My selection list for the Classics Club, a five year challenge to read at least 50 classics.

I use to join and enjoy a lot of book challenges. Nowadays, I find it hard to balance real life with blogging and reading all the books I want, but I couldn’t resist this challenge because I love classics.

I listed 50 books, but I think the selection may change or be added onto over time the selection has changed and been added to over time. When selecting the books, I did use a broad definition of classics as I included a few modern books. I will be used book shopping in a couple of weeks which may alter this selection again. The goal is to read 50 classics, but the selection of the list may change a bit over time due to time, interest, and availability of the books.

I included books that I own, books I want to read/heard a lot of, and books from the 1001 Books Before You Die List. Due to being revised, it’s actually 1294 books. For a spreadsheet to keep track of that lengthy list, go here .

You can follow all my posts relating to the club through my Classics Club tag which includes reviews, memes, etc.

Start Date: June 1, 2012
End Date: June 1, 2017 2018

My Prize: To be determined at a later date. Some sort of food and/or shopping will be involved.

1. Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens
2. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling – 04/06/2012
3. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
4. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce – 25/12/2015
6. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy – 10/06/2012
7. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James – 14/07/2012
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot – 17/07/2012
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
11. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
12. The Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder – 11/11/2014
13. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland – 31/05/2016
14. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett – 28/12/2013
15. The Return of the the Native by Thomas Hardy
16. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson – 02/12/2015
17. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
18. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
19. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen – 05/08/2012
20. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
21. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
22. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – 02/10/2012
23. The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
24. The Complete Poems by T. S. Eliot
25. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
26. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
27. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – 01/08/2012
28. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
29. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett – 27/03/2016
30. The Magus by John Fowles
31. Ulysses by James Joyce
32. On the Road by Jack Kerouac – 30/06/2013
33. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami – 24/08/2012
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau – 12/04/2013
35. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
36. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant – 31/12/12
37. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
38. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
39. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte – 26/07/2012
40. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte – 30/11/2013
41. Lady Susan by Jane Austen – 08/08/2012
42. Love & Freindship and The History of England by Jane Austen – 13/08/2012
43. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
44. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
47. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
48. The Awakening and Other Stories by Kate Chopin
49. Stuart Little by E. B. White – 15/05/2016
50. William-an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton – 22/06/2013

Updates:
June 5, 2016: Removed Nicolas Nickelby for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
May 29th 2016: Removed The Bluest Eye, replaced with Stuart Little.
November 13th, 2014: Removed Atlas Shrugged and replaced with Little House series link.
February 11th, 2012: Added Winesburg, Ohio, Return of the Native, A Little Princess, The Bluest Eye, Death in Venice to take out a couple of newer classics.
August 13th, 2012: Removed Home by Marilynne Robinson and put in Jane Austen’s juvenilia Love & Freidnship and The History of England.
August 7th, 2012: Added Mansfield Park and new link to Classics Club blog. I took out Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams because I’ve read it and replaced it with Lady Susan which I also think I read before but I’ll do a proper reciew for it. Also, I added the dates of when I completed each book so that this update list doesn’t get too long over the course of five years.
August 4th, 2012: Added Little Women.
July 28, 2012: Added link to Agnes Grey.
July 14, 2012: Added link to The Portrait of a Lady.
June 21, 2012: Added link to Mill on the Floss.
June 12, 2012: Added link to Tess. I’ve also started an additional list in the event I finish those above or I don’t end up reading some of the others so they can be replaced with those in added list.
June 5th, 2012: Added link to The Jungle Book, removed Misery by Stephen King because it was over 50.
June 4th, 2012: Realized I put in Inheritance of Loss twice! Took one out and added Agnes Grey.
June 3rd, 2012: Removed William Shakespeare’s sonnets because I remembered I had read them all. Added Hamilton’s William-an Englishman because I own it even though I’d never heard of it when and since I bought it. Now the list numbers have changed and will continue to.
June 1st, 2012.