Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. The meme was originally the brainchild of The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is Oldest (earliest published) Books on My TBR.
The Oldest Books on My TBR List
The full prompt for this week says “oldest (earliest published) books on my TBR”, so I have done my best to figure that out. I decided to only put two of Austen’s novels on the list, or she would have accounted for half the titles. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are the two I am most eager to read, anyway. I left out some books that I’m no longer quite as interested in reading, like Oliver Twist. (I moved those books to my “someday” list.) And I left out books I had read in abridged editions as a child, or read so long ago that I want to read them again, like Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island. The youngest book on my list is over 100 years old; the oldest was first published almost 435 years ago.
I should add that I have a physical or Kindle copy of nearly all of these. I need to locate a copy of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, but that shouldn’t be hard. (I have Alexandre Dumas’s version from 1842, but I want to read the original.) I also need to find a physical copy of Spenser’s Faerie Queen that has print big enough to read! It’s important to me to see how the lines were actually written, and Kindle doesn’t always handle poetry well. But alas, my Penguin paperback copy, while an excellent edition in other ways, has teeny tiny print. I may have to resort to a magnifying glass. Or an audiobook; Naxos has a recording of the entire thing, unabridged.
The Oldest Books on My TBR List, by original publication date
The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser (1590-1596)
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen (1813) and Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen (1813)
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, by E. A. Hoffman, (1816)
Phantastes, by George MacDonald (1858)
What Katy Did, by Susan Coolidge (1872)
The Canterville Ghost, by Oscar Wilde (1887)
The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (1888–1891) (Contains all the tales from The Happy Prince and Other Stories and The House of Pomegranates)
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham (1908)
The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley (1919)
The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnem (1922)
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