The Hardcore, Hifalutin, La-di-dah literature check list challenge

A couple of days ago, I took one of the www.listchallenges.com challenges that have cropped up quite a bit in the last couple of months.  It was a list of 200 books which you indicated whether or not you'd read them.  I was pretty confident at first.  For Pete's sake, I'm a literature graduate who has a philosophical bent. But when I went through them, although I knew about lots of them, I hadn't actually read all that many.  It was something like 18%.  I was mortified.

So, I decided that, as I'm not working at the moment, I'll get reading.  I thought that I'd read these 200 books in 2017.  And the literary criticism around them.  And different versions of the stage plays. You know, have a proper go at it.

Then I noticed a number of the works were by Fyodar Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, so I've tempered my enthusiasm and it looks like it's going to be more like a five year plan. I also noticed patterns in the list. So, I'm going to read the Russians together, and the philosophers together... you get the picture.

These are the books with which am going to start:

• Rene Descartes -  Meditations on first philosophy
• Blaise Pascal - Pensees
• Immanuel Kant - Critique of pure reason
• Georg Hegel - Phenomenology of spirit
• Friedrich Nietsche- Beyond good and evil
• Sigmund Freud  - Civilisation and its discontents
• Martin Heidegger - Being and time
• Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex

Yeah, I know.  Heavy.  Watch this space.

If you've stumbled on this blog through the labels, let me assure you I am going to be as intellectually rigourous as I can be.  I hold an MA Cultural and Film Studies from Sunderland University.  So if you have any questions or thoughts to include, be my guest.