Spin Number 9

Classics Spin Number 9

Source - Classic Spin #9

Choose 20 books from your list that you have NOT yet read
The selection can be -
- five books you are dreading/hesitant to read,
- five books you can’t WAIT to read,
- five books you are neutral about,
- and five free choices - these can be favorite authors, rereads, ancients, whatever you choose.

You have to post your list numbered from 1 to 20. The Spin club managers will choose a number from 1 to 20 and you MUST read the book next to that number before May 15, 2015.


Below is MY SPIN LIST .

1 Richard Adams - Watership Down

2 Jane Austen - EMMA PERSUASION

3 Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

4 Geoffrey Chaucer - Canterbury Tales

5 Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express

6 Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose

7 F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

8 Arthur Hailey - Final Diagnosis

9 Helene Hanff - 84 Charing Cross Road

10 Kathryn Kurtz - Dernyi Rising

11 Louis L'amour - Sacketts Land

12 Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook

13 C S Lewis - The Magicians Nephew

14 James Michener - Tales of the South Pacific

15 Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

16 Gene Stratton Porter - Moths of the Limberlost

17 Arthur Ransome - Secret Water

18 Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club

19 H G Wells -  The Island of Dr. Moreau

20 Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little House on the Prairie

Back to the Classics Challenge

Just found another new challenge. This is called The Back to the Classics Challenge.

 Hosted by Karen, the main rule is to read 12 books (1 per month) from various different categories, but all of them MUST be classics. The categories are as follows.


1.  A 19th Century Classic -- any book published between 1800 and 1899.

2.  A 20th Century Classic -- any book published between 1900 and 1965.  Just like last year, all books must have been published at least 50 years ago to qualify as a classic.  The only exception is books that were published posthumously but written at least 50 years ago.)

3.  A Classic by a Woman Author.

4.  A Classic in Translation. As in last year's category, this can be any classic book originally written or a published in a language that is not your first language.  Feel free to read it in its original form if you are comfortable reading in another language. 

5.  A Very Long Classic Novel -- a single work of 500 pages or longer, regular-sized print.  This does not include omnibus editions combined into one book, or short story collections.  Updated:  The 500 pages MUST be the actual text of the novel, not including endnotes, appendices, etc.  When in doubt, check more than one edition, and use an average page count.

6.  A Classic Novella -- any work shorter than 250 pages.  For a list of suggestions, check out this list of World's Greatest Novellas from Goodreads.

7.  A Classic with a Person's Name in the Title.  First name, last name, or both, it doesn't matter, but it must have the name of a character.  David Copperfield, The Brothers Karamazov, Don Quixote -- something like that. It's amazing how many books are named after people!

8.  A Humorous or Satirical Classic.  Humor is very subjective, so this one is open to interpretation.  Just tell us in the review why you think it's funny or satirical.   For example, if you think that Crime and Punishment and funny, go ahead and use it, but please justify your choice in your post.

9.  A Forgotten Classic.  This could be a lesser-known work by a famous author, or a classic that nobody reads any more.  If you look on Goodreads, this book will most likely have less than 1000 ratings.  This is your chance to read one of those obscure books from the Modern Library 100 Best Novels or 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.  Books published by Virago Modern Classics, Persephone, and NYRB Classics often fall into this category. 

10.  A Nonfiction Classic.  A memoir, biography, essays, travel, this can be any nonfiction work that's considered a classic, or a nonfiction work by a classic author.  You'd be surprised how many classic authors dabbled in nonfiction writing -- I have nonfiction books by Dickens, Trollope, Twain, and Steinbeck on my shelves.

11.  A Classic Children's Book.  A book for your inner child!  Pick a children's classic that you never got around to reading. 

12.  A Classic Play.  Your choice, any classic play, as long as it was published or performed before 1965.  Plays are only eligible for this specific category.

I will be ignoring the 50 years publishing rule and staying with the 25 years rule. But otherwise I am sure I can find books that fit each of these 12 categories. I will try and finish these categories by the end of 2015, but since I do have 5 years, I am not going to hold myself to the time limit. I just want to be able to read a variety of classic books.

Leader of the Lower School

Leader of the Lower School
By Angela Brazil
Published 1913

Text - Leader of the Lower School - Project Gutenberg



From the early 1900s up until the 1990's, the school system in New Zealand was modelled on the British system whereby the younger children had Primers (and Standards) in primary school and the older ones,  from age 11 onwards, had classes that were called Forms.

So 11 year olds were in form 1, 12 year olds in form 2 and so on up to 16 year olds in form 6. Since I was born and raised in New Zealand,  I myself went through these forms in the late 1970's and early 1980s.

Gipsy Latimer is a 14 year old from the colonies. She has been to 3 schools in the USA, 2 schools in New Zealand (her father is from New Zealand and her mother is American) and 1 school each in Australia and South Africa - before the Apartheid era.

Now Gipsy is at a boarding school in England, and to her independent mind, this new school is horribly stuffy and pretty much like a prison.

Gipsy loves making fudge, but noone at Briarcroft Hall has ever heard of fudge let alone eaten it. So when she politely asks the headmistress for permission to pop out and purchase a pan and some ingredients, she is most emphatically denied.

Not to worry - Gipsy is pretty independent, and she borrows the pan and some ingredients from the school kitchen and sets about making fudge over an open fire. That turned into a disaster, so no more fudge.


The School is divided into the Lower school and Upper school

 The Upper schools consists of the Lower and Upper 5th forms and the Lower and Upper 6th forms with a total of 22 girls.

The Lower schools had 70 students ranging from ages 11 to 15 and being sorted into forms 1, 2,  lower 3rd, upper 3rd, lower 4th and upper 4th.

Now, not being British born (although I am of british descent), I am not sure how these lower and upper forms work, and I doubt that one would spend the entire year in the same form. We never had these upper and lowers forms in NZ - not that I know of anyway. Everyone just went through form 1, form 2, form 3 etc up until form 6 or form 7. Completion of Form 6 is when the student could legally leave school. Students going into Form 7 were those who planned to attend university.


Anyway getting back to Briarcroft hall, the 5th and 6th form students (the upper school) ran all the offices of the school, including the guilds (or what we would call clubs) and while the seniors allowed the juniors to vote, the juniors never allowed to stand for office or participate in any other way. Every term the students were required to pay a shilling into the guilds as their subscription, but the lower school had no say in how that money was spent.

Gipsy decided that this simply was not fair, and so she organised a boycott. Quite simply, the lower school  stopped paying their  subscriptions to the seniors, and used their subscriptions to start their own clubs - including a lower school newspaper called the Juniors Journal.


When Gipsy had arrived at the school, her father had paid the fees for the first term and promised to make arrangements for payment of fees in a letter. But the promised letter never arrived. By the second term, Gipsy was kept on as a courtesy but missed out on a lot of extras since she had no money.

At the end of the second term, Gipsy spent 3 weeks holidays with the family of her good friend Meg Gordon.

At the start of the third term with still no word from her father, Gipsy was getting quite frantic with there being no word from her father, and the headmistress was becoming extremely hateful towards her. In fact. Gipsy was put to work (to earn her keep) and she was used as a servant to look after the 10 and 11 year olds, and to do anything else the teachers required. She was also still required to keep up with her own studies as well.

Things got so bad for Gipsy that she decided that it would be better if she ran away. So she did. she caught a train to Liverpool and started looking for the Captain Smith who had brought her and her father to England from South Africa in the first place.

While Gipsy was on the run, The summer coats were brought out of storage and a letter was found stuffed into a coat pocket. The letter was addressed to Gipsy Latimer and turned out to be the promised letter from her father stating that all financial needs were to be handled by a specified named bank.

Meg Gordons father called around all the steam ship companies in Liverpool, asking them to detain Gipsy if she ever showed up asking for a job or a ticket to South Africa. It just so happened that he called one particular company just when Gipsy was in the office, so the receptionist had Gipsy sit down and wait. Eventually Mr Gordon arrived at the office to take her back to school.

Once back to school, the missing letter was shown to her, the headmistress contacted the bank and submitted all previous bills and Gipsy finally had some pocket money again. Her work as a servant was immediately cancelled and nothing more was said about that. The principal did not exactly apologise for her poor behaviour, but the girl in whose pocket the letter was found, was raked over the coals for being so forgetful as to pass on a letter that was not hers.

To end the year, the school had a Festival during which the various junior Clubs and Guilds got to show off their activities.


Angela Brazil (not pronounced like the country - instead the emphasis is on the Bra and NOT on the Zil). wrote numerous formulaic girls school stories from the early 1900s up until world war two. Most of these are available on Project Gutenberg.


See Angela Brazil on Wikipedia for a list of Book titles.

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Del Rey Ballentine Books 1987
(Originally published in 1953)

I don't recall ever having to read this book for school. But I do remember vaguely watching the movie. Now I have just watched the movie again, first time in at least 30 years, and I remember more from the movie than I do the book.

This is a Dystopia novel - a novel of an alternative future that runs counter to our present. It is set post 1990.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to start fires and burn books.

Books have ideas and ideas are bad for people. Everyone is raised to be the same as everyone else. In the world envisioned by Bradbury, this idea is called Equality. We would call it Conformity. 

And anyone who knows me, knows that I will NEVER conform!!!  I have been a non-conformist since I was a teenager so it has now been more than 35 years ago since I stopped conforming to society's ideas.

Montag's wife Mildred does not work.  At the beginning of this novel. Montag comes home to find Mildred unconcious on the bed. She has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. He calls the emergency number and two men come around and pump her stomach out. That is all they do. They comment that they have pumped 7 stomachs already today.

Anyway, getting back to the burning of books. The laws say that all books and all reading material must be burnt. In place of reading, citizens will be watching TV.  Every house has several wall sized large TV screens where different channels have different programs. But all the programs are alike because they consist mostly of people talking and citizens listening. Citizens vegetate in front of the TV, listening and absorbing the ideas that the authorities are drumming into their heads. This includes Montag's wife Mildred.

On his daily walks between his home and the train, Montag meets up with a young lady named Clarisse. She starts asking questions - mostly related to what they see around them. For too long citizens have been brainwashed into staying quiet, staying alone, and being entertained by their TV's. 

While reading itself has not been banned - the act of reading books has been banned. In fact it is against the law to own and read books. Even talking about books is banned. Any book. All books. I am surprised that citizens of this dystopian world are even taught to read. What would be the point?

In the movie, there is a mail box outside the fire station where anonymous citizens can place details of anyone they think is hiding books or reading books. This is where the fire station get their callouts from. How this is done in the book, I'm sorry, but I cannot remember.

 One callout goes to a lady who refuses to leave her house which has hundreds of books hidden all over the place. She stands in the middle of the pile of books which have been splashed liberally with kerosene.  When the fire chief tells her to move, so he can light the fire,  she lights a  match and sets the whole conflagration off by her own hand. This woman chooses to die with her books.

This starts Montag off thinking and observing the world around him. Clarisse's questions and comments have slowly been influencing him. 

Some years previously, Montag has spent some time speaking to a professor named Faber. He goes to see Faber again. Montag talks about finding a printing press and running off a few copies. Montag also wants to start setting fires to the houses of firemen, after putting books in their houses. Faber tells him that he is not interested and asks Montag to leave. Montah onsys that he wants to do this, so Faber agrees to give him a small devide to listen through that goes in the ear. This is for Faber to listen and give Montag advice.

When Montag gets home, he finds that Mildred has some lady friends over to watch TV together. Montag tries to chat to the ladies but they all have the same ipinions and have no individuality. So he grabs a book of poetry and begins reading it saloud. One of the ladies starts to cry. The ladies all eventually leave, telling Mildred that it was a nice party.

Montag goes down to the firehouse to speak to his boss Beatty. Over a game of poker, Beatty talks to Montag telling him of the dangers of books. Montag gets confused. When the next fire call comes in, the fire engine stops in fromt of Montag's house.

Mildred leaves just as they arrive. Montag helps to burn his own books and his house. "When you're finished, you are under arrest" says Beatty calmly. Beatty tells Montag that Mildren did call in the alarm, but he also says that that the other ladies also called in an alarm as well. Beaty ignored the first call from the ladies but could not ignore the second call to the same address. When Beatty discover the ear wig commnunication device, Montag turns on him and kills his boss with the flamethrower. Montag then goes on the run.

Faber and Montag eventually meet up. Faber tells Montag where he can find safety.

Keep running and following the river until you hit the old rail lines and then follow the rail lines to the very end. There are lots of hobo camps between here and Los Angeles. (we just don't know where "here" is.)

Eventually Montag arrives at the hobo camp where he is welcomed and gets to watch his "arrest" on a small battery run TV.  Since the authorities were unable to find him, they shot and killed some other poor fellow who was in the street and who had blond hair. The one book Montag had been able to read and remember, is the Book of Ecclesiastes from the Old Testament.

The differences between the book and the movie.

In the book there was a mechanical hound that was used for sniffing out books and people in hiding. There was NO mention of this mechanical hound in the movie.

Clarisse had only a small part to play in the book. Faber had a bigger part. In the movie, Faber was removed altogether and his lines were given to Clarisse so that she had the much bigger part. She was the one to tell Montag how and where to find the Book People.


Also in the book, Montag's wife is named Mildred. In the movie her name is Linda.

In the Book Montag saved the Book of Ecclesiastes. In the movie, he saved the book -  "Tales of Mystery And Imagination" by Edgar Allen Poe.

In the book, Clarisse was killed in a car accident. In the movie, she survived and eventually met up with Montag at the hobo camp where the Book people live.

In some places I found the book to be boring. I preferred the movie much better. Which is not surprising to me at all. After all I am a visual learner.

2nd Classics Club Book List

This is my SECOND Classic Club Book List.


Louisa May Alcott - The Key and What it Opened

Victor Appleton - One of the Tom Swift Books

Margery Williams Bianco - The Velveteen Rabbit


Angela Brazil - Leader of the Lower School

Mary Grant Bruce - Back to Billabong 


Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass



Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express A Tommy and Tuppence Mystery

Arthur C. Clarke - either Dolphin Island or Prelude to Space (aka Master of Space and The Space Dreamers)

Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist

Susan Coolidge - What Katy did at School

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo

Daphne Du Maurier - The Glass Blowers

E M Forster - Room with a View 

Stella M. Francis - A Campfire Girls Book

Henry Rider Haggard - Allan Quartermain

Arthur Hailey - Final Diagnosis



Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Joseph Heller - Catch 22

Laura Lee Hope - The Bobbsey Twins

Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Henry James - The Aspern Papers

Katherine Kurtz - Deryni Rising

Louis L'Amour - either Sackett's Land or To the Far Blue Mountains

D H Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover

Gaston LeRoux - Phantom of the Opera

Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook

C S Lewis - The Magicians Nephew

Jack London - Adventure 

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice

Mrs L T Meade - The Rebel of the School

James Michener - Tales of the South Pacific  Centennial


Thomas More - Utopia

E Nesbit - The Railway Children



Gene Stratton Porter - Moths Girl of the Limberlost

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch - On the Art of Writing

Arthur Ransome - Secret Water

Rafael Sabatini - Captain Blood

Anna Sewell - Black Beauty

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

Margaret Sidney - Five Little Peppers and How They Grew

Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago

John Steinbeck - East of Eden

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Jonathan Swift - Gullivers Travels

Johanna Spyri - Heidi

James Alexander Thom - From Sea to Shining Sea

Mark Twain - Roughing It

H G Wells -  The Island of Dr. Moreau

Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin - Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little House on the Prairie

Johann David Wyss - Swiss Family Robinson

(Update - 48 titles - Dec 2015)


Any books I read for this challenge will come from these 2 lists.
But I do have 5 years to read them.
I am planning on reading 2 books per month minimum!!
Most of these will come from E-books or Project Gutenberg

A Study in Pink

I have just discovered the new Sherlock Holmes series. This is the English series of TV movies  starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

The first episode, called A Study in Pink - comes from the first story, A Study in Scarlet. However, instead of following up the word Rache for revenge, this time the story uses the name Rachel as the pivot point for solving the crime.


I am still watching the rest of the first season, but so far I like this series!!

Daria Reading List Challenge

Back in the 1990's there was this wonderful sarcastic cartoon show on MTV that I loved. The heroine was a high school girl nerd or geek, named Daria.

The way she delivered her lines - often with a dead pan face or tone - was hilarious!!

Her name was Daria Morgendorffer and she was a bookworm just like me!!!  Daria had one close friend, Jane. She also kind of had a crush on Jane's older brother Trent, who was into music. And Daria also had a rather annoying kid sister, Quinn, who was into clothes, makeup, fashion and being popular. Quinn was the total opposite of Daria.

Anyway, Daria read a lot of books, and someone has been kind enough to make a list. So the challenge is to read these books.

Daria Reading List

Since this classics challenge runs for 5 years, I think it would be relatively easy to add some of these books to my list. I am currently putting together a second list of 50 classics that I do want to read.  

Some of the books and authors on Daria's list I already have and do not wish to repeat - either the books or the authors.

So with a total of 100 books, once I get this second list finalised, I plan to be reading 2 classics per month to finish everything in 50 months or a little over 4 years - and have some extra months for "just in case".

Classics Club Meme - February 2015

Every month the Classics Club puts out a challenge for the members to respond to. This month is February 2015 and this months meme is -

What about Modern Classics?

Pick a Book Published SINCE 2000, and state why you think it is a classic?

I think the best modern classic since 2000 is The Da Vinci Code.

It is the one of highest selling books since the year 2000.  The closest competition in terms of modern book sales are the Harry Potter Books. While those are great childrens books, I don't consider  them to be classics.

The Da Vinci Code (published in 2003) on the other hand has influenced a major portion of the population on this planet in terms of religion.

It even influenced the Catholic Church into telling it's congregation to NOT read this book - which got many people upset and angry because that was blatant censorship. This book has since been placed on the Catholic Church's Banned Books List.

Noone should be telling anyone else what they can or cannot read.I certainly never listen to what anyone tells me what I can or cannot read. If anyone tells me that I cannot read something, I promptly go out and read it.


The basic story of the Da Vinci Code is that Jesus was married and had a child, and that his descendents have survived to the 21st century.

The Catholic church says that Jesus was never married, but they have no proof.

In Jewish society back then, noone could be called a Rabbi if they were not married. And Jesus was certainly called a Rabbi in the New Testament. Therefore he must have been married.

Since I no longer attend any religious church, it does not bother me if Jesus was married or not. But in terms of the customs of Jewish society back then, I think it highly likely that yes he was married.


Any books or author that can influence religious dogma and church policies this much, certainly has got to be a modern classic!!!!

PS  While the Harry Potter books have also influenced opinions about religion - these books were considered to be anti religion because they spoke about children and magic. The influence was pretty much the idea that these books were from Satan and the devil. Anti-religion.  Because in the religious world, there is no such thing as magic. Never mind that these books were all just fictional novels.

A Study in Scarlet

A Study in Scarlet
By - Arthur Conan Doyle
Published - 1888
Format - PDF

This is the very first Sherlock Holmes Story, and one that I have never read before. It tells the story from Dr Watson's Point of View, and includes the facts of how Watson came to be sharing an apartment (or flat as they are called in England) with Holmes in London.

Then came the case, where an American was found dead in an old empty house, with no obvious cause of death. His business cards identified him as an American, and the word RACHE was printed on the wall in blood. A woman's wedding ring was also found at the site.

A few days later a second American was found dead in a hotel. But he was stabbed to death. Once again the word RACHE was printed in blood on the wall.

The race was on between Scotland Yard, the London Police and Sherlock Homes as to who would solve the case first.

One of the Cops assumed that the full word should have been RACHEL.

Sherlock however knew that Rache was the German word for revenge. He telegraphed to the USA asking about the victims and if they were ever involved in a fight over a woman.

It turns out that both of the two dead men were former members of the Mormon church which at that time, practiced Polygamy, or allowed the men to have multiple wives.

There was a young girl growing up in Salt Lake City whose father was determined to never marry, because he did not want to have multiple wives, so he remained celibate. He did have an adopted daughter. It was his wish that the daughter would never become the wife of a Mormon. She fell in love with a man named Jefferson Hope who was a miner and NOT a Mormon. .

The Church elders began threatening the father to give his daughter to one of their sons, or something bad would happen. So the father, the daughter and Jefferson Hope all tried to escape from the Valley. The girl was dragged off, and raped by one of the Elders sons, so that he could claim her as his wife.  The father was killed and only Jefferson Hope escaped. He followed the elders sons, and waited to get his revenge.

It took him 20 years, and it happened outside of the USA, but he finally got his revenge. He killed the first victim by poison. He stabbed the second victim when he was being attacked. When Hope was captured, he told Sherlock that he was already dying of a bad heart and did not expect to live long.

Having told his story - the second part of this book consisted of 5 rather boring chapters of Mormon religion and culture - and had his revenge - Jefferson Hope was ready to meet his maker.


The Phrase - A Study in Scarlet - refers to the blood that erupted from Jefferson Hope's nose after his first victim died. This indicated that he already had a bad heart.

The first part of this book was good. We see the details in how Holmes finds his clues and teases Dr Watson about what will happen next. 

If I had known that the second half of this novel was a dry essay on the Mormon religion, culture and the righteousness of having multiple wives, I never would have bothered to read this book.

I detest religion of any kind.

Be warned. 

Scanners Universe Website

Just so you know why there is a link called Scanners Universe sitting over on the right, under the Favourite Websites List. That's because the Scanners Universe is MY personal website.

Since I have a Scanner Personality, I have interests that cover a wide range of Knowledge. And this is where I can write about them. One thing I absolutely detest - is to be forced into one or two NICHES!!   I find that to be so boring.

Throughout my life I have accumulated a vast sum of knowledge in my brain. This knowledge comes from all areas of life and literature. I read a wide range of books - History, Geography, Science, Art, Biographies, Literature, Language, Politics, some Sports, Technology and Computers.

I stay away from Mechanics, Engineeering and most Sports. These I leave to the Men of our World. 

I love playing games like Trivial Pursuit, and I love watching game shows on TV like "Who wants to be a Millionaire", "Jeopardy" and "Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?"  I love testing myself, and I pick up new knowledge as well.

So if you want to know more about me, Take a look through the Scanners Universe Website and read all about me!!

You can also read the first Blog I ever started. It too is listed under Favourite Websites. It's called Bibliohistoria.  I began this blog back in 2007 and closed it down in 2013. It was mostly a Books Review Blog, so I will have to make sure that none of the Books for this Classics Challenge were ones I have already read and reviewed.