The 2018 Reading Challenge - #33 - A Childhood Classic you never read

Hello bookworms :)

How are you all doing today? Hope you are having a lovely week!
Today´s book was another hard one to choose - there are so many amazing books to choose from.
So for the prompt - A Childhood Classic you never read - I went for Little Women and I almost could not decide. Besides all the English Childhood Classics I of cause never read because I did not even know English excised when I was a child ;) I just haven´t been too much of a bookworm as a child.
I spent all my time outdoors and never ever s minute longer without runnin around as absolutely necessary...sorry mum and dad ;) So I had a great selection of books to choose from ^^

Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books over several months at the request of her publisher. Following the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—the novel details their passage from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters.

Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success with readers demanding to know more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume (entitled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, although this name originated from the publisher and not from Alcott).

Alcott wrote two sequels to her popular work, both of which also featured the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls.

The novel addressed three major themes: "domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity."[Elbert, Sarah (1987). A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-1199-2.] 

Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth", but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well".[Sicherman, Barbara (2010). Well Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-3308-7.]

According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters. [Elbert, Sarah (1987). A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press] 

The book has been adapted for cinema; twice as silent film and four times with sound in 1933, 1949, 1978 and 1994. Six television series were made, including four by the BBC—1950, 1958, 1970, 2017, and as a 2018 PBS TV show. Two anime series were made in Japan during the 1980s.

A musical version opened on Broadway in 2005. An American opera version in 1998 has been performed internationally and filmed for broadcast on US television in 2001. ¹

As always a little summary from goodreads:

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"Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America."

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I´ll give it a 8 out of 10

I´m trying to imagine myself reading this as a child and how I would have liked it...cant...I dont think I would have liked it...all I liked as a child was Harry Potter ;) all the time over and over and over again ;) I think I would have thought how boring is that ;)

Anyways I liked it today as an adult ;) Not going to be read over and over and over again but I enjoyed it - even tho the girls where annoying sometimes ;) maybe that was just a mood at the time but that is what I remembered ^^ and I wont say that I´ll never ever read it again and I would probably read it to my own child ;) if that isn´t a recommendation 

For a little more inspiration and some alternatives?

I find it quite hard to give any recommendations here to be honest.

Childhood classics are totally different in every country...my choice Little Woman for example isn´t a childhood classic in Germany at all...never the less I chose it ;)

Of cause there are worldwide childhood classics like all the Grimm Brothers Fairy tales and other fairy tales from all the different cultures but otherwise I guess you have to decide whether you want to limit it to your home country or not.

Now if you´d like some more inspo you can go to goodreads and get inspired by the discussion or go over to buzzfeed

If you´d like a recommendation just ask me in the comments down below ^^

Which book did you choose for this category?

Did you already read Little Women?

Which book was your favourite as a child?

With lots of love

♥♥♥