My new Classics Club list

Hello readers! It's been a while! A couple of months ago, I posted about finishing the 50 books on my Classics Club list and solicited your suggestions on what to add to list #2. Thanks to everyone who commented. I took some of your suggestions and a few more from an online book club, and I'm back to share my second Classics Club list.

To recap, the Classics Club encourages people to choose a list of classic books to read within a given time frame. The idea is that you add some of the books that you have been meaning to read one day, enough that it is a challenge, but not so many that it feels impossible and you spend all your days pouring over Proust. Well, unless that's your thing. ;) I chose 50 books to read within the next five years. You can use your own interpretation of what a classic is. I tended towards books that are more than 50 years old. I checked a few "read before you die" lists to see what are considered books that have stood the test of time, and also did a bit of research trying to find classics from non-English speaking countries, especially trying for some African and African American works, and made sure to have some Canadian works too. I added some Russian classics too because I just really like Russia.  I also limited myself to a maximum of two books per author. However, I also made sure everything that I added to the list was available either at the Toronto Public Library or through Amazon Kindle.

My full list is below. The aim is to finish this list by August 31, 2023, which to be honest sounds like a crazy futuristic date at this point. LOL. I kicked off the challenge yesterday by starting #15 on the list, The Count of Monte Cristo!

1. U.R. Ananthamurthy - Samskara
2. Isaac Asimov - I, Robot
3. James Baldwin - Go Tell It On The Mountain
4. Pierre Boulle - Bridge On The River Kwai
5. Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
6. Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart Of The Dog
7. Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan Of The Apes
8. Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
9. Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone
10. Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit
11. Charles Dickens - Our Mutual Friend
12. Alfred Doeblin - Berlin Alexanderplatz
13. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes From The Underground
14. Arthur Conan Doyle - The White Company
15. Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
16. Daphne DuMaurier - My Cousin Rachel
17. Frantz Fanon - The Wretched Of The Earth
18. Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
19. F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is The Night
20. Ian Fleming - Casino Royale
21. John Galsworthy - The Forstye Saga
22. Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives And Daughters
23. Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
24. Guenter Grass - The Tin Drum
25. Graham Greene - The Third Man
26. Alex Haley - Roots
27. Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
28. Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf
29. Henry James - The Golden Bowl
30. Margaret Laurence - The Diviners
31. Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook
32. Hugh MacLennan - Two Solitudes
33. Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Foretopman
34. Thomas Mofolo - Chaka the Zulu
35. Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood
36. George Orwell - Burmese Dayss
37. Sir Walter Scott - Rob Roy
38. Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Magician of Lublin
39. Fyodor Sologub - The Petty Demon
40. Ngugi wa Thiong'o - A Grain Of Wheat
41. Leo Tolstoy - The Kreuzer Sonata
42. Anthony Trollope - Phineas Finn
43. Ivan Turgenev - Spring Torrents
44. Jules Verne - 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
45. Jules Verne - Journey To The Centre Of The Earth
46. Evelyn Waugh - Decline And Fall
47. P.G. Wodehouse - Thank You, Jeeves
48. Richard Wright - Native Son
49. Emile Zola - Germinal
50. Emile Zola - Nana

My Classics Club list

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)

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I'm Looking Forward To In 2017

Another Tuesday, another link-up. This week's topic deals with books we're looking forward to in the first half of 2017. I'm not sure if that is specifically looking at new books or just books we're looking forward to reading, so I'll do a little bit of both.

Books anticipated in early 2017:
1. Always and Forever, Lara Jean by Jenny Han: I just love this series so much. The characters are adorable.

2. Warcross by Marie Lu: To be honest, I just found this book as I was looking up books coming out in 2017, but it sounds like a fascinating concept!

3. The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli: I need this!

4. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman: I am new(ish) on the Gaiman train, but this looks fantastic.

5. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden: Woohoo, more Russian themes!

Books I plan to read in 2017 that have already been released:
6. One Night in Winter by Simon Montefiore: This has been on my list for a while and oh, hey, it's another Russian theme.

7. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende: While have long intended to read some Allende, I recently read a book about travels in South America, and the section on Chile made me bunk this modern classic up my list.

8. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: I might as well jump on the bandwagon!

9. Avalanche by Julia Leigh: I've heard this is a gritty, real take on a failed IVF experience, and I'm really interested to read it.

10. Living the Life Unexpected: 12 Weeks To Your Plan B For A Meaningful And Fulfilling Future Without Children by Jody Day: Sounds cheerful, eh? I'm really trying to wrap my head around the hand we've been dealt. I'm not okay with it, and I'm not sure I ever will be, but I'm trying to find a sliver of a silver lining, and hopefully this book will help.

Resolutions, Intentions, and Planning for a New Year

I'm not huge on making new year's resolutions. For much of my life, my resolutions typically involved health and weight-loss... even at those times when I really didn't need to lose weight. Moreover, these resolutions were generally abandoned a few weeks into the year. With this not-so-excellent track record, I've become wary of making resolutions. On the other hand, I am a big fan of goal-setting and looking ahead. This has become a bit more important for me now that I am married and have a house and have realized that I can no longer put things into the category of “I'll do that LATER when I'm grown up/settled/etc.” Life seems to be moving faster and faster as I get older. If I want to learn something or get into a new habit, I really should be doing it now, especially if it's something that will benefit my faith journey, my marriage, or my future children.

This has led me to think more deeply about what I want to achieve this year. I can think of lots of things that I should be changing, but which ones are most important? Instead of making one-off resolutions, I want to think about where I want to be in 2014, and make resolutions to help get me there. One of my university friends has a more comprehensive and far-sighted attitude to looking into the new year. She sets out both goals and intentions. The goals are things that are achievable by her own strength. (N.B. “Achievable” does not imply that they are easy!) Obviously, I know that all things are done through God and His strength, but the general idea is that a goal is something I can do without relying someone or something to be involved. For example, I could make a goal to run a marathon this year. I know I can do this, because I've run a half-marathon before, and if I pushed, could do more. This could be derailed by injury or illness, but otherwise, I could do it (although I have no plans to). An intention is something you want to do, but even if you do everything possible, it still might not happen. For example, you may want to get a new job this year, or to pregnant, or to make new friends. You can do things to help make your intention a reality, but you can't make it happen on your own.

After some thinking and praying, I wrote down a few goals and intentions for the year ahead, and I made a resolutions to do with each of them. I won't tell them all, because some are more personal, but I'll share one goal and one intention.

Goal: To grow in faith this year. I wrote this as a goal, although I suppose it's also an intention because God needs to take part in it. Nevertheless, I know that when my faith walk is not strong, it's usually because I have been lazy in prayer and Bible reading, and I know that the Word says if I draw near to God, He will draw near to me.

Action: Journaling. I used to journal alllllll the time, to pour out all my thoughts into volumes of notebooks, but since getting married, my journal entries have been woefully sparse. Writing in a journal does not make me holy, of course, but I find it helpful to be intentional about writing down what I am learning and keeping track of my prayer requests, etc. I love looking back on old journals and being reminded of what God did in my life during that time period. This year, I have resolved to journal at least once per week.

Intention: To make new friends and strengthen existing friendships. I've written a couple of times about how it's been difficult to make friends. After reading one of my previous posts, a friend suggested I check out the book MWF Seeking BFF, which relates one woman's experiences trying to make friends in a new city. The author also adds a lot of research on friendship, what makes people click, etc. It was an interesting read, and one thing I took out of it is that in this stage of life, making friends takes effort. The author put herself out there and consistently tried to meet with new people and then to follow-up on good matches. The book reminded me that I cannot continue to do almost nothing, and then lament that I haven't made any friends.

Action: Put myself out there more. Ask potential friends out for coffee. Invite people over (even though they might see how messy our house is). Get better at staying in touch with my current friends. We'll see how this goes...

As you all know, another of my resolutions is to read more books about marriage, and try to apply what I've learned. I've picked up the Timothy Keller book and am excited to share about it in the future.

So what about you? Do you have a resolution or goal for this year?