As we reported in the December 2007/January 2008 newsletter, several Penguin colleagues have agreed to read a Penguin Classic as part of their new year's resolution, to challenge the assumption that many classics, however deserving, go unread. Alan Walker, our Senior Director of Academic Marketing & Sales, volunteered to start an ambitious marathon to read one book by an author per letter of the alphabet, and to start again from the beginning before year's end. Here is Alan's first blog of his year of reading classically.

A

I begin with Henri Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate , known also by the French title Le Grand Meaulnes. Some of the other "A"s that I considered were Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand and another recent Penguin Classics French translation, Fantomas by Marcel Allain (something to look forward to for the next go-round). Alain-Fournier's only finished novel (he died in WWI at 28) reminded me of some of my favorite 20th-century coming-of-age novels like The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and A Separate Peace. This is an easy and fun book, with a mysterious mix of harsh realism and romantic idealism. And of course there is Le Grand Meaulnes himself (silent L and S, by the way), a character for the ages!

B

On to Russia and Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita . I took up Bulgakov's A Dead Man's Memoir, a semi-autobiographical account of the author's experience with the theater after his first play was brought to the Moscow stage. This absurdist tale affectionately draws on the madness of a Muscovite theater and all of its bizarre characters, with the backdrop of Soviet repression. For all those actors out there who have studied the Stanislavsky Method, this is a must-read, since one of Bulgakov's most ridiculous and funniest characters is based on the famous Russian director and teacher.

C

This was a tough decision; almost too many Cs to choose from. I mulled over Cather, Chatwin, Chaucer, Chekhov, Conrad, Chopin, Crane, and many others before I settled on Charles Chesnutt's A House Behind the Cedars. I've always wanted to read Chesnutt, and I was not disappointed. This story about a young Southern woman of mixed race who gets engaged to a white man under false pretenses is both scandalous and tragic. And it resonates today—a time when we could have an African American in the White House in 2008. This novel drives home that it was barely a century ago that words like "quadroon" and "octoroon" were part of the American dialogue on race.

D

This one was easy: My D is Robertson Davies! I read the first book of the Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business , the great Canadian writer's most famous novel. This book is a revelation, and reminded me of the humor and scope behind one of my favorite Penguin Classics, W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage .

E

After four male authors, I thought my "E" should be a woman writer-even though I wound up picking one with the first name George! George Eliot, that is, who Henry James once said "is magnificently ugly-deliciously hideous . . . in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her." I read Eliot's famous tale of the Weaver of Raveloe, Silas Marner. This is one of Eliot's shorter novels and memorable for her affectionate portrayal of a rural English town and the sad but heroic figure of Silas.

F

On to Australia and Miles Franklin (born Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin). My Brilliant Career, Franklin's semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the Australian bush, caused a scandal down under when it was published in the early 1900s. This is a great read, and a remarkable novel about a fiercely independent and intelligent young woman. Jane Eyre and Lucy Honeychurch have nothing on this feminist heroine! I highly recommend this book.

G

How could I pass up using my "G" to read another novel by one of my favorite authors, Graham Greene? This time around I took up The Power and the Glory, considered by many to be Greene's masterpiece. It's a brilliant and powerful novel about a morally conflicted whisky priest on the run from the fascist paramilitary group the Red Shirts, who persecuted Roman Catholic priests in 1920s Mexico. I'd also recommend Greene's equally powerful and relevant The Quiet American and the brilliantly funny Travels with My Aunt.

H

On to Norway and Knut Hamsun's hallucinatory novel Hunger. Considered a predecessor to both Camus's The Stranger and Kafka's Metamorphosis, this 1890s classic is in the author's words "an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body." The basically plotless account of the hero's attempts to publish, find food, and maintain his overzealous pride is both bizarre and hilarious. I am already looking forward to reading more Hamsun, including the book that won him the Nobel Prize, Growth of the Soil.

I

For the letter "I" I read Gilbert Imlay's early American epistolary novel The Emigrants, set around an English family's frontier crossing into the Ohio River Valley. It's a bit rough-going getting used to the formality of the language in the letters exchanged by the various characters, but once the different plotlines unfold it becomes quite a page-turner. It features a great romance, Austen-like plot turns, and even a kidnapping of the heroine by Native Americans. There is also historical value here, as Imlay addresses the issue of divorce and the rights of married women in England at the time.

J

My oldest brother is a Henry James scholar, and embarrassingly I had never read a single James novel, so my "J" was a no-brainer—although I would like to tackle Joyce's Dubliners next time around, or maybe Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. I chose James's third novel, The American, as it is considered one of his more comic and accessible novels. I loved this book: It's full of melodrama, humor, and witty, crackling dialogue. I highly recommend this tale of a self-made American millionaire who proposes marriage to the beautiful daughter of a haughty family of the French aristocracy!