The classics club

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.

  1. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  2. My cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
  3. Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier (read December 2021)
  4. Villette by Charlotte Brontë (read March 2022)
  5. Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
  6. The tenant of Wildfell hall by Anne Brontë (read January 2021)
  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 (read December – January 2021-2022)
  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 (read January 2021)
  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. Howards end by E.M. Forster (read February 2021)
  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 (read June 2021)
  24. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (read September 2021)
  25. Lady Chatterly’s lover by D.H. Lawrence (read April 2021)
  26. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  27. The handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood
  28. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (DNF, March 2022)
  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 (read March 2021)
  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 (read August 2021)
  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 (read October 2021)
  46. The trial by Franz Kafka (read February 2022)
  47. The bell jar by Sylvia Plath
  48. Richard III by William Shakespeare
  49. Love in time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (read November 2021)
  50. East of Eden by John Steinbeck