The Classics Club

I’ve seen rumblings of The Classics Club about the blogosphere for several months. But creating a list of fifty classics I want to read over the next five years (and then actually reading them!) was overwhelming. Then Suey joined up, and that was the push I needed to do it too.

Here is the short version of the club “rules”:

• choose 50+ classics
• list them at your blog
• choose a reading completion goal date up to five years in the future and note that date on your classics list of 50+ titles
• e-mail the moderators of this blog (theclassicsclubblog@gmail.com) with your list link and information and it will be posted on the Members Page!
• write about each title on your list as you finish reading it, and link it to your main list
• when you’ve written about every single title, let us know!

I choose to read 50 books in 5 years. Since I just finished The Woman in White yesterday, that will be the jumping off point, making my completion date 9/24/2017.

Without further ado, here is my list. I did not include any rereads. And I sometimes gave myself a couple of options for particular authors. I do reserve the right to modify this list as needed to accomplish my personal goals, but I am going to try to stick to this as written as much as possible. I’m excited to get going!

1. Austen, Jane: Mansfield Park
2. Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey
3. Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot
4. Benson, E.F.: Mapp & Lucia
5. Bronte, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
6. Camus, Albert: The Stranger or The Fall
7. Cather, Willa: My Antonia or One of Ours
8. Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White – finished 9/25/2012
9. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
10. Dickens, Charles: Bleak House or Great Expectations
11. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
12. Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss
13. Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying, A Fable, or Go Down, Moses
14. Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
15. Forster, E.M.: Howard’s End, A Passage to India, or A Room with a View
16. Franklin, Benjamin: Autobiography
17. Gaskell, Elizabeth: Wives and Daughters
18. Goethe Wolfgang: Faust
19. Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
20. Green, Graham: Brighton Rock or A Sense of Reality
21. Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
22. Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, or For Whom the Bell Tolls
23. Homer: The Iliad
24. Homer: The Odyssey
25. Irving, John: A Prayer for Owen Meany
26. James, Henry: Turn of the Screw
27. Joyce, James: Ulysses
28. Kipling, Rudyard: The Jungle Book
29. Lawrence, D.H.: Sons and Lovers or Lady Chatterley’s Lover
30. Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook
31. Mailer, Norman: The Executioner’s Song
32. Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
33. More, Thomas: Utopia
34. Morrison, Toni: Beloved
35. Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
36. Orczy, Baroness: The Scarlet Pimpernel
37. Orwell, George: 1984
38. Proust, Marcel: Swann’s Way
39. Rawlings, Marjorie: The Yearling
40. Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye
41. Shakespeare, William: King Lear or Twelfth Night
42. Steinbeck, John: The Pearl or In Dubious Battle
43. Stoker, Bram: Dracula
44. Tenboom, Corrie: The Hiding Place
45. Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
46. Waugh, Evelyn: A Handful of Dust, or Scoop
47. Wharton, Edith: Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, or The House of Mirth
48. Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
49. Wodehouse, P.G.: Right Ho, Jeeves or Thank You, Jeeves
50. Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse

Have you joined The Classics Club yet?

Tagged as: Classics, Lists