When it occurred to me over the weekend that it would be nice to re-focus on my Classics Club list this year, I was convinced that today would see me writing a post entitled “The Classics Club: Two Years In”. And yet here I am already three years into the five year goal post. Time flies…blah blah…I started back in January 2014 (apparently) so if I was “on track”, I’d have read 30 books by now. I have actually read 13…I’ve read other classics but clearly not so many from this list that 2014 me was oh so excited about.
To have read through my list by my target date of January 2019, that means I need to read 18.5 books this year and 18.5 books in 2018. Not a horrifyingly ambitious target but not insignificant when you bear in mind the fact that I read one book from my list during 2016. I mean sure, it was The Day of the Triffids and I really enjoyed it but still.
This is my list as it currently stands. The ones that I’ve struck through are the ones that I’ve read. The ones in bold are the ones that I own. You can find reviews to some of the ones that I’ve read on my Classics Club page here.
1. Margaret Atwood – The Blind Assassin
2. Jane Austen – Northanger Abbey
3. Jane Austen – Persuasion
4. J.M. Barrie – Peter Pan
6. Anne Bronte – Agnes Grey
7. Anne Bronte – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
9. Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
10. Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
11. Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game
12. Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White
15. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
17. Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers
18. Daphne du Maurier – My Cousin Rachel
19. George Eliot – Middlemarch
21. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
22. E. M. Forster – Howard’s End
23. Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South
24. Stella Gibbons – Cold Comfort Farm
25. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – The Complete Brothers’ Grimm Fairy Tales
27. Joseph Heller – Catch 22
29. Victor Hugo – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
31. Henry James –The Turn of the Screw
32. Franz Kafka – The Trial
33. Daniel Keyes – Flowers for Algernon
34. C. S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
35. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera
36. Thomas Mallory – Le Morte D’Arthur: Volume 1
37. Margaret Mitchell – Gone with the Wind
38. George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four
39. Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
40. J. D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
42. William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair
43. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
46. Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five
47. H. G. Wells – The Time Machine
48. Edith Wharton – The House of Mirth
49. Virginia Woolf – To The Lighthouse
From a look over my list, my gut feeling for this year is that I definitely want to get to Northanger Abbey because I have the adorable Penguin English Library edition and it’s only teeny weeny. I also really want to get to some Anne Bronte finally. And also to finally pick up The Woman in White properly. I *loved* The Moonstone when we read it as a group a few years ago and I fancy getting to a twisty mystery and Wilkie’s wit before the Winter is out. Other than that, any other tips on what I need to be picking off my list sooner rather than later?
