The Classics Club was created to encourage people to read Classics over a longer period, rather than solely in a one year challenge.  According to the rules you can take up to five years and list any number of books.  If you’re interested in joining click here.
I’ve given myself the full five years (March 8, 2017) and I have decided on 70 books I’ve never read, plus 15 re-reads for a total of 85 100 books. Â I wasn’t quite sure how to list them so I have listed them below divided by original publication language and then in order of publication. Â The overwhelming majority are English, but I made sure to include at least one book from each continent (except Antarctica, due to a lack of native language/population). Â (I will also be reading them all in English.) Â So without further ado here are my books:
Re-Reads
- English
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (1811)
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (1813)
- Mansfield Park – Jane Austen (1814)
- Emma – Jane Austen (1815)
- Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen (1818)
- Persuasion – Jane Austen (1818)
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (1847)
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (1847)
- The Scarlett Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee (1960)
- A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
- A Wind in the Door – Madeleine L’Engle (1973)
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet – Madeleine L’Engle (1978)
- Many Waters – Madeleine L’Engle (1986)
- French
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (1845)
- Middle English
- Spanish
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
New Reads
- Ancient Greek
- Arabic
- The Arabian Nights (1001 Nights) – Lang, Andrew (trans.) (1706)
- Chinese
- Dream of the Red Chamber – Cao Xueqin (1868)
- Czech
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera (1984)
- English
- The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliff (1794)
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (1818)
- Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë (1847)
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte (1848)
- Shirley – Charlotte Brontë (1849)
- The House of Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorn (1851)
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville (1851)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
- Villette – Charlotte Brontë (1853)
- North and South – Elizabeth Gaskill (1855)
- Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman (1855)
- The Professor – Charlotte Brontë (1857)
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (1859)
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (1860)
- No Name – Wilkie Collins (1862)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)
- Behind a Mask – Louisa May Alcott (1866)
- Roughing It – Mark Twain (1872)
- The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope (1875)
- Treasure Island – Robert Lewis Stevenson (1883)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (1884)
- Middlemarch – George Elliot/Mary Anne Evans (1874)
- The Bostonians – Henry James (1886)
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde (1891)
- Dracula – Bram Stoker (1897)
- A Room with a View – E.M. Forster (1908)
- Howard’s End – E.M. Forster (1910)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce (1917)
- Ulysses – James Joyce (1922)
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (1926)
- To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (1927)
- Orlando – Virginia Woolf (1928)
- The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen (1929)
- A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (1929)
- Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell (1933)
- Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie (1934)
- Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (1936)
- Anthem – Ayn Rand (1938)
- Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller (1939)
- The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (1940)
- Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers (1940)
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith (1943)
- The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers (1946)
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (1949)
- Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin (1956)
- Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand (1957)
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote (1958)
- Naked Lunch – William Burroughs (1959)
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (1961)
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (1963)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou (1969)
- The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison (1970)
- The World According to Garp – John Irving (1978)
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (1981)
- Shindler’s Ark/List – Thomas Keneally (1982)
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker (1982)
- Hotel du Lac – Anita Brookner (1984)
- Beloved – Toni Morrison (1987)
- The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie (1987)
- French
- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Victor Hugo (1831)
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (1844)
- Les Mis̩rables РVictor Hugo (1862)
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne (1870)
- A Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne (1874)
- Bel Ami – Guy de Maupassant (1885)
- The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux (1911)
- The Stranger – Albert Camus (1942)
- Ambiguous Adventure – Hamidou Cheikh Cane (1988 – African Novel)
- German
- Irish
- The Poor Mouth – Brian O’Nolan (1941)
- Russian
- Spanish
Fantastic list! I’m looking forward to chatting about the books that are on both of our lists.
Me too! I’m going to create a new feed on my RSS feed for all the Classic Club people.
I’m also going to be re-reading Sense & Sensibility!! We have many of the same titles on our lists. 😀
(Pssst. You should read Gone With the Wind first.) 😉
Gone with the Wind is definitely going to happen this year as it’s part of another challenge which is great. As soon as I can find a copy I plan on reading it! Thanks for the awesome group and the impetus to push all of us into actually reading more of the Classics!
Great list, fabulous challenge. Bonne chance.
Thanks! I’m excited for it.
Love the list! I see some that are on my list as well! I have a tender spot in my heart for Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The story is quite good, but the political ideology turn a lot of people off. I’m looking forward to sharing the experience of this challenge with everyone involved!
Thanks for the comment! I’ve always been intrigued by Atlas Shrugged and am definitely looking forward to reading it, especially for its political ideology.
Awesome! Then may I make a suggestion? I’d read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead before tackling Atlas Shrugged. A lot of the ideology’s foundation is in that book, in my opinion, and I’m glad I did so, because it allowed me to understand a bit more of what Rand was getting at.
I like the way your list is divided by the nationality of the author. I wonder what mine would look like if I did it that way. I’m sure it would be overwhelmingly British/American, partly because I distrust translations. I always feel as if I might be “missing something” in the translation.
Happy reading!
Thanks! I was trying to think of a different way than either by language or by year. I also distrust translations and really wish I could read a lot more novels in their native language and actually found it difficult to find novels translated from some native languages. (Like people in Africa writing in either Arabic or French.)
Great list, we have many in common. I loved Persuasion even more than Pride and Prejudice, and To Kill a mockingbird was fabulous on audiobook as narrated by Sissy Spacek. Enjoy your reads! I look forward to your reviews, looks like your making great progress.
I’ll definitely have to check your list out tomorrow!
Great list! I recently read Schindler’s Ark/List and found it even MORE graphic — and more moving — than the movie version.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting! That’ll be a tough one to read when I do get around to it.
You have a great list there. I too am doing the Classics Book Challenge.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. Good luck with your list!
I am only starting now (and you’ll be finished soon!) but I am definitely adding this to my list of book challenges! Thank you for showing a great book challenge!
I’m not that close to finishing! But thanks and good luck!
Thanks! You as well! P.S. I think you are really going to love The Sun Also Rises. I saw that it’s on your list and it’s my one of my top 5 to this day.