So I have just agreed to the Classics Club Challenge, and what it means is that I agreed to read 50 classic titles in 5 years (4/2015-4/2020). I think it is a great initiative to read amazing literary classics.
My list was composed of books I had heard of and never read; books you know you should have read and never got around reading it, as well as inspiration from Goodreads lists and the Big Book List.
I’m not planning on reading these books in the same sequence as I have listed. Some books will have a review available, and some will not, and there is no set number of books I plan to read in a year. I will be crossing them out as I’m reading them. I have already started the year on a Dante theme, so those books I took credit for and they will be crossed out.
So here is my list:
Twain, Mark ~ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Dumas, Alexandre ~ The Three Musketeers
Hugo, Victor ~ Les Miserable
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor ~ The Brothers Karamazov
Whitman, Walt ~ Leaves of Grass
Atwood, Margarete ~ Alias Grace
Blake, William ~ Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Swift, Jonathan ~ Gulliver’s Travels
Voltaire ~ Candide
Goldsmith, Oliver ~ The Vicar of Wakefield
Hawthorne, Nathaniel ~ The House of the Seven Gables
Haywood, Eliza ~ Love in Excess
Fielding, Henry ~ Joseph Andrews
Shelley, Mary ~ The Last Man
Eliot, George ~ The Mill on the Floss
Eliot, George ~ Middlemarch
Verne, Jules ~ From the Earth to the Moon and ‘Round the Moon
Verne, Jules ~ Around the World in Eighty Days
Cervantes, Miguel ~ Don Quixote
Bronte, Charlotte ~ The Professor
Bronte, Anne ~ The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Wharton, Edith ~ The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Wharton, Edith ~ The Age of Innocence
Stegner, Wallace ~ Angle of Repose
Woolf, Virginia ~ A Room of One’s Own
Woolf, Virginia ~ To the Lighthouse
Angelou, Maya ~ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Ishiguro, Kasuo ~ The Remains of the Day
Cather, Willa ~ Death Comes for the Archbishop
Doyle, Arthur Conan ~ The Hound of the Baskervilles
Christie, Agatha ~ Murder on the Orient Express
Wilde, Oscar ~ The Canterville Ghost
Washington, Irving ~ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang ~ Faust
Alighieri, Dante ~ Inferno
Alighieri, Dante ~ Purgatorio
Salinger, J. D. ~ The Catcher in the Rye
Heller, Joseph ~ Catch-22
Chandler, Raymond ~ The Big Sleep
James, Henry ~ The Portrait of a Lady
Smith, Betty ~ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
O’Connor, Flannery ~ Wise Blood
Collins, Wilkie ~ The Woman in White
Collins, Wilkie ~ The Moonstone
Dickens, Charles ~ Oliver Twist
Dickens, Charles ~ Great Expectations
Austen, Jane ~ Mansfield Park
Tolstoy, Leo ~ Anna Karenina
Lowry, Lois ~ The Giver
Melville, Herman ~ Moby-Dick
What do you guys think about this challenge? Please feel free to leave a comment, and let me know if you’ve read any of these books and your thoughts about it. Thanks for stopping by 🙂
A Wondrous Bookshelf 
That’s a fabulous list!
I would humbly suggest switching out the following:
Lucy Gayheart or One of Ours for Death Come for the Archbishop by Willa Cather;
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus for The Last Man by Mary Shelley;
Villette for The Professor by Charlotte Bronte;
The Count of Monte Cristo for The Three Musketeers by Dumas;
Suggested additions:
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell;
Little Women by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Sun Also Rises or The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway;
Rebecca or Jamaica Inn by Daphne DuMaurier
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Good luck!
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Thank you so much, Jooli. Yes! I have already read Rebecca (one of my favorites), Slaughterhouse-five, The Sun Also Rises (one of my all-time favorite), Little women, North and South (also one of my favorites). I did consider The Count of Monte Cristo. Thank you so much for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at it, and I might switch! 🙂
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That’s a nice, varied list. Have fun!
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Thank you!
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Wellllllll…… some of those books look exciting to me. I particularly love Flannery O’Connor, the Russians, the Betty Smith, the Virginia Woolf, though I’d sub Orlando for A Room of One’s Own, but otherwise I find those lists pretty tired. I don’t know why any modern young woman wants to read Dickens. The female characters are excruciating, and I can’t find any emotional truth in it. But tell us how it goes! Five years, 50 books is a neat idea.
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Thanks, Ivalleria. I’ll take a look at Orlando. Thanks for the tip.
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Oh, yay! You joined! Welcome!! (I’m a fellow clubber.) 😀
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You have a great list here, and it has some of my favorite authors on it: Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain. Have fun! (There’s an Edith Wharton reading event going on in May, hosted by http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.)
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Cool! Thanks for the link!
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Welcome to the club! Les Miserable is amazing and Atwood is always a great choice.
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