Back to School Challenge

I was skipping through my appallingly overloaded Google Reader when I had to stop short at a post by Tam at Bailey's and Books. She discovered a Back to School Challenge. I used to love reading lists, the promise of them, the undiscovered gems contained therein, and just plain the joy of being required to buy more books for my library. Yes, I have been a nerd my whole life. What can I say? Worse yet, I even read everything on the list. Yup. Geeks R Us. I still vividly remember the thrill of Dickens' Bleak House, a book that so captured my imagination I spent a weekend speeding through the entire thing my senior year of high school. Did anyone else in class read it? I don't know. But remembering the dizzy pleasure of that reading (and others in the school years pre and post this experience), how could I pass up this challenge?

Hosted by Five Borough Book Review, the rules are to choose any four reading-list books to read from September 1-December 31 and to post your reviews in the comments section of the sign-up post. I wonder if I could get by reading the books on my 7th grader's required reading list but since I am now and have always been, and will always be, until time immemorial, a goody-two shoes teacher's pet, I will go ahead and choose books more likely to be on high school reading lists. So here are my choices:

1. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (in honor of my Bleak House experience)
2. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
3. Wives and Daughters by Mrs. Gaskell
4. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin