The Classics Club

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 these 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.

1. Othello, William Shakespeare
2. The Tempest, William Shakespeare
3. The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
6. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
7. Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner
8. Gigi, Colette
9. Dubliners, James Joyce
10. A Dedicated Man and Other Stories, Elizabeth Taylor
11. South Riding, Winifred Holtby
12. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
13. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
14. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
15. The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
16. Passing, Nella Larsen
17. Goblin Market and Other Poems, Christina Rossetti
18. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
19. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
20. Women in Love, D.H.Lawrence
21. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
22. Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
23. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
24. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
25. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
26. Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge
27. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
28. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
29. Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes
30. Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
31. The Bottle Factory Outing, Beryl Bainbridge
32. Evalina, Fanny Burney
33. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
34. The Birds and Other Stories, Daphne Du Maurier
35. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
36. The Driver’s Seat, Muriel Spark
37. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
38. My Antonia, Willa Cather
39. My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin
40. Villette, Charlotte Bronte
41. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
42. Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
43. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemmingway
44. The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
45. Selected Stories, Guy De Maupassant
46. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral
47. The Story of an African Farm, Olive Shreiner
48. Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
49. The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe
50. All Quiet on the Western Front, E.M. Remarque

And the ‘bumped’ books are:

1. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
2. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. The Magus, John Fowles
4. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
5. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
6. Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
7. Hard Times, Charles Dickens
8. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo
9. The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas
10. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott