I’m joining The Classics Club at the blog of the same name. I’ve chosen the following books that I’ve determined to be classics (they don’t have any rules regarding what is considered classic) to read by December 31, 2015. I could have gone up to five years, but that seemed like such a long time. I don’t plan on reading these books in any particular order and I don’t plan on only reading these. If I break it down into three years, that would be 20 of these books each year. I think I can do that along with allowing for other books and projects. I will probably have mini-projects each year that may or may not overlap with this one. A few of these books are re-reads because they did not “hit home” with me the first time around and I have heard such raving reviews about them since that I thought I would give them another chance (maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood the first time).
| 1 | Tales of the Jazz Age | Fitzgerald, F. Scott | ||
| 2 | Beowulf | Anonymous | ||
| 3 | The Man Who Was Thursday | G. K. Chesterton | ||
| 4 | Bagombo Snuff Box | Vonnegut, Kurt | ||
| 5 | Tortilla Flat | Steinbeck, John | ||
| 6 | Billy Budd, Sailor | Melville, Herman | ||
| 7 | Go Tell It On The Mountain | Baldwin, James | ||
| 8 | Emma | Austen, Jane | ||
| 9 | Jane Eyre | Bronte, Charlotte | ||
| 10 | Wuthering Heights | Bronte, Emily | ||
| 11 | A Farewell To Arms | Hemingway, Ernest | ||
| 12 | Mansfield Park | Austen, Jane | ||
| 13 | Tender is the Night | Fitzgerald, F. Scott | ||
| 14 | Before Adam | London, Jack | ||
| 15 | Watership Down | Adams, Richard | ||
| 16 | Pride and Prejudice | Austen, Jane | ||
| 17 | The Red Pony | Steinbeck, John | ||
| 18 | The Pearl | Steinbeck, John | ||
| 19 | The Hound of the Baskervilles | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | ||
| 20 | Little Women | Alcott, Louisa May | ||
| 21 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Dumas, Alexandre | ||
| 22 | A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Smith, Betty | ||
| 23 | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Franklin, Benjamin | ||
| 24 | The Encantadas | Melville, Herman | ||
| 25 | Daisy Miller | James, Henry | ||
| 26 | The Call of the Wild | London, Jack | ||
| 27 | The Mill on the Floss | Eliot, George | ||
| 28 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Hurston, Zora Neale | ||
| 29 | Family Happiness | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 30 | The Natural | Malamud, Bernard | ||
| 31 | Moby Dick | Melville, Herman | ||
| 32 | Gone With the Wind | Mitchell, Margaret | ||
| 33 | A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories | O’Connor, Flannery | ||
| 34 | Persuasion | Austen, Jane | ||
| 35 | Wise Blood | O’Connor, Flannery | ||
| 36 | The Old Man and the Sea | Hemingway, Ernest | ||
| 37 | Franny and Zooey | Salinger, J. D. | ||
| 38 | Nine Stories | Salinger, J. D. | ||
| 39 | Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters/Seymore: An Introduction | Salinger, J. D. | ||
| 40 | The Winter of Our Discontent | Steinbeck, John | ||
| 41 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | ||
| 42 | The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde | Stevenson, Robert Louis | ||
| 43 | Jazz | Morrison, Toni | ||
| 44 | The Power and the Glory | Greene, Graham | ||
| 45 | War and Peace | Tolstoy, Leo | ||
| 46 | The Sun Also Rises | Hemingway, Ernest | ||
| 47 | The Outsiders | Hinton, S. E. | ||
| 48 | The Guns of August | Tuchman, Barbara | ||
| 49 | Mother Night | Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt | ||
| 50 | Breakfast Of Champions | Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt | ||
| 51 | Welcome to the Monkeyhouse | Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt | ||
| 52 | The Violent Bear It Away | O’Connor, Flannery | ||
| 53 | Silas Marner | Eliot, George | ||
| 54 | A Mercy | Morrison, Toni | ||
| 55 | Benito Cereno | Melville, Herman | ||
| 56 | Sense and Sensibility | Austen, Jane | ||
| 57 | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Wilde, Oscar | ||
| 58 | Northanger Abbey | Austen, Jane | ||
| 59 | Brideshead Revisited | Waugh, Evelyn | ||
| 60 | The Catcher in the Rye | Salinger, J. D. | ||
Mirror with Clouds 
Great list! I just read Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters/Seymore: An Introduction for the club and it’s one of my favorite so far. So good! -Melissa
Thanks, Melissa! I’ll be reading the Salinger books sooner rather than later.
Admirable list! I counted twenty I’ve read. I thought about joining the Classics Club, but much of my reading life has been Classics-related anyway. 🙂 The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Fountainhead are two of my favorites that I don’t think we’ve discussed before. Enjoy!
Yes, Salinger and Ayn Rand are going to be the ones I read soon. I just watched an old (well, 1980) interview with Rand on YouTube. Very interesting.
For the first time, I’ve thought to check out your CC list. You have both of my favorite Jane Austen books AND my favorite Hemingway here! And my top 2 favorite books of all time: Jane Eyre and The Count of Monte Cristo! This is an exciting list 😀
In case you didn’t notice, some of the list appears to be in alphabetical order and some of it isn’t. That’s because I have basically replaced some of the books on the list as I read something that wasn’t on it originally. I’ll still read the same number – its just the list will look different at the end that it did at the beginning. The books you have mentioned, though, I have no intentions of replacing. But Ayn Rand is going to have to bite the dust here shortly, I think.
I didn’t notice they were out of order until you mentioned it 🙂 Blogger adds numbers if you insert something into a numbered list, so I just put my additions in where they belong — WordPress doesn’t do that?
I have 70 on my list now. This is ridiculous. Right now I think that when I reach 50, I’ll pull off all the ones I didn’t read and be like, “LOOK! I did it! Fifty books!” And then make a new list with the ones I didn’t get to and begin again, perhaps? Or see how many I get read in 5 years, even if it’s more than 50? Dunno. I’m only 7 months in — I’ve got time to plan 🙂
That’s what made me decide to do the Classics Club — the fact that your list can change as you go along, as long as you end up with 50 read in 5 years. Otherwise, no way I would stick to a static list. Of the 12 I’ve read so far, 5 weren’t on the list when I first made it.
WordPress probably does something like that; however, I just didn’t realize it. I was putting my list together in Excel and then copied it to my post. I also looked and looked to find out how to link my “Old Man and The Sea Read A Long” photo to your blog. There is some sort of plug-in to install but I couldn’t get it to work. From everything I read, it sounded like Blogger does this easily.
But I am looking forward to reading “Old Man and the Sea” next week!
Aha! Another reason I won’t be switching to WordPress any time soon, then. But don’t worry about it — that’s why my blog name is on the button too 🙂
It seemed there was an entire forum of people quite surprised that WordPress couldn’t do this.