In my never-ending search for new things to write about, I stumbled upon The Classics Club by way of Carissa’s post at Musings of an Introvert. I love classic literature (not really a surprise to most of you — if someone doesn’t like at least some classic literature they probably shouldn’t major in English), so why not come up with a reading list and blog about each title? That will give me topics for 10 of Mondays blog posts for the next five years.
The challenge for those who join The Classics Club is to make a list of at least 50 books and read through it in no more than 5 years. I thought 10 books a year would be thoroughly doable (to put this in perspective, I’ve read 45 books so far this year), and so I posted my list and I’m signing up today. Some of them are re-reads, but most of the ones on the list are new to me. The titles on the list may change as I read, but here are the one I’m starting out with (*indicates a re-read):
- Adams, Richard: Watership Down*
- Anonymous: The Arabian Nights
- Austen, Jane: Lady Susan
- Beagle, Peter S: The Last Unicorn
- Bradbury, Ray: The Martian Chronicles
- Bronte, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- Bronte, Charlotte: Villette
- Burke, Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
- Burnett, Frances Hodgson: A Little Princess*
- Burnett, Frances Hodgson: The Secret Garden*
- Burney, Frances: Evelina*
- Burney, Frances: The Wanderer
- Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes*
- Cooper, James Fenimore: The Red Rover*
- Cooper, James Fenimore: The Water-Witch
- Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
- Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist
- Dickens, Charles: The Mystery of Edwin Drood
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov
- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Hounds of the Baskervilles
- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Sign of Four
- Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
- Eliot, George: Adam Bede
- Eliot, George: Middlemarch
- Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South*
- Gaskell, Elizabeth: Wives and Daughters
- Hardy, Thomas: Far From the Madding Crowd
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The House of the Seven Gables
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
- Homer: The Iliad
- Homer: The Odyssey
- Keats, John: Poems
- Leroux, Gaston: The Phantom of Opera
- Malory, Sir Thomas: Le Morte d’Arthur
- Montgomery, L.M.: Emily of New Moon
- Poe, Edgar Allen: Collected Stories and Poems
- Radcliffe, Ann: The Mysteries of Udolpho
- Rousseau, Jean-Jaques: Emile
- Scott, Sir Walter: Waverly
- Shakespeare, William: Henry IV, part 1
- Shakespeare, William: Henry IV, part 2
- Shakespeare, William: Measure for Measure
- Shakespeare, William: Othello
- Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
- Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Black Arrow*
- Swift, Jonathon: Gulliver’s Travels
- Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
- Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer*
- Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man
Like An Anchor 