Jillian at A Room of One's Own recently came up with the bright idea of a Classics Club to "link together the bloggers who blog classics voraciously". She recommends listing a minimum of 50 classic books that you plan to read within five years. I've chosen 125 classic works, mostly from the Western canon, and including poetry, plays and novellas. My list starts with all the novels in Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind. (I'd originally listed "read all the books in WEM" as a goal in my 101 in 1001 list, but then realized that with roughly 150 titles in the book, that might be impracticable if I wished to read anything else.) With the other titles in my classics list, I've tried to go more with books I've wanted to read (or reread) for a while, rather than books I know I should read. However, the list is subject to change at any time.
I'm setting my completion-goal date as March 12, 2016. However, this too is subject to change if I find that that ugly beast Real Life is keeping me from reading as much as I would like.
I guess I'll "reward" myself with a nerdy t-shirt from CafePress when I reach 63 books and maybe the same when I reach the end of the list.
Rereads are in red.
The Well-Educated Mind Novel List
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (I know it so well I may not reread it, though I love it, but replace it with The Holy War.)
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I'm in no danger of not rereading this!)
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I'm in no danger of not rereading this – I reread it at least once a year!)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Stranger by Albert Camus
1984 by George Orwell
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Sieze the Day by Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
White Noise by Don Delillo
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Other Well-Educated Mind Titles
Grace Abounding by John Bunyan
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Richard III by William Shakespeare
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Essays by Michael de Montaigne
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
Up from Slavery by Booker. T. Washington
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey (more for my very big and devastating love for Carrington than for Queen Vicky or even “that disgusting old man”.)
The Sort-of-Alphabetical List
The Holy Bible – King James Version (What do you mean the alphabet doesn't start with 't' or 'h' or 'b'? I was taught you should never put any book on top of the Bible – in the physical sense.)
Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid's Tale
Alcott, Louisa May – Hospital Sketches
Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy
Bronte, Charlotte – Shirley
Bronte, Charlotte – Villette
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett – Aurora Leigh (have to look up if it's actually long enough to qualify under books)
Burnett, Frances Hodgson – The Secret Garden
Burney, Fanny - Evelina
Cædmon - (His hymn/creation account)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens, Charles – Little Dorrit
Dickens, Charles – Nicholas Nickleby
Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles – The Old Curiosity Shop
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan – The Hound of the Baskervilles
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Eliot, George – Daniel Deronda
Eliot, George – Silas Marner
Eliot, George – Romola
Eliot, George – Adam Bede
Eliot, George – Felix Holt, the Radical
Eliot, T.S. - The Wasteland
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays (first and second series)
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Forster, E.M. - A Room with a View
Fuller, Margaret - Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Gaskell, Elizabeth – Mary Barton
Gaskell, Elizabeth – Life of Charlotte Bronte
Gaskell, Elizabeth – Ruth
Gaskell, Elizabeth – North and South
Gaskell, Elizabeth – Sylvia's Lovers
Gilbert and Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic (yes, criticism, but pretty classic criticism that I keep meaning to finish.)
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Hardy, Thomas – The Mayor of Casterbridge
Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ishiguro, Kazuo – The Remains of the Day
Johnson Samuel - Rasselas
Lewis, C.S. - The Chronicles of Narnia
Lewis, C.S. - Mere Christianity
Milton, John - Comus
Milton, John - Areopagitica
Milton, John - Paradise Regained
Mitchel, Margaret – Gone with the Wind
Montgomery, Lucy Maud - Anne of Green Gables Series (reread eight novels and complete one book of short stories)
O'Connor, Flannery – Wise Blood
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pepys, Samuel – Diary
Pope, Alexander - The Rape of the Lock
Pizan, Christine de - The Book of the City of Ladies
Radcliffe, Anne – The Mysteries of Udolpho
Richardson, Samuel - Clarissa
Richardson, Samuel - Sir Charles Grandison or Pamela
Scott, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe
Shakespeare, William – King Lear
Shakespeare, William - Othello
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – Henry V
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Spenser, Edmund - The Faerie Queene
Stoker, Bram – Dracula
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Virgil – The Aeneid
Wallace, Lew – Ben Hur
Waugh, Evelyn – Brideshead Revisited
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Grey
Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest
Woolf, Virginia – Orlando
Woolf, Virginia – Flush
Woolf, Virginia – A Room of One's Own
Novellas and Poetry
In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot (novella)
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
And a dreadful prognostication on the best laid plans of those who may, or may not, be handsome, clever and rich:
"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were--very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding."
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