Summer Classics

Hey Blogger Buds,

This summer I'm tackling a few classics, so I figured that today I'd share with you the pre-2000 books I'm reading. I don't usually read classics, so I'm also going to mention my reason for picking these books.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I'm reading this one for the Nerdfighter book club. John and Hank Green chose it because E. L. James sold more copies of Fifty Shades of Grey in a month than Ray Bradbury sold of F451 in his entire lifetime.

Right now, I'm 70 pages in, and it's amazing. Mr. Bradbury has an astounding command of the English language, and a way of just weaving words together to paint these astonishing pictures for you. The only author I've recently read who I could say the same thing about is Markus Zusak.

I'm not finished yet, but I still highly recommend.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To be honest, I don't really know what this is about. It seems that when a book reaches a certain status as a classic, it doesn't need a summary anymore, just stuff about how it's "compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving" and "takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos." (nabbed from Goodreads) I don't even know what "pathos" means*.

But it's a book that everyone just must read, supposedly. Also, it was one of my summer reading choices for school, so let's kill two birds with one stone, eh? (Pun intended.)

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

This is my other school book. I read it a few years back, for a different school summer assignment, so hopefully I'll remember some of it, and just have to give it a quick skim. I don't know how to explain it, so I'll leave it up to Goodreads to provide a semi-ambiguous summary:

"Johnny Tremain, a young apprentice silversmith, is caught up in the danger and excitement of 1775 Boston, just before the Revolutionary War. But even more gripping than living through the drama of Revolutionary Boston is the important discovery Johnny makes in his own life."

Fire and Hemlock by Dianna Wynne Jones

Probably at least one or two of you are loading your guns and/or wands and preparing to come after me for including this book on a list of classics. But I said that I would be including pre-2000 books, and this one was published in 1985.

I'm reading it because my knowledge of DWJ's works is embarrassingly limited to Howl's Moving Castle and some other half-hearted attempts, so when I saw Fire and Hemlock on the library shelf I scooped it up without even reading the summary. For this reason, I don't really know what it's about, and I refuse to find out, because then I might change my mind. If I'm going read it anyway, is there even a point to knowing what it's about? No.

That's the plan for my summer classics! Wish me luck!

What kind of classics are you planning on reading this summer?

DFTBA,
Riv

*pathos: "a quality that evokes pity or sadness" -Thanks, Google!