The Classics Club asked a question and we were not sure we'd be able to answer. The question should have been an easy one - What is your favorite classic book and why? - but then there's two of us and we both have a pile of favorite classic books (that you can admire in the sidebar of our pages).
Narrowing down our lists of favorites looked close to impossible, so we
figured we'd skip this meme. But then we remembered that there is one
classic that we both love and that is a fairly good representation of
what unites us at this point. That book is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.
As readers we are not very
similar. Not only that we have very different reading styles (Alexis -
slow and thorough, Claudia - fast and... less than thorough), but, beyond the loose label of "classics," we tend to appreciate different books. And yet we rank The House of Mirth
the same. We love it for its elegant writing. We love it for its
heroine, poor tragic Lily Bart. We love it for its depiction of 19th
century society. And we love it for the memory of that time when Claudia
unwittingly spoiled it for Alexis by saying, "Oh, you're reading The House of Mirth? I cried at the end."