About five years ago, I came across a blog called the Classics Club, and was intrigued. The premise was that you make a list of 50 classic books that you want to read in the next 5 years, and then review the books on their blogs. You don't need to do 50. You could choose 20 books or whatever works for you, but I stuck with 50 because it was manageable while still a challenge. I read a lot of books, about 80-90 in a year, so choosing to do a minimum of 10 classics still left me a lot of room for the biographies, history books, YA, and modern fiction that I also enjoy. I don't like to write reviews, so I decided to choose 50 as a personal challenge, and to finish them by June 2018.
If you've been around here a while, you know that these past five years were extremely difficult. We thought we would be growing our family, but instead we went down into the abyss of infertility treatments, and on top of that, there was a lot of family drama, and I also went back to school, graduated, and started working in a new field. I can safely say that five years ago, I never expected June of 2018 to look the way it does. But somehow, it makes me happy that I finished my 50 books. That was the one goal that I could keep working towards, when everything else was falling to pieces.
Overall, participating in this challenge has been a good experience. I finally read War and Peace and Les Miserables. I discovered that I enjoy Anthony Trollope. I also found that I don't particularly enjoy Faulkner or Virginia Woolf, but at least I tried! :)
I'll post my full list below, but first question for you readers: What books should I add to my second Classics Club list? I've given myself the summer off, but hope to start a new list in September, with the goal to finish by the end of August, 2023. I'd like to broaden my horizons a bit and read classics from non-European classics, since I've read a lot of the English and Russian canon. Give me your best recommendations of neglected classics!
The full list, including when I finished it.
1. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (January 2014)
2. Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (December 2014)
3. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (July 2013)
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (December 2016)
5. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (March 2014)
6. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (December 2014)
7. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (September 2014)
8. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (June 2017)
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (August 2017)
10. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (October 2015)
11. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (July 2013)
12. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (December 2013)
13. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (March 2018)
14. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (July 2014)
15. E.M. Forster, Howards End (March 2017)
16. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (June 2017)
17. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (October 2016)
18. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (April 2014)
19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (July 2017)
20. Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (March 2015)
21. H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quartermain (April 2016)
22. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (February 2018)
23. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (September 2015)
24. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (July 2016)
25. Homer, The Odyssey (February 2018)
26. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (March 2016)
27. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (October 2013)
28. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (May 2018)
29. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (December 2017)
30. James Joyce, Ulysses (April 2018)
31. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (May 2016)
32. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons (July 2014)
33. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Times (January 2014)
34. Nikolai Leskov, The Enchanted Wanderer (November 2017)
35. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (October 2014)
36. Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean September 2013)
37. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (January 2015)
38. Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (April 2014)
39. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (September 2017)
40. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (September 2014)
41. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (August 2016)
42. Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (January 2015)
43. Ivan Turgenev, King Lear of the Steppes (April 2015)
44. Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve (March 2015)
45. H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (June 2013)
46. Rebecca West, The Thinking Reed (May 2016)
47. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (July 2013)
48. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (December 2015)
49. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (February 2017)
50. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (April 2015)
I prefer European classics and have few American classics I actually like to be honest so I'm not a good recommender of non-europeans classics.
ReplyDeleteA few different ones I've enjoyed from my list so far (still European sorry) are The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (medieval adventure story... think Robin Hood or Ivanhoe), The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (an action adventure story that reminds me of Jules Verne or Tarzan), Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (a sci-fi adventure/romance). I love most all of Dickens novels but especially Nicholas NIckelby, Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit. You should try some Wilkie Collins also. Moonstone is his best but I also liked No Name and Armadale. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is great as well... it's a mystery/suspense novel that Alfred Hitchcock adapted into a film as well. If you haven't read any Gaskell besides the ones on hour list you should definitely read Wives and Daughters and North and South. And I think it's good to read at least one Jules Verne. They're sometimes kind of tedious to get through but Around the World in 80 Days is the easiest in my opinion. The Bridge on the River Kwai and All Quiet on the Western Front are good war classics.
As far as American classics I did like All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and The Complete Stories of Flannery O Conner. I'm sure there's others I'm not thinking of and I'm assuming you've read To Kill a Mockingbird, Little Women and Anne of Green Gables but if you haven't do!
And congratulations for finishing! I'm getting close to finishing my list (I was overly ambitious and made a list of 100) and I can't wait to make a second list.
Thanks! Great suggestions! I will add some of those to the list. I am a big Dickens fan and am hoping to get through all of his books in my lifetime, so I will probably add a few onto my next list. I loved North and South. It's a favourite of mine, and I adored the BBC miniseries. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind doing a re-read one of these days... :)
Deletegood ideas.. great information..
ReplyDelete