I’m finally joining The Classics Club! For anyone living under a rock, The Classics Club was founded in March 2012 as a community meant to encourage people to read and blog about the classics by inviting bloggers to set a goal of reading at least 50 classic books in the next five years. I don’t usually participate in challenges, but I really like the flexibility this one offers. I have five years to read all 50 books, which seems like plenty of time, and I don’t consider this list to be definitive. The following list of titles is more of a starting point, and I’m giving myself the freedom to make changes to the list as my knowledge and tastes develop. Even so, I have been mulling over my list for months, trying to perfect it! I think I am finally happy with the books I’ve chosen, and I’m ready to join in!
1800s
1. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
2. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
3. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
4. Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
5. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
6. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
7. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
8. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
9. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10. Middlemarch – George Elliot
11. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
12. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
13. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
14. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
15. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
16. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
17. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
1900s
18. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
19. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
20. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
21. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
22. My Antonia - Willa Cather
23. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
24. The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
25. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
26. This Side of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
28. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
29. The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
30. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
31. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
32. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
33. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert E. Heinlein
34. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
35. A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
36. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
37. Dubliners – James Joyce
38. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
39. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
40. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
41. Beloved – Toni Morrison
42. Sula – Toni Morrison
43. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
44. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
45. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
46. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
47. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
48. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
49. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
50. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
There you have it, the 50 classic books I am challenging myself to read by November 14, 2017!
Little Women!! Walden!! A Room of One’s Own!!!
(Pssst. Sense & Sensibility!)
Your favorites, I know! I can’t believe I haven’t read Little Women yet, but this winter might be the perfect time to finally do it!
Mmmaybe. I tried not to put ALL THE AUSTEN books on my list — I have to give some other writers a chance!
Yay! I’m so glad you’re joining us! Your list is great, and we have lots of books in common–maybe we can read some of them together.
I’m so excited to finally make the leap and join all of you! We should absolutely read some together
I love your selection I’m actually reading “Little Women” in two weeks!
But I completely disagree with focusing only on classics (which was somehow an idea related to that club/blog). Of course, classics are needed but we have such a contemporary and modern literature that it is a pity to ignore it. Imagine not having read Sylvia Plath or “Cloud Atlas”!
Good luck with this project, I know you’ll do great
We’ll have to add Little Women to our list of books to discuss
I definitely won’t only be reading classics. In order to read all 50 books in five years, I’ll have to finish one book from this list every five weeks or so, which isn’t a huge commitment — probably less than a quarter of all my reading. I just look at the Classics Club as a way to encourage myself to read the classics more often — and I am using a broad definition of the term ‘classic.’ That’s one of the things I like about the club; it allows members to define ‘classic’ however they wish. I didn’t limit myself to pre-1900 works; when considering what ‘classic’ means to me, I decided that any book I thought would be taught in a class would fit the bill. According to that criteria, Sylvia Plath and Cloud Atlas would probably both count as classics for me, and my list contains plenty of modern works, including Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie. The majority of my reading will remain modern/contemporary, but I’m looking forward to reading more classics and furthering my literary education.
Wow, Salm Rushdie. I should read him too… Just saw the other day a documentary about all the reactions to his “Satanic Verses”. Scary!
What was the documentary? Sounds interesting.
I made my Classics Club list a while ago and just never officially joined! I just need to suck it up and make me post already!
You should! I wrote my list months ago and only got around to posting it yesterday because I needed to post something but hadn’t written anything
It feels good to have made the plunge; jump in!
I did it today! But I posted it as a “page” not a “post”
Hooray! Ooh, making a page is such a good idea!
What a great list! I’m glad to see that you’ve joined the club! Looking forward to discussing some great books with you!
Two books I try to recommend….Dracula (B. Stoker) and Germianl ( E. Zola)….believe you will not regret it!
For some reason I had it in my head that you’d already joined up. Guess not! Your list looks great–as always, I look at others lists and see books I wish I’d put on mine!
You have some wonderful choices! The Things They Carried and Cannery Row are both incredible. Welcome to the club! – Melissa
Thanks! I can’t wait to read them, and I’m so excited to have finally joined!