As with other commenters, I don't think this is too bad. A quick reader could easily get through the Shakespeare in an afternoon (and surely most people taking this course would probably have read or seen them before anyway...), and some of the rest are quite short.
The hardest book there, I would say, is "The Brothers Karamazov", which is a masterpiece with a little of everything in it, but it is rather dense in the way that Russian novels, and those by Dostoevsky in particular, tend to be. "Moby Dick" is also quite a weighty tome, but it's not a particularly difficult one to get through. I have no idea about the opera libretti or what miseries having to read them might entail.
What a wonderful selection, though, regardless (and lovely to see one of T.S. Eliot's Greek tragedies in there).
The hardest book there, I would say, is "The Brothers Karamazov", which is a masterpiece with a little of everything in it, but it is rather dense in the way that Russian novels, and those by Dostoevsky in particular, tend to be. "Moby Dick" is also quite a weighty tome, but it's not a particularly difficult one to get through. I have no idea about the opera libretti or what miseries having to read them might entail.
What a wonderful selection, though, regardless (and lovely to see one of T.S. Eliot's Greek tragedies in there).