Jillian at A Room of One’s Own had the brilliant idea to create The Classics Club, wherein each member would create a list of 50+ classics (a “classic” could be defined however each member wanted) they wanted to read in the next five years. Below is my list; it consists of 100 books I want to read (and review on my blog) by January 1, 2017. They are all from the list 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which I’m already working to chip away at; I’m hoping my Classics Club list will make it a little easier to break down the list into small chunks! There are 40 books that were written in the 1900s, 50 from the 1800s, and a mere 10 from the 1700s. As I read and review each of these titles, I’ll link to this page as well as the 1001 Books page. You can join the Classics Club here. Enjoy!

1900s

1. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
2. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
4. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
5. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
6. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
7. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
8. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
10. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
11. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
12. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
13. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
14. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
15. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
16. The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
17. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
18. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
19. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier January 31, 2013
20. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
21. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
22. Animal Farm – George Orwell
23. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
24. 1984 – George Orwell
25. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
26. The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
27. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
28. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
29. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
30. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
31. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
32. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
34. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
35. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
36. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
37. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
38. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
39. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
40. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

1800s

1. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells June 16, 2012
2. Dracula – Bram Stoker
3. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H. G. Wells
4. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells April 13, 2012
5. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
6. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
7. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
9. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde September 20, 2012
10. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
12. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
13. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
14. The Brothers Karamzov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
16. Middlemarch – George Eliot
17. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
19. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
20. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
21. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
22. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
23. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
24. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
25. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
26. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
27. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
28. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
29. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
30. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
31. Villette – Charlotte Bronte
32. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
33. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
34. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
35. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
36. Shirley – Charlotte Bronte
37. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
38. Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
39. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
40. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
41. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
42. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allen Poe
43. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
44. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allen Poe
45. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
46. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
47. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
48. The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
49. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
50. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James

1700s

1. Camilla – Fanny Burney
2. Cecilia – Fanny Burney
3. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
4. The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
5. Candide – Voltaire
6. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
7. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
8. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
9. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
10. A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift