You can call it a fool’s errand, but I’m joining the classics club. The goal is to read 50 classic books in the next 5 years. Write a review about them and list all these review on this page to track my progress. I’m starting at the 1st of January 2021 and hope to finish the list at 31 December 2025.
I’m not sure if I will finish this list in time. Maybe I’ll read 10 of them and quit the challenge, or I’ll read 20, maybe 30 or even 40 of them. What I know for sure is that I’ll have read more classics thanks to joining the club, than I would on my own.
This is my list. I didn’t make it too hard for myself and am choosing works from authors I’ve loved before or stories I have seen in a TV version. I also have chosen some more classic historical fiction works. But there are still some authors and works on this list that scare the hell out of me.
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- My cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
- Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier
- Villette by Charlotte Brontë
- Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
- The tenant of Wildfell hall by Anne Brontë (read January 2021)
- Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (reread)
- War and peace by Leo Tolstoj
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj
- Les misérables by Victor Hugo
- The count of monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas (read January 2021)
- La reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
- The Borgias by Alexandre Dumas
- The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Utopia by Thomas More
- Howards end by E.M. Forster (read February 2021)
- A passage to India by E.M. Forster
- To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Tess d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy (read June 2021)
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Lady Chatterly’s lover by D.H. Lawrence (read April 2021)
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- The handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood
- Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- And then there were none by Agatha Christie
- Great expectations by Charles Dickens
- The color purple by Alice Walker (read March 2021)
- The idiot by Fyodor Dostoeysky
- North and south by Elizabeth Gaskell
- The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- The fifth queen by Ford Madox Ford
- The woman in white by Wilkie Collins
- Treasure island by Robert Louis Stevenson (read August 2021)
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
- The cacher in the rye by J.D. Salinger
- The trial by Franz Kafka
- The bell jar by Sylvia Plath
- Richard III by William Shakespeare
- Love in time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
