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
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
- The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
- Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
- The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
- We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
- All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
- The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
- Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
- The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
- The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
- Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier January 31, 2013
- The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
- The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- 1984 – George Orwell
- I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
- The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
- The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
1800s
- The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells June 16, 2012
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- The Island of Dr. Moreau – H. G. Wells
- The Time Machine – H. G. Wells April 13, 2012
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde September 20, 2012
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
- The Brothers Karamzov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
- The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
- Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Walden – Henry David Thoreau
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- Villette – Charlotte Bronte
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
- The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Shirley – Charlotte Bronte
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
- Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allen Poe
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allen Poe
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
- Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
- The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
- The Awakening – Kate Chopin
- The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
1700s
- Camilla – Fanny Burney
- Cecilia – Fanny Burney
- The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
- The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
- Candide – Voltaire
- Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
- A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
- Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
- Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
- A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
AWESOME list, Bridget! I’m so glad you’ve joined. I confess I’m most excited by your 19th century choices. 🙂 But Clarissa and The Mysteries of Udolpho also intrigue me, as well as a great many from your 20th century list! I love that people are doing this, because it lets me see what they pick that I have yet to encounter. I’m thinking I’ll learn a lot from this club. We by Zamyatin? I’ve never heard of the title or the author. So I look forward to your thoughts when you reach that title!
Very best wishes to you!
I’ve gotten We recommended before and just realized it was on The List, so I figured I’d put it on. I have no idea at all what it’s about, and I’ve also never heard of the author, but I’m looking forward to reading it! I’m also looking forward to reading The Mysteries of Udolpho because of Catherine Morland’s interest in Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey 🙂
Yep — I read Northanger Abbey right after it last year. I’ve got Radcliffe’s The Italian on my list. It’s supposedly REALLY good. 😀
I finally got round to reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair last year and just loved it. Thank goodness I had read the book before I saw the recent film version.
Love your blog!
Agnes x