Classics Club

24/1/2014

When I was writing up my bookish goals for 2014, one of them was to read at least one classic that I'd never read before. Shortly after writing that list of goals, I stumbled across The Classics Club. When it comes to classics, I have a tendency to stick to my safety zone and reread the same things over and over again - Persuasion, Jane Eyre, pretty much anything Dickensian. In short, nineteenth century English stuff, because the Victorian era is my jam. This, I have decided, is an excellent opportunity to branch out, and also to revisit some classics that I had to read in high school or university but which I haven't revisited since.

The goal of The Classics Club is to read at least 50 classic books within a five year period and review them all. I'm planning to read 60 in just under five years, so by 1 January 2019. I've tried to include a good mix of stuff, though I couldn't entirely force myself away from my beloved nineteenth century English literature. Still, I've included some stereotypical American high school reading, some things I was forced to read in high school, a decent dose of Australian classics, some "true" classics (in the Greek and Roman sense), and a little smattering of some of my favourites that I haven't re-read in years (and therefore haven't reviewed before).

Without further ado, here's my list (alphabetically by author's surname, of course):

1. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
2. Lysistrata - Aristophanes
3. Emma - Jane Austen
4. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
5. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
6. Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon
7. Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte
8. Shirley - Charlotte Bronte
9. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
10. The Seagull - Anton Chekov
11. For the Term of His Natural Life - Marcus Clarke
12. No Name - Wilkie Collins
13. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
14. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
15. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
16. Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
17. The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
18. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
19. The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
20. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
21. Middlemarch - George Eliot
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
23. Passage to India - E.M. Forster
24. The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
25. My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin
26. North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
27. She - H. Rider Haggard
28. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
29. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
30. The Odyssey - Homer
31. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
32. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
33. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
34. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carre
35. Picnic at Hanging Rock - Joan Lindsay
36. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
37. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
39. 1984 - George Orwell
40. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
41. The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe
42. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
43. Macbeth - William Shakespeare
44. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
45. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
46. Dracula - Bram Stoker
47. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
48. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
49. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
50. The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
51. The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
52. The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
53. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
54. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
55. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
56. The Aeneid - Virgil
57. The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
59. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
60. The Chrysalids - John Wyndham

Have you read any of these? What should I start with??

K xx