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2026: Tierney's Year of Classics

As promised, here's the list of classics that I'll be tackling this year. 

  • Dante Alighieri- Inferno
  • Dante Alighieri- Purgatory
  • Dante Alighieri- Paradise
  • Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower 
  • Octavia Butler- Parable of the Talents
  • Simone de Beauvoir- America Day by Day
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky- The Brothers Karamozov
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky- Notes from Underground
  • George Eliot- Middlemarch
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson- Self-Reliance and Other Essays
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Beautiful and Damned
  • Homer- The Iliad
  • Homer- The Odyssey
  • James Joyce- Ulysses
  • Franz Kafka- Diaries
  • Franz Kafka- Letters to Milena
  • Michel de Montaigne- The complete Essays
  • Ovid- Metamorphoses
  • Walker Percy- The Moviegoer
  • Marcel Proust- Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1)
  • Seneca- Letters from a Stoic
  • William Makepeace Thackeray- Vanity Fair
  • Evelyn Waugh- A Handful of Dust
  • Nathaniel West- Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of The Locust
  • Yevgeny Zamyatin- We
I am starting today with Ovid's Metamorphoses. In particular, I am going to be reading the Penguin Classics edition translated by Stephanie McCarter. It won the Academy of American Poets Translation Award a couple of years ago. When I was in college, we read a few selections from Metamorphoses, but I've never read the entire thing. I imagine it's probably going to take me about a month to get through the 474 pages of verse. Thankfully, there's a glossary and extensive notes and references at the end of the book to help me when I struggle. 

Happy New Year, y'all! Let's read, readers!







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