C. Christopher Smith of the Huffington Post has issued readers a hefty challenge. He proposes that for every current book you read, you read a classic.

Pause for heavy sighing…

As I read on in to his post, however, I felt a bit better. Smith quotes John Ruskin who says, ” “All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.” and goes on to define classics as books that are “not books of the moment.”

In looking at books this way, the challenge actually becomes exciting. For years, I have thought back to books that I read when I was younger. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Tuck Everlasting and on and on. Each of these are books that could be read again and again, years and years after they were first published. There are many books like these that I remember loving but that I do not in fact remember at all.

Perhaps, this year I will take the challenge and read the ‘classics’ of children’s literature.

For now, I have begun with A Bridge to Teraibithia. So far, so good…