Why It's a Masterpiece at 100 Weeks

I personally can't believe we've been doing 'Why It's a Masterpiece' for almost two years now. At 100 weeks, I have decided to expand and rework 'Why It's a Masterpiece' to include some more pieces of literature and other parts that I think could be quite interesting. This also means that this series of articles is about to get a bit longer than usual.

Let's first go over what 'Why It's a Masterpiece' is for those of you just joining us...

'Why It's a Masterpiece' started off as an article dedicated to a special work of literature or film in which I spoke about key parts, plot lines, quotations and more concerning why this work is so respected. The first ten or so weeks were dedicated nearly exclusively to film but, I did think about it for a while. Yes, I do love film but I did also love literature. Should I come back to films? Probably not. I have so much to say about books and there's just so many of them to analyse. I think I will leave films to some other creators on here that I quite respect.

So, after around a while, it became exclusively about literature. The way it works at the moment is that I give an overview of when the book was published and who it was published by - including where the book sits in the bibliography of the author and the era in which it was published. This is followed by a breakdown of the plot and of course there are spoilers, it is a deep-dive - not a review. After this, there is a section called 'into the book' in which three major themes and/or symbols are analysed with quotations after each in order to split them up without subheadings. This is followed by an eponymous section in which we take a quick look at why this book is considered a masterpiece at all. Finally, I give a short conclusion on why we still read it today.

Of course, at the very end of the article you will find what is going to be featured next week, giving you (if you would like to) time to prepare by reading the book or refreshing yourself.

Now that we have reached 100 weeks, I'm planning to make some small adjustments. These include:

New Section!

If you read my work often, you'll probably know that at the beginning of my deep-dive articles there's a section called 'Background and Context'. This will be added to 'Why It's a Masterpiece' articles. It'll be featured before the 'Introduction' and will cover why this book is important to me personally. I probably won't do it for every single book because I don't want to bore you to death - but for a lot of them post-100, I can definitely see it becoming more of a frequent thing.

New Books!

The 19th Century has arrived!

As you know, we have been exclusively looking at books from the 20th century and now, I think that we are ready to start exploring novels from the 19th century as well. I am very excited for this because now that there are about to be some really (and I mean really) long books, there are going to be some very long articles to go along with them! I hope you are as excited about this as I am - this is going to be so much fun.

New Recommendations!

For some of the articles I will now be including a section called 'Other Masterpieces...' in which I will feature two or three books in a simple list that can be read if you enjoyed the novel from the article. This again, will be only done here and there, especially if the book is something really damn important in the history of literature.

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Conclusion

I'm really glad that you've come on this journey with me so far and I'm looking forward to what comes after 100 weeks. There's a whole bunch of ideas I've got and not one of them gives me any reason to stop writing these deep-dives now. Here's to another 100 weeks and now featuring 19th century novels everywhere!

Of course Week 101 is one of my absolute favourites...

Next Week: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky