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 
wow challenging list… instead of reading no. thirty, you could listen to lucia di lammermoor: the sextet and the mad scene; i wore out a record of that when i was younger with Roberta Peters singing the lead role… she's not that well remembered now, but i thought she had a truly spectacular voice…
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Yay! You're doing it! My only advice would have been don't go over 50 but you've stayed close, so you're alright. I started with 170 and finished about 70 on my first list, my eyes being bigger than my stomach, so to speak. ;-)Glad to see some Wendel Berry! Le Morte d'Arthur I'd love to read again … it was sort of bizarre. Paradise Lost is awesome and I really loved To The Lighthouse. Have fun with your list!! 🙂
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Actually it's the opera that made me want to read it! 🙂 I saw the Anna Netrebko version on DVD and was really taken by the story.
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Thanks Cleo! 😀 I think I'll genuinely like Berry…as for Le Morte, the only reason I want to read it is because it was one of T. E. Lawrence's favorites. Overall though I'm happy that I'm going outside the comfort zone with some of these.
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Lots of good ones in there! I hope you LOVE Berry. And cool to see \”The Outsiders\”!
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Oh, and with the Lord of the Rings, it's like you're reading 54 books. :p
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What a great list, Marian! I should add Steinbeck to my list. I read a few years ago but I need to re-read as I can't really remember much at all. I had a sort of reading renaissance after I turned 19 & I'd like to revisit all those classics I read then.
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Yeah… I should've thought through that one and split it into 3. XD
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Yes, half my \”rereads\” listed here I haven't read in a decade, perhaps longer. I'm tentatively excited to see if my opinion has changed about them. I would be sad if I didn't love Jane Eyre anymore though, as that was one of the first classics I fell in love with. Hopefully that won't happen!
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Well, I'm doing 52 books because of Gulag Archipelago, so you're in good company. 🙂
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Excellent list! I'm on my second go-round with the CC now, and I learned with my first one that I liked to keep adding books to my list as I went along, so when I finished 50 books, I just took the extras that were on my list, added some more, and started in on my second 50. That's how it worked for me, anyway.I see lots of favorites of mine here! Jane Eyre and The Count of Monte Cristo are my top 2 favorites novels, and The Outsiders is in my top 10 as well.Have fun!
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That's a great idea! I can already think of one or two I wish I had added, haha…
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Unrelated to this, but I thought you might find it interesting…I just spotted a video on Shenzhen, China's \”dystopian city\”. Bloomberg is doing a series on China's tech future. It's…exhilarating and deeply alarming at the same time to see such technological power….but used for control.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydPqKhgh9Mg
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Gotta love that optimistic ending… XD Phone payments aren't so radical (compared to credit cards), but the social credit system is really disturbing. It's sad, but I can see something like that being implemented here in the U.S., maybe not soon but in a couple of decades. Unless (in the unlikely scenario) we come together as a society and agree we don't want to live like that.
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China seems far more collectivist — group-minded, I mean — than the United States. Our problem seems to be fractiousness, not over-unity, but it's not hard to imagine someone like Google or facebook advancing that kind of system to stop 'trolls'. I was amazed by how sophisticated the robots were in that factory. The last time I saw a manufacturing robot was in an auto factory, and it was a model T compared to those thing!
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Yeah, that is definitely impressive (and also how young the engineers seem)!
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Truly — they were practically kids. (Have you read 'Player Piano'? It's a Vonnegut story about what happens when automation is so successful that the only people who have jobs are the machine techs…)
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Not yet, but I like that sound of that (for a book :D).
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Looks like a great list! Have fun. #5 and #24 are two of my favorites.
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Rereads are fun so kudos for including those. After reading War and Peace a few years ago, I've been hesitant to read Anna Karenina but I've heard many say it's am easier read than War and Peace. My favorite Dickens to date is David Copperfield followed by Little Dorrit. I still have several to read but glad to see Copperfield is on your list.
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Yeah, originally I wasn't going to include Anna Karenina, but a fellow blogger friend really liked it, so I thought I'd give it a try. 🙂 David Copperfield is one where I've seen a couple of film adaptations, and each time I think, \”I should read this.\”Thanks for stopping by!
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Thanks! 🙂 I have high hopes for The Moonstone (I really liked The Woman in White).
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I some how missed this! Just wanted to wish you luck with your list, Marian! I SPY TESTAMENT OF YOUTH!!!! YES ❤ We share a couple others: Hunchback & Germinal. I also want to read Wendell Berry, but I don't own any & I am making myself read books I own right now. 🙂 East of Eden is a favorite of mine. Good for you on the rereads! Those are so fun. x
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Thanks Jillian!! I’m hoping to make a dent in this list this year. 😀
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Hi Marian! I just joined The Classics Club. You have a great list! Here are books on your list I loved: East of Eden, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Count of Monte Cristo, Jayber Crow (though Hannah Coulter is my favorite Wendell Berry), Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden,
I enjoyed (but not as much as I LOVED the above): Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Scarlet Letter, The Diary of a Young Girl, Emily of New Moon, Brideshead Revisited, and Huck Finn
I will link my list if interested. Happy reading and good luck!
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Hey Elena, thanks for stopping by! 🙂 I’m so glad to hear you enjoyed those novels—I’ve heard so many good things about those first three!
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Brilliant. I have read 26 of the books on your list.
As I just mentioned on your TTT list, I am a huge classics fan and my name is Marianne. Glad to have stumbled across your blog that way.
And here is my classics club list
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26, that’s great! Thanks for stopping by 🙂
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No problem, Marian, I loved the list. And thanks for revisiting
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