Friday, March 16, 2012

The Classics Club


Jill at A Room of One's Own has created The Classics Club. This fits in perfectly with my intention to read more Classics, especially ones already on my shelves.

I might read more than what is listed below, but I don't want to over commit (I tend to do that). With that in mind, I plan to read 50 Classics in the next 5 years. That means I should have this reading list completed in March 2017. I have put a few rereads on the list, but didn't want to include too many. All of the rereads are books that I read a long time ago. My reading of David Copperfield goes back the furthest -- I read it when I was 8 years old; and, no, I won't tell you how old I am now!

I honestly can't tell you which title I most look forward to reading. It would probably be a tie between: Don Quixote, the Trollope titles, and Ethan Frome. These are books I've wanted to read for the longest time. But, then there is the The Arabian Nights ... and Beowulf ... the Forster books .... See what I mean?

I will probably gift myself a lovely edition of a wonderful book when I'm finished reading this list, but I have 5 years to decide and change my mind multiple times.

Without further ado ... THE LIST:

  1. Alcott, Louisa May - Little Women (reread)
  2. Arabian Nights, The (trans. Muhsin Mahdi)
  3. Ariosto, Ludovico - Orlando Furioso
  4. Austen, Jane - Sense and Sensibility
  5. Barnes, Julian - Flaubert's Parrott
  6. Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney)
  7. Bradley, Marion Zimmer - The Mists of Avalon (reread)
  8. Bronte, Anne - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
  9. Bulgakov, Mikhail - The Master and Margarita (reread)
  10. Burnett, Frances Hodgson - The Secret Garden
  11. Campbell, Joseph - The Hero with a Thousand Faces (reread)
  12. de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
  13. Cheever, John - Oh What a Paradise It Seems
  14. Colette - Cheri
  15. Collins, Wilkie - The Haunted Hotel
  16. Collins, Wilkie - Miss or Mrs?
  17. Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations
  18. Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield (reread)
  19. Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
  20. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky)
  21. Durrell, Lawrence - Justine (Alexandria Quartet)
  22. Durrell, Lawrence - Balthazar (Alexandria Quartet)
  23. Durrell, Lawrence - Mountolive (Alexandria Quartet)
  24. Durrell, Lawrence - Clea (Alexandria Quartet)
  25. Forster, E.M. - Howard's End
  26. Forster, E.M. - The Longest Journey
  27. Forster, E.M. - A Passage to India (reread)
  28. Forster, E.M. - Where Angels Fear to Tread (reread)
  29. Gaskell, Elizabeth - Cranford
  30. Gaskell, Elizabeth - North and South
  31. Hardy, Thomas - The Mayor of Casterbridge
  32. Homer - The Odyssey (reread)
  33. Hugo, Victor - Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
  34. Mitchell, Margaret - Gone With the Wind
  35. Polidori, John - The Vampyre
  36. Radcliffe, Anne - The Mysteries of Udolpho
  37. Spenser, Edmund - The Faeire Queene
  38. Stendhal - The Red and the Black
  39. Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
  40. Thackeray, William Makepeace - Vanity Fair
  41. Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky) (reread)
  42. Trollope, Anthony - Barchester Towers
  43. Trollope, Anthony - The Warden
  44. Twain, Mark - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
  45. Verne, Jules - Journey to the Centre of the Earth
  46. Virgil - The Aeneid (reread)
  47. Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
  48. Wharton, Edith - Ethan Frome
  49. Woolff, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway
  50. Woolff, Virginia - A Room of One's Own (reread)
I'm currently reading Clarissa by Samuel Richardson as part of a year long group read with JoAnn and others.

4 comments:

  1. Great list! I added the same Trollope titles to mine. Somehow I've entirely missed out on this benchmark Victorian novelist so far, so I'm really looking forward to reading him.

    You read David Copperfield as an eight-year-old?! Wow! I struggled to get through that door stopper as a twenty-eight-year-old. :)

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  2. The Secret Garden! Gone With the Wind! The Mysteries of Udolpho!! Sense & Sensibility!!

    I'm excited by many of the titles on your list. :)

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  3. Diana: Yay for finally reading Trollope! I'm not sure how I've missed reading him so far either. Well, we will take care of that little oversight, won't we? :o)

    Jillian: I KNOW!! I'm practically bouncing in my seat just thinking about reading all of these wonderful titles!

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  4. You have great books on here!

    And I can't believe you read David Copperfield as a kid! I would have been so intimidated by it. :)

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