I have pledged to read fifty classics over the next five years for the Classics Club. However I’ve been tinkering with this list over the past year as firstly I realised there was a lack of female authors present and secondly, with two years already gone and a second pregnancy and baby in that time, I haven’t the time or concentration required for some of the literary epics. So I am officially updating my list as of August 2017 of the fifty classics I pledge to read by June 2020, and I am sure I will get around to the others in due course.
- Othello, William Shakespeare
- The Tempest, William Shakespeare
- The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
- Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner
- Gigi, Colette
- Dubliners, James Joyce
- A Dedicated Man and Other Stories, Elizabeth Taylor
- South Riding, Winifred Holtby
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
- The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
- Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
- The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
- The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
- Goblin Market and Other Poems, Christina Rossetti
- A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
- To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- Women in Love, D.H.Lawrence
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
- The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
- The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
- Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
- Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge
- The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
- Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes
- Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
- The Bottle Factory Outing, Beryl Bainbridge
- Evalina, Fanny Burney
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
- The Birds and Other Stories, Daphne Du Maurier
- The Awakening, Kate Chopin
- The Driver’s Seat, Muriel Spark
- The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
- My Antonia, Willa Cather
- My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin
- Villette, Charlotte Bronte
- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
- Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemmingway
- The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
- Selected Stories, Guy De Maupassant
- Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral
- The Story of an African Farm, Olive Shreiner
- Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
- The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe
- All Quiet on the Western Front, E.M. Remarque
And the ‘bumped’ books are:
- War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Magus, John Fowles
- Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville
- Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
- Hard Times, Charles Dickens
- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo
- The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas
- Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
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Welcome to the club! The Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare.
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Thank you, I am looking forward to reading that one. I love the idea of the Shakespeare project that you are doing, I may sign up to that in the future.
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I loved The Mysteries of Udolpho! I think I may stand alone. 🙂
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I was looking forward to that one, and I’m sure the fact that it is a classic must mean that plenty of other people have enjoyed it too. I’ll let you know when I’ve read it.
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