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:

1. On The Good Life, Cicero, BCE
2. The Divine Comedy, Dante, 1318
3. The Decameron, Boccaccio, 1351
4. Don Quixote, Cervantes, 1605
5. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, De Laclos, 1782
6. The Monk, Lewis, 1796
7. Sense and Sensibility, Austen, 1811
8. Pride and Prejudice, Austen, 1813
9. Ivanhoe, Scott, 1819
10. The Red and the Black, Stendhal,1830
11. The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas, 1844
12. Wuthering Heights, Bronte, 1847
13. The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne, 1851
14. Bartleby, the Scrivener, Melville, 1853
15. The Woman in White, Collins, 1859
16. Les Miserables, Hugo, 1862
17. War and Peace, Tolstoy, 1864
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll, 1865
19. Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky, 1866
20. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, 1869
21. Carmilla, Le Fanu, 1872
22. Personal Memoirs, Grant, 1885
23. The Bostonians, James, 1886
24. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain, 1889
25. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde, 1890
26. Hunger, Hamsun, 1890
27. The Canterville Ghost, Wilde, 1891
28. The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett, 1896
29. The Invisible Man, Wells, 1897
30. Lord Jim, Conrad, 1899
31. Kim, Kipling, 1901
32. The Land of Little Rain, Austin, 1903
33. The Way of All Flesh, Butler, 1903
34. A Room with a View, Forster, 1908
35. The Phantom of the Opera, Leroux, 1910
36. Maurice, Forster, 1914
37. The Good Soldier, Ford, 1915
38. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce, 1916
39. The Education of Henry Adams, Adams, 1918
40. Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson, 1919
41. This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald, 1920
42. Three Soldiers, Dos Passos, 1921
43. So Big, Ferber, 1924
44. The Magic Mountain, Mann, 1924
45. Mrs. Dallowy, Woolf, 1925
46. The Castle, Kafka, 1926
47. Steppenwolf, Hesse, 1927
48. To the Lighthouse, Woolf, 1927
49. Berlin Alexanderplatz, Doblin, 1929
50. Goodbye to All That, Graves, 1929
51. As I Lay Dying, Faulkner, 1930
52. The Maltese Falcon, Hammet, 1930
53. Little Man, What Now? Fallada, 1932
54. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein, 1933
55. A Testament of Youth, Brittain, 1933
56. Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald, 1933
57. Mary Poppins, Travers, 1934
58. Rebecca, du Maurier, 1938
59. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck, 1939
60. And Then There Were None, Christie, 1939
61. Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood, Christopher, 1939
62. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers, 1940
63. Mythology, Hamilton, 1942
64. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith, 1943
65. Brideshead Revisted, Waugh, 1944
66. The Drinker, Fallada, 1944
67. Animal Farm, Orwell, 1945
68. Hiroshima, Hersey, 1946
69. The Diary of a Young Girl, Frank, 1947
70. The Caine Mutiny, Wouk, 1951
71. From Here to Eternity, Jones, 1951
72. The Price of Salt, Highsmith, 1952
73. Wise Blood, O’Connor, 1952
74. Lord of the Flies, Golding, 1954
75. Catch-22, Heller, 1955
76. Night, Wiesel, 1955
77. Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin, 1956
78. You’re Stepping on my Cloak and Dagger, Hall, 1957
79. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak, 1957 
80. The Ugly American, Lederer, 1958
81. A Raisin in the Son, Hansberry, 1959
82. The Tin Drum, Grass, 1959
83. Revolutionary Road, Yates, 1961
84. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson, 1962
85. Ship of Fools, Porter, 1962
86. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway, 1964
87. The Stone Angel, Laurence, 1964
88. Stoner, Williams, 1965
89. The Chosen, Potok, 1967
90. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut, 1968
91. The Godfather, Puzo, 1969
92. The Winds of War, Wouk, 1970
93. Deliverance, Dickey, 1970
94. The Killer Angels, Shaara, 1974
95. The Thorn Birds, McCullough, 1977
96. Midnight’s Children, Rushdie, 1980
97. Curious Wine, Forrest, 1983
98. The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood, 1985
99. Regeneration, Barker, 1991
100. 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?