I’m joining the classics club in 2021

And it scares the hell out of me. A few years ago, I already started my own classics project. And I did read some great classics: the novels of Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, The three musketeers… I enjoyed them all, but the last years I’m just picking up other books above classics. Mainly because I think they will be too difficult to read and thus take too long to finish. But I kept enjoying TV adaptions of classics such as War and peace and Les miserables. So now, I want to start reading classics again.

That’s why I joined the classics club where the goal is to make a list of 50 classics and read them in the coming 5 years! You review them on your blog and track your progress on a separate page. I don’t have high hopes in really finishing 50 classics in 5 years. I will try, but as I only read around 35-40 books every year, it’s a great commitment. But I’m not afraid of a challenge. I know that by joining I will have read a lot more books from this list by 31st December 2025 than without this challenge.

My list consists of authors I already enjoyed or think I will enjoy (the Brontë sisters, Dumas, Du Maurier…), of stories I already know because of the TV version (Vanity Fair, Les miserables, War and peace…) and of some older historical fictions works (Richard III, The fifth queen, I Claudius…).

When you take a look at my list, you should keep this in mind:

• No Jane Austen on this list as I already read her books.
• No Ernest Hemingway, as I hated ‘the old man and the sea’.
• Not too much of dystopian fiction as it really isn’t my thing. So no Orwell or Wells, I made the exception for ‘a clockwork orange’ since one of my best friends loved it so much and for ‘the handmaid’s tale’ because everyone seems to love it.
• There are some authors on this list that I’m scared to start reading because of what I heard about their writing. That’s why I only chose one book from them so that I can give up on the author if the writing is not my cup of tea. This is the case with Charles Dickens, G.G. Marquez and Fyodor Dostoeysky.
  

This is my list:

1. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
2. My cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
3. Jamaica’s Inn by Daphne Du Maurier
4. Villette by Charlotte Brontë
5. Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
6. The tenant of Wildfell hall by Anne Brontë
7. Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (reread)
9. War and peace by Leo Tolstoj
10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj
11. Les misérables by Victor Hugo
12. The count of monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
13. The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
14. La reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
15. The Borgias by Alexandre Dumas
16. The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
17. Utopia by Thomas More
18. Howard’s end by E.M. Forster
19. A passage to India by E.M. Forster
20. To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
21. Dracula by Bram Stoker
22. Tess d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
23. Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy
24. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
25. Lady Chatterly’s lover by D.H. Lawrence
26. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
27. The handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood
28. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
30. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
31. And then there were none by Agatha Christie
32. Great expectations by Charles Dickens
33. The color purple by Alice Walker
34. The idiot by Fyodor Dostoeysky
35. North and south by Elizabeth Gaskell
36. The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro
37. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
38. The fifth queen by Ford Madox Ford
39. The woman in white by Wilkie Collins
40. Treasure island by Robert Louis Stevenson
41. The Iliad by Homer
42. The Odyssey by Homer
43. The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
45. The cacher in the rye by J.D. Salinger
46. The trial by Franz Kafka
47. The bell jar by Sylvia Path
48. Richard III by William Shakespeare
49. Love in time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
50. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

What’s your favorite classic?

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