Wednesday, March 8, 2017

On the Beach was a book I read as a teenager and I have never forgotten it; I’ve probably read it three times over the years. The original book was on Mum and Dad’s bookshelf and when we were clearing out Dad’s books it was the one book that we all would have liked to have taken home with us. That got me thinking about classic books.

Dad often purchased “the Classics” on the sale tables at Coles. Books by Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot, and Austen came to me via him, I think mainly because no one else in the family wanted to read them. They were good stories and I’m glad I read them but I haven’t gone looking for any since Dad stopped passing them along.

I have a collection of classic books from my past on a shelf in the hallway. They include Pat of Silver Bush (my first L.M. Montgomery book), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (from Mum and Dad’s shelf), The Sun is My Undoing (again from Mum and Dad’s shelf) and Ada Blackjack (because Dad enjoyed the North so much). On the Beach will be added to this collection, as well as a couple of others that I haven’t read yet (Icemaster, From Here to Eternity, and For Whom the Bell Tolls).

What do you consider your “classics”?