Have you heard about what all the cool kids in The Classics Club are doing? They’re making the classics an integral part of their lives by choosing to read and blog about 50+ classics over a five year time period. I’m not claiming to be cool, but I do want to read more classics, so I’m in!
The process of creating your own reading list is a wonderful challenge in itself. I greatly enjoyed forming my own reading lists in graduate school and for the courses I used to teach. Creating a focused and limited reading lists helps you to refine your thinking about a topic, genre, or time period, as well as what’s important to you and why.
In the process of putting together my list of classics I focused on books I have not yet read, although there are a few that I started in the past and didn’t finished. These are the books that whenever I come across them I think, “I really want to read that already.” I tried to keep the list to 100 books published before 1970, but there are some at the end published after 1970 that I just couldn’t resist.
Here’s my list of 100 classics that I plan to read by October 2017:
- On The Good Life, Cicero, BCE
- The Divine Comedy, Dante, 1318
- The Decameron, Boccaccio, 1351
- Don Quixote, Cervantes, 1605
- Les Liaisons Dangereuses, De Laclos, 1782
- The Monk, Lewis, 1796
- Sense and Sensibility, Austen, 1811
- Pride and Prejudice, Austen, 1813
- Ivanhoe, Scott, 1819
- The Red and the Black, Stendhal,1830
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas, 1844
- Wuthering Heights, Bronte, 1847
- The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne, 1851
- Bartleby, the Scrivener, Melville, 1853
- The Woman in White, Collins, 1859
- Les Miserables, Hugo, 1862
- War and Peace, Tolstoy, 1864
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll, 1865
- Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky, 1866
- Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, 1869
- Carmilla, Le Fanu, 1872
- Personal Memoirs, Grant, 1885
- The Bostonians, James, 1886
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain, 1889
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde, 1890
- Hunger, Hamsun, 1890
- The Canterville Ghost, Wilde, 1891
- The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett, 1896
- The Invisible Man, Wells, 1897
- Lord Jim, Conrad, 1899
- Kim, Kipling, 1901
- The Land of Little Rain, Austin, 1903
- The Way of All Flesh, Butler, 1903
- A Room with a View, Forster, 1908
- The Phantom of the Opera, Leroux, 1910
- Maurice, Forster, 1914
- The Good Soldier, Ford, 1915
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce, 1916
- The Education of Henry Adams, Adams, 1918
- Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson, 1919
- This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald, 1920
- Three Soldiers, Dos Passos, 1921
- So Big, Ferber, 1924
- The Magic Mountain, Mann, 1924
- Mrs. Dallowy, Woolf, 1925
- The Castle, Kafka, 1926
- Steppenwolf, Hesse, 1927
- To the Lighthouse, Woolf, 1927
- Berlin Alexanderplatz, Doblin, 1929
- Goodbye to All That, Graves, 1929
- As I Lay Dying, Faulkner, 1930
- The Maltese Falcon, Hammet, 1930
- Little Man, What Now? Fallada, 1932
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein, 1933
- A Testament of Youth, Brittain, 1933
- Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald, 1933
- Mary Poppins, Travers, 1934
- Rebecca, du Maurier, 1938
- The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck, 1939
- And Then There Were None, Christie, 1939
- Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood, Christopher, 1939
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers, 1940
- Mythology, Hamilton, 1942
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith, 1943
- Brideshead Revisted, Waugh, 1944
- The Drinker, Fallada, 1944
- Animal Farm, Orwell, 1945
- Hiroshima, Hersey, 1946
- The Diary of a Young Girl, Frank, 1947
- The Caine Mutiny, Wouk, 1951
- From Here to Eternity, Jones, 1951
- The Price of Salt, Highsmith, 1952
- Wise Blood, O’Connor, 1952
- Lord of the Flies, Golding, 1954
- Catch-22, Heller, 1955
- Night, Wiesel, 1955
- Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin, 1956
- You’re Stepping on my Cloak and Dagger, Hall, 1957
- Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak, 1957
- The Ugly American, Lederer, 1958
- A Raisin in the Son, Hansberry, 1959
- The Tin Drum, Grass, 1959
- Revolutionary Road, Yates, 1961
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson, 1962
- Ship of Fools, Porter, 1962
- A Moveable Feast, Hemingway, 1964
- The Stone Angel, Laurence, 1964
- Stoner, Williams, 1965
- The Chosen, Potok, 1967
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut, 1968
- The Godfather, Puzo, 1969
- The Winds of War, Wouk, 1970
- Deliverance, Dickey, 1970
- The Killer Angels, Shaara, 1974
- The Thorn Birds, McCullough, 1977
- Midnight’s Children, Rushdie, 1980
- Curious Wine, Forrest, 1983
- The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood, 1985
- Regeneration, Barker, 1991
- Suite Francaise, Nemirovsky, 2006 (written in 1930s/40s)
I feel the need to say that the only book I’m not thrilled about reading is the Faulkner. I have never read anything by him, although I’ve tried. But since I re-read The Great Gatsby this year and have come to have a new appreciation for Fitzgerald, I thought I’d give Faulkner another chance.
Do you read classics? What are some of your favorites or some that you really want to read already?
Glad to see you signed up 🙂
100 is a challenge, you're going to be a busy classics reader! I haven't read lots of these books so I will be looking forward to your reviews.
Welcome to the Club. Your list is impressive. There are so many here that are not on my list, though I have a couple of them lined up on my TBR. Looking forward to rading your reviews.
I tried to balance things out with some shorter classics, but some of those older, thicker classics now make five years seem like a tight time frame!
Thank you for the welcome! I'm so happy to take the plunge back into the classics and am looking forward to your reviews as well. It's always interesting to me how different people focus in on different things about the same book.