So…contrary to my past practices, I am starting to embrace epic challenges. Before this enthusiasm leaves me, I’ve decided to finally join The Classics Club and commit to reading 50 classics within five years.
It’s a pretty reasonable goal (ten classics a year), since I mostly read classics anyway. But I’m making it more difficult by including some chunksters and books I’ve been putting off for years and some that fall under both (*cough* War and Peace). I also threw in some rereads that I keep meaning to return to. The list also came out to 52 instead of 50 (sigh), but I’m only committing to 50.
- East of Eden – John Steinbeck
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Resurrection – Leo Tolstoy
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
- The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank – 4/3/19
- The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
- 1984 – George Orwell – 4/25/19
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – 2/8/20
- True Grit – Charles Portis
- The Red and the Black – Stendhal
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – 3/5/22
- The Analects – Confucius
- Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
- Silence – Shusaku Endo – 3/22/20
- The Painted Veil – W. Somerset Maugham – 2/29/20
- Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Emily of New Moon – Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Jayber Crow – Wendell Berry
- The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- Le Morte d’Arthur – Thomas Malory
- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Victor Hugo
- The Last Days of Pompeii – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
- Common Sense – Thomas Paine
- The Bride of Lammermoor – Walter Scott
- Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
- Paradise Lost – John Milton
- The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton
- For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
- The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
- The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
- To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
- Germinal – Emile Zola
- Watership Down – Richard Adams
- Dracula – Bram Stoker (reread)
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (reread)
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (reread)
- The Secret Garden – Frances Burnett (reread)
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (reread)
- Under Western Eyes – Joseph Conrad (reread)
- The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reread) & Notebooks for The Idiot
- Silas Marner – George Eliot (reread)
- Moby-Dick – Herman Melville (reread)
- The Bounty Trilogy – James Hall and Charles Nordoff (reread)
- The Heir of Redclyffe – Charlotte Yonge (reread)
- The Lord of the Rings (reread)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (bonus, added 12/12/19)
Classics Considered 
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