Jillian over at A Room of One’s Own started this awesome online book club of sorts called the The Classics Club. It’s a challenge to read and blog about the classics!
The rules are simple:
- Make a list of at least 50 literary works to finish in up to 5 years. These can include fiction, non-fiction, plays, short stories, essays, etc.
- Set a deadline to complete your reading list.
- Blog about each book after you’re finished with it.
- Choose a prize to reward yourself with at the end.
Super awesome challenge for a bookworm such as myself! So I’ve put together a list of classics. Some are re-reads like some favorites from childhood (Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess…) some I listened to as audiobooks but never actually read in print (Jane Eyre, Persuasion…) and a few authors are a bit daunting but I’m determined to at least try (Dostoyevsky, Gibbon, Tolstoy…).
50 Classics
(alphabetical by author)
- Little Women//Louisa May Alcott
- Old Fashioned Girl//Louisa May Alcott
- Pride & Prejudice//Jane Austen
- Persuasion//Jane Austen
- Northanger Abbey//Jane Austen
- Go Tell it On the Mountain//James Baldwin
- Jane Eyre//Charlotte Bronte
- The Pilgrim’s Progress//John Bunyan
- A Little Princess Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Mildred Pierce//James A. Cain
- Don Quixote//Miguel de Cervantes
- The Count of Monte Cristo//Alexandre Dumas
- Little Dorrit//Charles Dickens
- The Old Curiosity Shop//Charles Dickens
- The Brothers Karamazov//Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Crime and Punishment//Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Narrative of Fredrick Douglas
- An American Tragedy//Theodore Dreiser
- Invisible Man//Ralph Ellison
- Silas Marner//George Elliot
- As I Lay Dying//William Faulkner
- The Great Gatsby//F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
- Cranford//Elizabeth Gaskell
- North & South//Elizabeth Gaskell
- The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire//Edward Gibbon
- The Wind in the Willows//Kenneth Graham
- Tess of D’Urbervilles//Thomas Hardy
- For Whom the Bell Tolls//Ernest Hemingway
- Les Miserables//Victor Hugo
- Portrait of a Lady//Henry James
- To Kill a Mockingbird//Harper Lee
- The Scarlet Letter//Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Moby Dick//Herman Melville
- Gone With the Wind//Margaret Mitchell
- Anne of Green Gables//Lucy Maud Montgomery
- The Scarlet Pimpernel//Baroness Orczy
- Pygmalion//George Bernard Shaw
- The Grapes of Wrath//John Steinbeck
- Of Mice and Men//John Steinbeck
- Anna Karenina//Leo Tolstoy
- The Warden//Anthony Trollope
- Around the World in 80 Days//Jules Verne
- The Color Purple//Alice Walker
- Ben Hur//Lew Wallace
- The Age of Innocence//Edith Wharton
- The Importance of Being Ernest//Oscar Wilde
- Little House on the Prairie Laura Ingalls Wilder
- A Streetcar Named Desire//Tennessee Williams
- Mrs. Dalloway//Virginia Woolf
My deadline should be exactly 5 years from today, July 3, 2017 but I’m going to change it to my 25th birthday in a few years (well under the 5 year mark!). I want to finish all these books by the time I’m 25!! Right now, I’m just hoping to make it through Ben Hur. I was required to read it in 8th grade and was BORED OUT OF MY MIND! Now I’m thinking, “Elyssa, you’re an adult now, you should be able to get through it with less pain and perhaps even enjoy it!”
Anyone else have a reading challenge they’re working on? If not, consider this one! It should prove to be lots of fun!!
Happy Reading!!
The Classics Club is hosting a Classics Spin! Quite an interesting game really :) I am to make a list of 20 books from the remaining books on my CC list. On February 18, a number will be randomly chosen and I have until April 1st to finish the book with that corresponding number! As an added twist, I can organize my Spin List into different categories. For example:
unscripted 