The Classics Club is one of the longest running book clubs in the blogging community. The central goal of the club is simple: to inspire bloggers to read and write about classic books. The goal is to hand select at least 50 classics and read and blog about each book within a five year span. The club has a variety of games, member updates, and link-ups for bloggers to participate in.
I have come to love classic literature during my undergraduate studies but have honestly not read all that many, having missed the opportunity to read many popular ones during my high school years. I’ve wanted for a long time to read more classics, and so this club is a great way to get me to organize my goal and motivate me to actually doing it.
Completion Deadline
I am going to be generous and select the longest possible completion date, which is five years. My completion date will be on or before July 30, 2024.
My List
1. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. The Stranger by Albert Camus
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison
6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
7. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
10. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
11. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
12. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
13. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
14. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
15. Dracula by Bram Stoker
16. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
17. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
18. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
19. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
20. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
21. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
22. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
23. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
24. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
25. The Trial by Franz Kafka
26. Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
27. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
28. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
29. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
30. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
31. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
32. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
33. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
34. Sula by Toni Morrison
35. The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
36. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
37. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
38. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
40. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
41. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
42. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
43. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
44. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
45. The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe
46. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
47. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
48. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
49. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
50. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (reread)
About My Selections
I tried not to set any rules for myself though I did prioritize books that I own copies of. I have a few repeating authors and often it was because I simply owned multiple books by the same author. I had a good mix of authors that I had read one of their other books in the past and ones that are completely new to me. A majority of the list consists of books that I feel comfortable reading, either because they are in my genre preferences or because they are of average book length.
I did however decide to really challenge myself and tackle two lengthy books that has been on my TBR forever, but I had been intimidated by the page count: Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo. The other book that is a personal challenge to myself is A Clockwork Orange, which I already know will take time to read because of the invented language. After finding out about this I had no desire to read it, but it was gifted to me years ago and my husband was a fan when he was a teenager.
I also tried to avoid rereads and only have one listed, The Handmaid’s Tale. I feel like I wasn’t smart enough to understand all the themes upon my first reading and wanted to reread it so I could write a proper review. Also with the sequel The Testaments coming out later this year, I figure it’s a perfect time to reread it.
I thoroughly browsed the suggestions list provided by The Classics Club and it’s members.
Current Progress
2 / 502019-2020: 1 book, 18 pages – not so good! I started this really late.
2020-2021: 1 book, 50 pages
2021-2022: 1 book, 29 pages
2022-2023:
2023-2024: