stones.  Amazingly the stones become the new race of men.

  
Apollo and Daphne (1908)
John William Waterhouse
source Wikimedia Commons

Python, a terrible serpent, slithers from the earth, but Phoebus (Apollo) kills him with his arrows, and the sacred Pythian games were establish in memory of the act.  Daphne, daughter of the river god, was Phoebus’ first love but Cupid, resentful at Phoebus’ mocking of him, shoots him with an arrow that ignites love and Daphne with one that spurns it. Apollo pursues, and as he catches her, in response to a prayer to her father, she is turned into a laurel tree.  Yet Apollo loves her still, and this is why the leaves of the laurel crown the heads of the Roman chieftains.

Juno Confiding Io to the Care of Argus (1660)
Claude Lorrain
source Wikimedia Commons

The river god, Inachus wept for his missing daughter Io. She is fleeing the god, Jove, who catches her and rapes her, yet to hide his deed from his wife, Juno, he turns Io into a beautiful white cow.  Yet Juno is not easily fooled and she sets a guard on Io, Argus of the hundred eyes, who never sleeps with all closed at once.  Jove finally feels compassion at Io’s plight and sends Mercury to lull Argus to sleep with his reed pipes with a song of Syrinx (who fleeing from Pan was turned into a reed), and then he cuts off his head. Juno set the eyes of Argus into the tale of a peacock, whereas Io returns to her original form in her refuge on the banks of the Nile and becomes the goddess, Isis.

Io’s son by Jove, Epaphus, mocked the son of Phoebus, Phaeton’s, claim that the Sun was his father.  Mortified, he asks Clymene, his mother, for proof and she confirms the truth, sending him across Ethiopia and India to Phoebus’ palace.

Mercury, Argus and Io (1592)
Abraham Bloemaert
source Wikimedia Commons

From O’s brilliant post, I realized that it would be fun and helpful to add the transformations in each book in a more obvious form than merely reading of them in the text.  So here they are!

Metamorphoses

Chaos  ❥  Creation
Golden Age ❥  Silver Age  ❥  Bronze Age  ❥  Iron Age
Giant’s Race  ❥  New Race
Lycaon  ❥  Wolf
Irreligious, Combative Men  ❥  Deucalion & Pyrrha ⇒ (via Rocks)  ❥  New Mankind
Daphne  ❥  Laurel Tree
Io  ❥  White Heifer  ❥  Io  ❥  Isis
Syrinx  ❥  Marsh Reeds  ❥  Panpipes
The Eyes of Argus  ❥  Peacock’s Tail

Metamorphoses – Book I

The Persians by Aeschylus

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“Of the Persians gone 
To the land of Greece
Here are the trusted:
As protectors of treasure …..”

 

Performed in Athens in  472 B.C., The Persians portrays the naval battle at Salamis between the Greeks and the Persians, which occurred seven years earlier.   It is unique from other tragedies, as it was without a prologue or exudos (final scene) of the chorus.  As it deals with contemporary history instead of the common mythic topics, it was not part of a unified triad of plays that Aeschylus appeared to favour, yet interestingly it was performed with two other “lost” mythic plays, Phineus and Glaucus Ponieus.  In comparing this play to later tragedies, these differences raise the possibility of tragedy developing out of an earlier form.

Battle of Salamis (1868)
Wilhelm von Kaulbach
source Wikimedia Commons
 
The play begins in 480 B.C., and at the palace of Xerxes at Sousa, the Persian elders are lauding the strength of Xerxes and his army as they are engaged in battle with the Greeks:
 

“And the furious leader the herd
Of populous Asia he drives,
Wonderful over the earth,
And admirals stern and rough
Marshals of men he trusts:
Gold his descent from Perseus,
He is the equal of god.”
 

Yet their tone of exhortation becomes tinged with concern over the question of victory in this battle, and the mother of Xerxes, the Queen, appearing, echoes their sentiments.  A herald arrives, bringing most unwelcome news:
 

“O cities of Asia, O Persian land,
And wealth’s great anchorage!
How at a single stroke prosperity’s
Corrupted, and the flower of Persia falls,
And is gone.  Alas!  the first herald of woe,
He must disclose entire what befell:
Persians, all the barbarian host is gone.”
 

The herald, an eyewitness, bitterly describes the Persians’ defeat at Salamis.  Momentarily speechless, the Queen finally asks about survivors.  Xerxes is still living, but the Herald lists the many dead heroes, casualties of the battle.  The survivors are scattered.

 

“Ship dashed against ship, till the Persian army
dead stewed the deep like flowers”
source Wikimedia Commons
While Xerxes is a great warrior, his errors in the battle are made apparent.  He harangued his captains publicly, “in ignorance of Greek guile and the jealousy of the gods” …. and, “he conned the future ill.”  In return for his pride and miscalculations:

 

“All the Persians, who were in nature’s prime,
Excellent in soul, and nobly bred to grandeur,
Always first in trust, met their death
In infamy, dishonor, and in ugliness.”

 

Lamenting that her dream of defeat has come to fruition, the Queen attempts to assuage her grief by offering prayers and gifts to the gods.  As she offers libations at the tomb of her dead husband, Darius, his ghost rises up, inquiring about the present woe.  When he hears of the tragic defeat, he appears to blame his son’s “youthful pride”, yet he counsels the Queen to receive her son gently when he returns.
 
Somber laments issue from the Persian council of elders until Xerxes arrives in grievous affliction.  He recounts more of his defeat, his words a song of sorrow until the end:
 
“Oh alas, woe,
The magic wheel of longing for my friends you turn, you tell
Me hateful sorrows.  Within my frame my heart resounds,

resounds ……”

Death of the Persian admiral (Ariabignes,
brother of Xerxes) early in the battle
source Wikipedia
Wow, this was a very powerful play.  By the Persians’ defeat, Xerxes has not only lost honour for himself, but he is responsible for the loss of honour of generations before him.  Yet the tragedy of the situation is in his overweening pride and his attempt to place himself in a position above the gods.  He ignored the wisdom of his elders, instead choosing to go his own way, and paid dearly for his folly.

 

Even though, Aeschylus was writing through Persians eyes, elements of a Greek mindset crept in here and there, as in Darius’ horror of the Persians plundering and burning the Greek temples.  And he counsels the Queen for the Persians not to invade Greece because “the Grecian soil is their own ally.”  Very convenient.  Yet there is also a sympathetic tone towards the Persians, as if the Greeks can empathize with the sufferings of battle and the woes of the aftermath of loss.  In fact, the sympathy is startling.  The great daring of such a play perhaps goes beyond both historical and contemporary understanding.  No playwright had risked presenting the enemy, not only from a sympathetic viewpoint, but also showing them as noble and heroic in battle.  The battle at Salamis was a recent event and it is a tribute to the rhetoric of Aeschylus that this play was so well-regarded.  Yet while his feat is indeed admirable, Aeschylus ensures that he remains in control of his creation.  Few names can be traced to real persons, hyperbole is employed and Persians adopt Greek tradition, preventing any person from drawing any concrete truth from his presentation.  His Persian War, while being historically based, is still in the realm of myth, as if he cannot escape it. 

Translated by Seth G. Bernardete

    




The Brubury Tales by Frank Mundo

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“When in April, and it hasn’t yet rained,
And the drought of March has again sustained
Another year of our eternal spring;
Then old Santa Ana begins to sing
That fiery yet most familiar tune
How Los Angeles always feels like June ….”

No, The Brubury Tales are not my usual classics bent, but since it is based on a classic, The Canterbury Tales, I decided to make them, not only a pairing, but a 2015 challenge.

In this poem, we are not confronted with pilgrims, but seven security guards who work at the Holiday Inn in L.A.  Six men and one woman make up their team, as they perform their duties during the unsettled times of the Los Angeles race riots.  The prologue introduces each of them:  Leo Kapitanski, Alex Loma, John Shamburger, Joseph Dator, J.T. (the narrator), Rolla Amin, and Darrin Arita or “The Feet”.

As Christmas is approaching, each guard is lobbying for vacation time during the holidays, but Leo Kapitanski, their security chief, comes up with a unique idea. Each one of the guards must tell a tale, and the guard who crafts the best tale, will be awarded with the time off.

Leo is the first to tell his tale and exhibits some fine alliterative verse, reminiscent of the style of the Pearl poet (Sir Gawain & the Green Knight):

“Those were tumultuous times in Olde Yellowfield:
When widespread war had wracked the west;
As Pestilence and plague plundered through the east;
And silky southern skies, soot-saddened into shade
As burnt and billowing breaths of northern brush
Did daily darken the heavens in dismal doom!
And for years was Olde Yellowfield yanked to black
By those soot-stacks that steadily stole the sun.
Olde Yellowfield was new Blackfield, banned from light …”

The Brubury Tales illustration
by Keith Draws
source

Yet not everyone appreciates such poetical talents, and The Feet protests over this “literary crap”.  So Leo agrees to tell another tale full of vice, since no one can appreciate a story well-told, because:

“‘In today’s world where television rules,
Personally, I blame the public schools.’
But Leo disagreed a little bit,
‘Takes a village to raise an idiot.'”

Leo’s tale weeps full of sorrow and distress, ringing with shades of lost chances and bitter regret, as a man tries to navigate the paths of life and love and fails miserably, a red stain left on his attempt, an unendurable burden on his heart.

There are seven tales in all, in a variety of settings and time periods, covering a number of different issues with respect to love, marriage, betrayal, regret, and death, yet hope resonates in these explorations of life’s struggles and victories.  Humour is also woven into the fabric of the narrative, delivered with an adeptness that gives a sublime harmonization with the other serious themes. Though each tale has a modern twist, they bear resemblance to stories of Dostoyevsky, Boccaccio, Saki, Poe, O’Henry, Dickens, Twain, the Bible, Dante, Gilman, Crane, Anderson and Bierce, and it’s a veritable treasure hunt, to sift through the narrative to see if one can spot these recognizable classics.  There even is a remake of Omar Kayyam’s The Rubaiyat, which is very cleverly done.  In another twist to the story, the author himself makes an appearance as the supervisor.  There is an abundance of literary wealth within this book, and one can imagine the work as a tapestry; each thread you pull leads to a new idea, or allusion, or theme, working singly and yet together to form a unique and complex whole.

With regard to the poetic structure, it’s mostly comprised of couplets in iambic pentameter, echoing very much of Chaucer’s style and tone.  Yet there are variations in poetic style at certain points during the tales which helps to give a different flavour to the stories.  The author is also is very adept at changing the voice of the characters, each one sounding like an individual and making it very easy for the reader to step into their world.

This read completes my The Canterbury Tales/The Brubury Tales Project for 2015, and I think I can say that it was my favourite project of the year.  Not only was I pleasantly surprised at the enjoyment that I received from Chaucer’s merry and sometimes, raunchy tale, I was blown away by The Brubury Tales and the talent and aptitude of its author.  A great project, all around!

 

 

 

Hamlet: The Prince or The Poem? by C.S. Lewis

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Hamlet the prince or the poem

“A critic who makes no claim to be a true Shakespearian scholar and who had been honoured by an invitiation to speak about Shakespeare to such an audience as this, feels rather like a child brought in at dessert to recite his piece before the grown-ups.”

In Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem, Lewis begins his lecture by claiming that his aim is not to examine what other critics have before him, but to consider why the critics have failed to agree about the procrastination exhibited by the character of Hamlet.  He first outlines the three different camps:

  1. Those who think the play “bad” and that there are no motivations to explain Hamlet’s actions
  2. Those who believe he did not delay and acted with as much alacrity as was possible.
  3. Those who believe he did procrastinate and explain his paralysis through his psychology.

 

Next, he asks you to suspend all knowledge of the play, as if “you had no independent knowledge of the thing being criticized,” and proceeds to examine each view.

In the first case, if Hamlet is indeed a failure, we waste our time investigating why his actions were delayed.  Yet, if this failure were indeed a reality, why does Hamlet touch us so?  Why does it echo with “the sense of vast dignities and strange sorrows and teased ‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls'”?  If Hamlet is failure, then perhaps failure is better than success, and such a verdict could never be rendered with less certainty.

With regard to point two, the opponent to this view is Hamlet himself.  He declares that he is a procrastinator, a cowardly soul who wavers with indecision.  The ghost, for the most part, is in agreement.

The last point seems to be the most logical, yet why then, in all three camps, does the play appear to hold each in thrall, enchanting the very critics who criticize it?  Does the mystery and magical appeal of the play have little to do with Hamlet’s actual character, but instead is due to something entirely different?

 

Czachórski Actors Before Hamlet
Czachórski Actors Before Hamlet
Wladyslaw Czachórski
source Wikimedia Commons

 

Lewis brings to light Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, which is an imitation not of men, but of action and life and happiness and misery, yet “action” by ancient standards means “situation.”  Instead of always attempting to delineate a character, one should first “surrender oneself to the poetry and the situation.” It is through poetry and situation, and for their sake, that the characters exist.

Hamlet's Vision
Hamlet’s Vision (1893)
Pedro Américo
source Wikimedia Commons

For Lewis, the ghost does not merely tell of the murder of Hamlet’s father.  Instead, the ghost and Hamlet are inseparable, and indeed the spectre is different from most vile ghosts in Elizabethan drama; this ghost is willfully ambiguous.  Its presence lends an enigmatic uneasiness to the play, filling Hamlet’s, and even other character’s, minds with doubt and uncertainty.  ” ….. the appearance of the spectre means a breaking down of the walls of the world and the germination of thoughts that cannot be thought; chaos is come again.”

The subject of Hamlet is death.  Lewis does not base the theme on the numerous deaths of the characters, rather the situations they find themselves contemplating.  We read it in the ghost, in the line of “melting flesh”, in the rejection of suicide, in the graveyard, the skull ……..  As we read Hamlet, we cannot escape it, which gives the play its quality of obscurity and apprehension.  There are other elements to the play, but there is always this groping toward the final end and questions about the destiny of the soul or body.

Hamlet’s vacillations do not balance on his fear of dying, but instead a fear of being dead.

“Any serious attention to the state of being dead, unless it is limited by some definite religious or anti-religious doctrine, must, I suppose, paralyse the will by introducing infinite uncertainties and rendering all motives inadequate.  Being dead is the unknown x in our sum.  Unless you ignore it or else give it a value, you can get no answer.”

 

Hamlet and Ophelia
Hamlet and Ophelia (1858)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
source Wikimedia Commons

Yet Lewis says that Shakespeare’s own text does not confirm his theory, nor has Shakespeare given “us data for any for any portrait of the kind critics have tried to draw.”   We enjoy Hamlet’s speeches “because they describe so well a certain spiritual region through which most of us have passed and anyone in his circumstances might be expected to pass, rather than because of our concern to understand how and why this particular man entered it”.  And, in fact, Hamlet is an Everyman.  He is a hero yet also a “haunted man — man with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling to get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him.”

The critics have never doubted the greatness or mystery of the play, but they simply put it in the wrong place, “in Hamlet’s motives rather than in that darkness which enwraps Hamlet and the whole tragedy and all who read and watch it.”  It is the mystery of the human condition.

Lewis ends by acknowledging the weakness of his theory, only because his type of criticism does not have centuries of vocabulary to support it, as does the other type of criticisms.  Yet he wishes that Hamlet could be played as “a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness, and from whose hands, or from our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.”  Perhaps his views are childish, yet children remember the details of stories.  So, is Lewis a literary child?

“On the contrary, I claim that only those adults who have retained, with whatever additions and enrichments, their first childish response to poetry unimpaired, can be said to have grown up.”

 

 


Deal Me In Challenge #1 

 

deal me in challenge
deal me in challenge

 

The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi

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“The Gandhis belong to the Bania caste and seem to have been originally grocers.”

Encouraged by friends and colleagues to share the history of his movement, Gandhi began his autobiography as weekly installments which were published in his journal, Navjivan, and also, Young India.  Writing in jail, Gandhi wanted to communicate spiritual and moral truth that he has discovered through personal experiments and he shares the impetus for his search:

“But one thing took deep root in me — the conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality.  Truth became my sole objective.  It began to grow in magnitude every day, and my definition of it also has been ever widening.”

As many other biographers have done, Gandhi begins his narrative with his childhood, sharing his many childish misdemeanors such as smoking, drinking, stealing, etc.  Married at the age of thirteen, Gandhi condemns this practice, characterizing his desire for his wife as lust, feeling in bondage to his passions, which he laters frees himself from:

” …… (I) realized that the wife is not the husband’s bondslave, but his companion and helpmate, and an equal partner in all his joys and sorrows —- as free as the husband to choose her own path ….”

Gandhi in South Africa
source Wikipedia

As a young man, Gandhi travelled to England to study to become a lawyer.  Upon returning to India, and being bored with his opportunities, he accepted the position of legal advisor on a large law suit in South Africa. With regard to his vocation, Gandhi had sharp insights, and with a moral bent, turned a perhaps mistrusted profession into a respected appointment:

“I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.  The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases.  I lost nothing thereby — not even money, certainly not my soul.”

“The symbol of a Court of justice is a pair of scales held evenly by an impartial and blind but sagacious woman.  Fate has purposely made her blind, in order that she may not judge a person from his exterior but from his intrinsic worth.”

In spite of being an unimposing figure, Gandhi’s greatness came not only from his desire for unity among people and serving the poor, but also his unique ability to see situations from a different perspective.  What the world would see as a weakness, Gandhi often saw as a strength:

“I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatever. In fact, I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage.  My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure.  Its greatest truth has been that it has taught me the economy of words.  I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts ……. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth ……..  My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler.  It has allowed me to grow.  It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”


With his Christian and Muslim friends, he noted the differences, but instead of attempting to erase those differences, he chose to celebrate them, focusing on the positive aspects that those differences brought to light:

“Yet even differences prove helpful, where there is tolerance, charity and truth.”

His work in South Africa spanned decades, as he fought for the rights of the Indians there, after encountering race prejudice himself.  Many of his political views became entrenched with his South African experiences, and his religious views grew as well.  He became known for the employment of satyagraha, or non-violent protest and elucidates how it played out in his life.  The reader follows Gandhi through the Boer War and into World War I and his return to life in India.  He began to see the detriment of British colonial rule and worked hard to make his country ready for the independence that he foresaw.

His humility and his concern for his fellow-man resonate from the pages, his wisdom bringing unique insight.

“Man and his deed are two distinct things.  Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked always deserves respect or pity as the case may be.  ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world …………. It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself.  For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite.  To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.”

His desire for truth through the restoration of broken relationships and systems resonated throughout his work and his life.

What really spoke to me in this biography is that Gandhi, in spite of claiming a natural affinity with all races, also worked hard to develop traits within himself that would foster unity, empathy, patience and love towards others.  While it was a conviction within himself to cultivate positive behaviour, it was done with great effort and sometimes at a cost.  It is a tragic irony that Gandhi’s life came to and end with an act of violence, but perhaps the man himself would turn that perception on its head and simply say that it was further evidence of our need of the very thing which, at times, seems out of reach.  Yet as long as we are striving for peace, it is perhaps the striving that truly matters.

“I have found by experience that man makes his plans to be often upset by God, but, at the same time where the ultimate goal is the search of truth, no matter how a man’s plans are frustrated, the issue is never injurious and often better than anticipated.”

2016 Challenges ….. Here I Come!

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Karen @ Books and Chocolate is once again hosting my favourite challenge of the year, the Back to the Classics Challenge.  Admittedly, it’s my favourite challenge because it’s my easiest challenge. About 95% of the books I’m reading lately are classics, so I’m all over this one.  I don’t usually make a list for this challenge, as the books I read naturally correspond with the categories, however, I want to concentrate on my Classics Club List for this coming year, and my WEM Biographies Project continues, so there are some “maybe” titles that I can choose:

  • The Lord of the Flies – William Golding (#11)
  • Metamorphoses – Ovid (#4)
  • Framley Parsonage – Anthony Trollope (#9)
  • The Man in the Iron Mask – Alexandre Dumas (#6)
  • The Time Machine – H.G. Wells (#7)
  • The Man Who Knew Too Much – G.K. Chesterton (#8 or #12)
  • That Hideous Strength – C.S. Lewis (#7)
  • The Gulag Archipelago – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (#10)
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X (#5)

Once again O at Behold the Stars is hosting the Reading England challenge.  I did well with my attempt at this challenge this year, so I’ve decided to do it again and learn more about English counties!

I don’t have any set books planned for this one, but I’d like to read some counties that I hadn’t covered in the 2015 Reading England challenge. And I still have to read my nemesis, Thomas Hardy, so his works are a possibility.


As well as concentrating on my Classics Club List, I also want to have some focus for my Shakespeare Project and I was happy to find The 2016 Bardathon Challenge.  
I’m planning to aim for the Mix-and-Match Shakespearean, reading, watching, performing (ha!), and/or listening to 5 plays.  I think I’ll begin with Henry V, since it’s the only play that I haven’t read from the Henriad.
I’m looking forward to getting back into the Bard!
I joined the Books in Translation challenge last year and really enjoyed it, so I’ve decided to participate again this year.  I’m going to try for the Bilingual level, which is 7 – 9 translated works during 2016, but hopefully I’ll be able to make the top level, Linguist, reading 10 – 12 translated works for the year.  
I’ve participated in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge every year and last year was the first year that I didn’t make it and ended up 2 books short.  Yikes!  So in 2016, I need to regain my streak and manage to read at least 1 book per week. If I can’t, I’m going to cry.
Jay at Bibliophilopolis hosts The Deal Me In challenge, my most challenging of challenges!  I tried it for the first time last year and failed miserably, yet it was my most valuable challenge because it forced me to read essays, poetry, short stories and children’s classics that I wouldn’t have read otherwise.  My list for this year:

Clubs – Short Stories
A –  Cabbages and Kings – O’Henry
2 – The Runaway – Anton Chekhov
3 –  The Queen of Spades – Alexander Pushkin
4 – Le Horla – Guy de Maupassant
5 – The Tell-Tale Heart – Edgar Allan Poe
6 – The Life You Save Might Be Your Own- Flannery O’Connor
7 – The Honest Thief – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 – A Little Woman – Franz Kafka
9 –  A Haunted House – Virginia Woolf
10 – The Birds – Anton Chekhov
J –  The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Gilman
Q – The Eyes – Edith Wharton
K –   Signs and Symbols – Vladimir Nabakov
Spades – Essays
A – Milton – Charles Williams
2 – Doodles in the Dictionary – Aldous Huxley
3 – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – G.K. Chesterton
4 – On A Faithful Friend – Virginia Woolf
5 – Shooting an Elephant – George Orwell
6 – Hamlet : The Prince or the Poem – C.S. Lewis
7 –  The Tyranny of Bad Journalism – G.K. Chesterton
8 – The World of Tomorrow – E.B. White
9 – Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse – Wendell Berry
10 – Sense – C.S. Lewis
J – Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community – Wendell Berry
Q – Different Tastes in Literature – C.S. Lewis
K – Vulgarity – G.K. Chesterton
Diamonds – Poetry
A – A Man’s a Man for a’That – Robert Burns
2 –  Gesang Der Geister Über Den Wassern – Johann Wolfgang
               von Goethe
3 – The Morning of Life – Victor Hugo
4 – Sonnett XXIII – Garcilaso de la Vega
5 – A Lover’s Complaint – William Shakespeare
6 – Resolution and Independence – William Wordsworth
7 – Ode III – Fray Luis de León
8 – Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas
9 – To A Mouse – Robert Burns
10 – Tears, Idle Tears – Alfred LordTennyson
J –  Easter Wings – George Hebert
Q – On His Blindness – John Milton
K – Phoenix and the Turtle – William Shakespeare
Hearts – Children’s Classic
A – A Triumph for Flavius – Caroline Dale Snedeker
2 – Three Greek Children – Alfred Church
3 –  The Story of the Treasure Seekers – E. Nesbit
4 – Detectives in Togas – Henry Winterfeld
5 – Big John’s Secret – Eleanore M. Jewett
6 – The Tanglewood’s Secret – Patricia St. John
7 – The Wolves of Willoughy Chase – Joan Aiken
8 – Red Sails to Capri – Ann Weil
9 – Sprig of Broom – Barbara Willard
10 – Teddy’s Button – Amy LeFeuvre
J –  Call It Courage – Armstrong Sperry
Q – Tales from Chaucer – Eleanor Farjeon
K – Beyond the Desert Gate – Mary Ray 

And last, but most exciting, is the Ancient Greek Reading Challenge which I posted about here.  I’m planning on reading the dramatists, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, some comedies, and perhaps even make it to Plato and Aristotle if I’m feeling rather brave.

Other than these 2016 challenges, I have on-going projects such as:

My C.S. Lewis Project:  

I did wonderfully the first year but last year was a sorry sight.  I need to read at least a couple of Lewis this year.  Mere Christianity should be a “gimme” and I’d also love to start and finish The Screwtape Letters.  Otherwise Miracles is my favourite and The Abolition of Man would be a good one to try, as I struggled with it the first time I read it.

My Barsetshire Chronicles Read:

Sigh!  This was a complete failure last year.  I didn’t even get one book read. The next up is Framley Parsonage, so I’m going to have to focus, focus, focus!

The Well-Educated Mind Biographies:

Okay, this is one challenge where I’m doing well, thanks to Ruth!  She keeps me honest.  Next up is Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  There are 10 biographies left before we move on to Histories, so hopefully we’ll finish them all this year.

My Shakespeare Project:

I’ve been moving reasonably slowly through this lately, but at least I’m moving.  I hope my Bardathon challenge will help me read some more of the Bard in 2016.

I’m also doing a few read-alongs including O’s The Pickwick Papers Read-Along, Amanda’s Children’s Literature Event in April, and a few of us are reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses (beginning now) and Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene (beginning mid-April).  If anyone wants to join in on the last two, please let me know.  We keep getting new recruits!