After years of resistance and thinking I can motivate myself, I finally took the plunge and join The Classics Club. The last time I read a piece of classic literature, excluding my reread of the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, was in March 2013, and even that was a reread of a short novel I first read in high school. Obviously, motivating myself is not going well.
Club participants are supposed to pull together a list of fifty or more books considered to be classics and both read and discuss every single title on their personal blog within a five year period. I plan to read seventy-five books in three years ending on August 15, 2017 simply because I rather like the idea of reading twenty-five classics each year.
Neither the club nor I have a definition of what is a classic so in addition to those titles that immediately came to mind — those big, scary titles I’ve been avoiding for years — I pulled titles from two other lists I had hoped to read more titles from by now — 101 Great Books for College-Bound Readers and AP Literature. I would also like to finish reading the complete works of Jane Austen, and reread one novel I do not think I was ready to read when I original did. (I’m looking at you, Wuthering Heights.)
I’ve structured my list below the jump in alphabetical order by title, but I have also created a spreadsheet where you can organize my list by author, order in which I added it to my list, and year originally published.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)
- The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)
- Agnes Grey (Anne Brontë)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
- The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
- Beloved (Toni Morrison)
- Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
- The Book of Mormon (Joseph Smith Jr.)
- Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
- The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
- Cranford (Elizabeth Gaskell)
- Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
- A Doll’s House (Henrick Ibsen)
- Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
- Dracula (Bram Stroker)
- East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
- Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)
- The Holy Bible (Anonymous)
- The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
- The House of Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
- The Iliad (Homer)
- The Island of Dr. Moreau (H.G. Wells)
- Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
- The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
- The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling)
- Juvenilia (Jane Austen)
- King Lear (William Shakespeare)
- Lady Susan (Jane Austen)
- The Last of the Mohicans (James Feinmore Cooper)
- The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving)
- Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
- A Light in the Attic (Shel Silverstein)
- Little Lord Fauntleroy (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
- The Magician’s Nephew (C.S. Lewis)
- The Making of the Marchioness (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
- Matilda (Roald Dahl)
- Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
- Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
- Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
- No Name (Wilkie Collins)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
- The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux)
- Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lingren) — January 2015
- The Plague (Albert Camus)
- The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
- A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean)
- A Room With a View (E.M. Forster)
- Roots (Alex Haley)
- Sandition (Jane Austen)
- Selected Poems (Emily Dickinson)
- Silas Marner (George Eliot)
- Snow Falling on Cedars (David Guterson)
- The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (John le Carre)
- The Stranger (Albert Camus)
- The Swiss Family Robinson (Johann D. Wyss)
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
- The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
- This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
- The Trial (Franz Kafka)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
- Villette (Charlotte Brontë)
- Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
- The Warden (Anthony Trollope)
- The Waste Land and Other Writings (T.S. Eliot)
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
- Wives and Daughters (Elizabeth Gaskell)
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum)
- Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
Welcome to the dark side! So glad you decided to join! – Melissa
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