The Classics Club

Below you’ll find my list of the 50 books I pledge to read before September 2017. It’s a bit scary to create such a list because my intention is to try and stick to it and actually get these books read. I started with listing the books I already own that qualify for this club – 25 books in all (one of these is a reread). And then came the trickier part – going through my wish list of 1000+ books and determining the last 25 books…

There was some titles I immediately knew I wanted to include – like Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 and Dumas The Count of Monte Christo. But then I just went through my wish list, added the books I felt for. I have to admit that apparently, not that many classics have spoken to me. I only ended up with a list of 55 novels – so 30 novels out of my 1000+ wish list are what I determine classics…! That’s just sad! If I had known that, I probably would have joined The Classics Club a lot sooner to get more recommendations…!

But anyway, here’s my list. I haven’t paid attention to making sure both men and women are included or that all the authors aren’t ‘old white men’ but I still have a bit of everything, I think. The last to be included was Ernest Hemingway – I’ve been putting of reading him for so long, him being this big game hunter who drank too much, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that I might actually still like some of his works… So I kicked Mervyn Peake off the list and added Hemingway.

Here’s the list – deadline: September 2017:

1. Richard Adams: Watership Down. (Own collection)
2. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
3. Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey. (Own collection)
4. Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy. (Own collection)
5. Frank L. Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
6. Karen Blixen: Out of Africa. (Own collection)
7. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (Bought)
8. Frances Hodgson Burnett: A Little Princess
9. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch. (Own collection)
10. A.S. Byatt: Possession. (Own collection)
11. Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland. (Own collection)
12. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass. (Own collection)
13. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote (Own collection)
14. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (Bought)
15. Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby. (Own collection)
16. Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities. (Own collection)
17. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Idiot. (Own collection)
18. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment. (Own collection)
19. Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy
20. Alexander Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
21. Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. (Own collection)
22. George Elliot: The Mill on the Floss
23. Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong
24. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. (Own collection)
25. Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows. (Own collection)
26. Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
27. Graham Greene: The End of the Affair
28. Alex Haley: Roots
29. Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
30. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Bought)
31. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
32. Frank Herbert: Dune. (Own collection)
33. Victor Hugo: Les Misérables. (Own collection)
34. Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
35. Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man
36. James Joyce: Ulysses. (Own collection)
37. Mario Vargas Llosa: Conversations in a Chatedral
38. Gabriel García Márques: One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Own collection)
39. Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
40. Toni Morrison: Beloved. (Own collection)
41. Marcel Proust: In Remembrance of Things Past. (Own collection – I’m not sure when the edition I’m reading is being published and I don’t know if the last volume is finished in 5 years but I’ll try to finish as much of it as is published.)
42. Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children. (Own colletion)
43. John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men
44. J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings. (Own collection – reread)
45. Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited. (Own collection)
46. Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
47. Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
48. Virginia Woolf: Orlando. (Own collection)
49. Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road
50. Émile Zola: Thérèse Raquin