I guess it's a good thing that for once I finished a BL-opoly book in the afternoon, because the game gods had apparently decided that since we've been having so much fun with multiple hop, skip and jump rounds lately, why not just do another one?

For square #4 -- the first square the doubles I rolled dumped me on -- I decided to use another "cat" card and go with Saša Stanišić's How the Soldier Repairs the Grammophone: Technically, the cover of the German edition (both print and audio) also qualifies for this square's requirements, as it depicts a guy wearing a suit, but I need to do something about the novelty card menagerie that's beginning to accumulate in my pockets, so just in case, I'll treat this one as a case of "read whatever you like" and do something about my TBR (as well as checking off Bosnia and Herzegovina on my "Around the World" challenge)..

Then it's off to Berlin with another book that's been sitting on my TBR for way too long already -- Lili Grün's Alles ist Jazz -- and which will again allow me to kill two birds with one stone, as it is set in my home country (Germany), as required by this BL-opoly square's prompt, but was written by an Austrian, so I also get to check off Austria on my "Around the World" reading challenge.

Then the BL-opoly gods decided to gift me another novelty card (I suppose they must have concluded that I can't possibly be allowed to have fewer than four of them at any given time) ...

... and lastly I get to complete the "Lake House" sequence of squares, with yet another book that's been sitting on my TBR for way too long and which will allow me to check off yet another country on my "Around the World" challenge (Armenia) with Eve Makis's Spice Box Letters.

Phew.

The moves, in sequence:

Having finished three underwhelming books in a row, I need something good.

While I will also pick up Woolf's A Room of One's Own (in celebration of having my flat back after the window-fitting has finished) and have high hopes for that one, I'm also hankering for some reads about Ancient Greece and Rome.

I'll leave it to your opinion whether this was inspired by starting to read Mary Beard's Confronting the Classics, but let's say that I've had a lot of fun spending time in Ancient Greece last August and have been wanting to embark on a similar project for some time. 

So, while I'm getting an introduction to the Classics provided by Mary Beard, I'll kick off the project on the Ides of March with a read of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar followed by as many of the listed titles I can get to all the way through April. 

And as many of these are also on my physical shelves, this should tie in nicely with my 2020 Mt. TBR Project.

(Please Note: I've only read The Frogs so far, which was included in the Little Black Classics)

All year I've been reading one of the Little Black Classics each week, with different levels of success. Going into The Frogs, I has no idea what to expect.

It turned out to be a play (I like plays), and as such a Greek comedy. I've in school studied some Greek theater, but these were always the famous tragedies. So, I was very glad to see a comedy that also survived the times.

Dionysus is looking for a poet in order to motivate the Athenians but unfortunately al good playwrights have died, so he has to travel to the underworld and fetch one. When he arrives he happens upon both Euripides and Aeschylus who are fighting over who is the better poet. Dionysus will have to make the decision.

The play is silly. But so are all (good) comedies. I have to say I liked reading it a lot. It had a modern feel to it (for as far as possible, because the Chorus remains a strange thing to me), with fourth-wall-breaks and a commentary on plays in general I would almost consider post-modern. What also helped, I'm sure, is that the translation felt modern. (I'm wondering how much of the original the translator sacrificed for readability).

Either way, it was a witty play with a Chorus of Frogs, and I was thinking, if they are putting on this play, I would definitely like to see it.

~Little Black Classics #101~

By and large, I think it's fairest to say "I didn't mind" the books we read in school. 

A few stood out as instant favorites: Shakespeare's Macbeth which, together with Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet movie (which we watched in class) laid the groundwork for my lifelong love of Shakespeare; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (which the rest of my class hated, but I instantly loved).

Some that I found OK without being enthusiastic about them still inspired me to take a closer look at their authors and discover works that I ended up liking much better -- e.g. Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers and Intrigue and Love (aka Passion and Politics), which eventually led me to his Don Carlos, which in turn became an instant favorite.

Some I rather disliked in school (at least in part, because of the way in which they were presented in class), but I reread them years later and they suddenly made a whole lot more sense -- such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Albert Camus's The Stranger (though I still liked The Plague, which we never read in school, better), Max Frisch's Homo Faber and The Firebugs; and, perhaps most surprisingly, Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician (surprising because Mann was already a favorite author of mine at the time, so this should have been a no-brainer favorite from the start).

There were only a few books that I positively hated in school, but those I hated with enough of a vengeance never to have looked at them again -- or at anything else written by their authors: Peter Handke's Kaspar and Alfred Andersch's Sansibar.

Far and away the biggest impact on my reading preferences, though, was wielded by my final English teacher, who not only taught that Shakespeare class mentioned above and introduced me to sonnets (EBB, Shakespeare and otherwise), but who also gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as a gift ... and thus inspired yet another one of my most lasting instances of book fandom -- because come on, if you fall in love with Austen's writing when reading Mansfield Park, everything else is just bound to fall into place completely naturally.

(Task: Did you love or hate the books you had to read for school?  Looking back, which ones (good or bad) stand out to you the most?)

For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

I really enjoyed this lovely collection of poems. Despite its age, so many of the emotions expressed still resonate today. The language used is phenomenal and the descriptions overall have the power to inspire the reader. I especially enjoyed Browning's pacing and rhyme schemes. A wonderful book of poetry.