I've been debating joining the Classics Club for a while. I love the idea of it and definitely want to add more classics to my reading, but I tend to react negatively to pressure and having to read certain books in a specific time frame. With that in mind, I've chosen the most generous time frame (5 years) and restricted myself to 72 books. I wanted to make it 70, as I like a nice round number, but I couldn't think of two to drop! I'm not going to beat myself up about this or think of the time frame, I'm just going to use it as a spur to read (or reread) these classics as soon as possible.
Without further ado, my list:
(Titles in bold will be rereads)
1. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
2. A Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
3. Emma - Jane Austen
4. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
5. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
6. Persuasion - Jane Austen
7. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
8. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
9. Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie
10. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
13. Villette - Charlotte Bronte
14. The Good Earth - Pearl Buck
15. A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett
16. O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
17. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
18. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
19. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
20. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
21. Hard Times - Charles Dickens
22. Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
23. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
24. Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
25. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
27. Rebecca - Daphe Du Maurier
28. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
29. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
30. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
32. Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert
33. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
34. King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard
35. Tess of D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
36. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
37. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
38. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
39. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
40. Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood
41. Turn of the Screw - Henry James
42. The Portrait of A Lady - Henry James
43. Daisy Miller - Henry James
44. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
45. Kim - Rudyard Kipling
46. The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham
47. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
48. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
49. The Bell - Iris Murdoch
50. 1984 - George Orwell
51. Burmese Days - George Orwell
52. Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
53. Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
54. Titus Alone - Mervyn Peake
55. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
56. Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan
57. Anthony and Cleopatra - William Shakespeare
58. Othello - William Shakespeare
59. The Tempest - William Shakespeare
60. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
61. Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
62. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
63. Dracula - Bram Stoker
64. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkein
65. The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkein
66. The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkein
67. The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkein
68. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
69. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
70. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
71. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
72. Orlando - Virgina Woolf
My list isn't attempting to be representative of different time frames, styles or countries, it's just a list of books that appeal to me. There is a notable absence of George Eliot books and only one Thomas Hardy, because I haven't enjoyed these authors in the past. Hemingway and I don't get along.
When putting this list together, I suprised myself with how many rereads I included. I tend not to reread, but as I looked at my classics shelf I starting thinking "ooh, I want to read that one again" or "I wonder if that improves on a rereading". I shall be rereading both old favourites (Dracula, 1984) and books that I read as a teenager that didn't set my world on fire (Crime and Punishment). I want to find out if experience and a bit more maturity will help. Some classics I've read recently I won't be rereading, especially Anna Karenina. I loved that book, but will probably wait more than five years before picking it up again.
I'm anticipating that Moby Dick and Les Miserables will take quite some time and effort to read, so I've tried to balance classics like these with shorter and more modern ones so the project doesn't feel like a slog.
Have you read any of the books on my list I've not read before? Am I in for a treat?
The new classics club website can be found
here