Okay, so what about works of literature that are NOT novels? Do they count? Should they count? After all, my most recent outing with Shakespeare (King Richard II) took two and one-half hours, about the same length of time I would expect to spend watching an actual production. And some of the short novels I've counted during my previous training period (Stephen Crane's Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, to name just one example) took less than that amount of time to read.
So, do plays count?
And I have to say no. After all, I don't want to read 25 plays and 25 novels, which would be relatively easy to do, and shift the onus of difficulty over onto the non-fiction works. The novels have to remain challenging in order to forestall doomed attempts at (Good God!) Spengler.
But poetry is a different matter. Does Homer count? Of course, even if in verse. The Divine Comedy would count as three. Paradise Lost but probably not Paradise Regained. Idylls of the King. John Brown's Body. Orlando Furioso. But not "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Pippa Passes", and other works of similar brevity. ("Atalanta in Calydon" falls into a grey area, if only for Swinburne's tortured diction . . .)
So long poems, of book length, published and studied separately, count. Plays do not (Well, maybe "Mourning Becomes Electra". Good God!)
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