Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson:  While the book was quite different from its cover description I found I enjoyed it.  Trond has raised a family and lost two wives.  When he walks away from the accident that killed his second wife, he retires and moves to a cabin in the woods without telling his daughters.   Too busy, he thinks.  He relishes the solitude and the chance to live a simple life reflecting over and over how his father did the things he now finds himself doing.  As he restores his humble home slowly (he has plenty of time), he finds himself recalling over and over incidents from his life with his parents, sister, friends, and his own family.  These experiences and memories have molded him into the individual he is.   However, Trond finds that memories are not enough.  He does indeed need his daughters and friends.  The author weaves the memories and incidents throughout the story with great skill so that the story flows smoothly.  Very good read.

I think I'm finally going to read Jane Austen LOL! But 'lucky' for me I haven't read too many classics so almost everyone is a new to me author...

Out Stealing Horses sounds pretty good!

REK, I just looked up Per Petterson.  How is this a classic (50 years old or more)?  It does sound like a good read but I was trying to figure out how it could be in the classics challenge?

Tess of the D'Urbervilles - although by the time I read it, I had 'read' another Thomas Hardy - I listened to The Mayor of Casterbridge as an audiobook in February.

Tess had the opportunity to be one of the great depressing books of all time. Hardy just added a bit too much poetic, unrealistic symmetry, that left a glimmer of hope at the end. I'm a normal person, and I like happy endings, but it just wasn't in the cards here. The thing is, it should have been just a soul-crushing tome of despair, with readers wandering around in numb stupefaction reflecting on the futility of hatred, and the destruction of 'unforgiveness' (is there a word that means the state of being unforgiving?). Instead Hardy spliced in some 'cathartic' thing that felt false to me.

Anyway, I got over my fear of Hardy.

Hardy writes about life, and he tries to tell it true. Frequently very depressing.

I already completed this category. I "met"  W.S Maugham and plan to read more than just The Painted Veil.

I read The Picture of Doran Gray.  Good.  Thought-provoking.  Enough so that I did a little on-line research on the author, about whom I previously knew nothing.  And that made the novel even more interesting, but ... a bit confounding.  I may need to re-read it.