Overview of 2017 Reading

Back in April, I started my Classics Challenge—a plan to read 50 classic works over the course of 5 years—but that was not the start of my reading for the year. Here is a quick overview of the books I finished in 2017.

The author that stands out this year is George Eliot. Having discovered Middlemarch in 2016 and loving it, I continued to read George Eliot throughout 2017:

• Mill on the Floss
• The Lifted Veil
• Daniel Deronda
• Romola
• Felix Holt, The Radical

Apart from The Lifted Veil, I could recommend any of these excellent novels. Middlemarch remains my favorite Eliot novel, but Daniel Deronda and Romola are not far behind. In addition to those books by George Eliot, I read 11 other novels in 2017.

Some of these were excellent:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Some of them were quite good:

• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
• The Unbearable Light of Being by Milan Kundera
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazan

Some were good, but not as enjoyable as I had hoped:

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric

And there were a couple that I did not care for at all:

• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
• The Trial by Franz Kafka

Toward the end of 2016, a classmate started a Shakespeare reading group which gave me occasion to read Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and Richard III, as well as the Sonnets. This group continued into 2017 where we read Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1-2, and Henry V. Apart from these plays and poems of Shakespeare, I also read the classic Metamorphoses of Ovid and the modern Rosmersholm of Henrik Ibsen.

The most momentous event of the year for me was certainly ordination to the priesthood on June 24^th, and with this came further reading about the saints and the liturgy. I read the Letters of St. Cyprian, the Lausaic History (about the desert fathers), biographies of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Dominic, Bl. John Henry Newman (both by himself and by another), and a handful of saints canonized in 1881. In the last month of the summer, having said Mass every day for a couple months, I wanted to read more about its history and how the prayers came to be as they are, and found the excellent Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid and Voice of the Church at Prayer by Uwe Michael Lang. Continuing my canon law studies, I have read all sorts of articles and books (in whole and in part) that I won’t list here. All the reading in canon law spurred my interest in other legal works, and so I read Cicero’s Republic and Laws, a huge chunk of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, and the Qur’an.

This last month, I have almost exclusively read about the history of canon law, especially in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic tradition. With Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather in my carry-on, I expect to read more literature as 2018 begins!