Earlier this week, I shared a post with my list of books for the newest Classics Club Spin challenge (see it here), and today, this spin’s number was announced. (For those keeping track, it’s CC Spin #32, and for me personally, #4!)

Hosted by The Classics Club blog, the Classics Club Spin is a reading adventure where participants come up with a list of classics they’d like to read, number them 1 to 20, and then read the book that corresponds to the “spin” number that comes up.

For CCSpin #32, the lucky number is:

And that means I’ll be reading:

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (published 1913)

Synopsis:

O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather’s first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather’s heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra’s devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.

At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

I’m excited for this one! I read My Antonia many years ago, but haven’t read anything else by Willa Cather, and I actually have a few of her books on my (never-ending) to-read list.

O Pioneers! is relatively short (just 159 pages), so I may wait until early January to get started. The target date for finishing is January 29th, 2023, so I should be in really good shape.

It turns out that this is my third American classic in a row for my CCSpin books. That’s okay… but I may need to revise my list to try to broaden the selections a bit more before the next spin comes along.

What do you think of my newest spin book?

Here’s my list of 20 titles for Classics Club Spin #32:

1. Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne DuMaurier
2. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
3. An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott
4. Dracula by Bram Stoker
5. Peony by Pearl Buck
6. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
7. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
8. Howards End by E. M. Forster
9. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
10. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
11. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
12. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
13. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
14. The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
15. Passing by Nella Larsen
16. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
17. The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
18. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
19. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
20. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Porter

My previous Classics Club Spin books:

Are you participating in this Classics Club Spin? If so, what book will you be reading?