Sneak preview – read-alongs

Goethe, Jackson, Lowry, Hammett and Tolstoy

Welcome to the Read the Classics read-alongs. Here is a preview of what we’ll be reading over the coming months.

September 2024

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)

Our first read-along will celebrate the 250th anniversary of one of the most influential novels in European literature. The Sorrows of Young Werther is the tragic love story that made Goethe’s name and inspired the Romantic movement across the continent.

Penguin Classics | 144 pages | translated by Michael Hulse

October 2024

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

‘The books that have profoundly scared me when I read them – made me want to sleep with the light on, made the neck hairs prickle and the goose bumps march, are few,’ says Neil Gaiman. ‘But Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House beats them all [. . .]. It scared me as a teenager and it haunts me still.’

Penguin Modern Classics | 256 pages

November 2024

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)

The Mexican Day of the Dead falls on Saturday 2 November this year. It’s the day on which Malcolm Lowry’s delirious novel Under the Volcano takes place. I’ll invite you to join me in a challenge: read the entire novel in one day, in real time, with a dangerous additional option of drinking along with the alcoholic protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin . . .

Penguin Modern Classics | 400 pages | introduced by Michael Schmidt

December 2024

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934)

For something slightly different this Christmas, we’ll read the last novel by Dashiell Hammett, inventor of hard-boiled crime. Ex-detective Nick Charles and his smart-talking wife Nora plan to spend Christmas in their Manhattan hotel suite with their pet schnauzer and a case of Scotch, but instead Charles finds himself investigating a bullet-riddled corpse and a missing inventor.

Penguin Modern Classics | 240 pages

January 2025

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1875-8)

To mark the 150th anniversary of the first published instalment of Anna Karenina, we will read perhaps the greatest novel ever written over the course of the whole of 2025. We’ll split the novel into twelve monthly sections and savour both the devastating love story and the panoramic depiction of nineteenth-century Russia.

Oxford World’s Classics | 896 pages | translated by Rosamund Bartlett

---

Buy a copy of any of these books through Bookshop.org and Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!