classy classics

At home, we have pocket books of these titles-The Count of Monte Cristo and Around the World in Eighty Days. For as long as i can remember. They had sketches of various scenes drawn from the storyline.

As we reached middle school, we had abridged versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book(?).

That was when i was actually introduced into the wonderful world of classics. I recall reading The Secret Garden, The Water Babies, the Wind In The Willows, Little Women, The Railway Children, the entire series on Oz, Heidi, What Katy Did, What Katy Did Next.....

Don't know why, but i suddenly stopped them. Perhaps, i was pulled into indian literature at that point of time. I checked these out in the last few years-The Mill on the Floss, The Invisible Man and Through The Looking Glass. A pittance, i know.

On visiting Landmark last week, i picked some old titles to add to my meagre collection. Despite the fact that i've read them previously. It, definately will be nice to flip those pages, on a lazy afternoon, when i know not what to do.

What interests me is the easy reading that goes in when one glances at a classic. Some of those words are hardly used in our everyday speech(*sigh*). The description of is very vivid, be it a flower... a child.... a manor... a horse-drawn carriage. At the end it leaves you a gay feeling.

An extract from The Secret Garden:

It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place anyone could imagine. The high walls which shut it were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses, which were so thick thaqt they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown, and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. They were other trees in the garden, and one of the little things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. They were neither leaves or roses on them now, and Mary did not know whether they were dead and alive, but their thin grey or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over evreything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and, indeed, it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life.

ps: I discovered this amazing site; classic reader. It is free site which has a wide variety of titles and authors to choose from. For anybody who woudn't mind reading off a screen, it's simply fantastic.