Classics Club Book List

So, after years of seeing the lists, the spins, the challenges, and the memes, I am finally joining the Classics Club! This is pretty big for me as I’ve had some bad experiences with booklists/challenges and vowed never to get myself into one again, but never say never, I guess.

I actually feel good about the way the Classics Club works because the minimum is a pretty doable 50 classics in 5 years and though you start with a set list of which books you would like to read during that period, the list is mutable, allowing for it to grow or even to swap out books you no longer want to read and put new ones you’re interested in onto the list in their place.

This is perfect for me because I never want to get locked into a commitment I can’t keep, or feel obligated to continue to slog through a book that no longer interests me, sapping all the joy out of reading. We’re here for a good time.

My list includes novels, novellas, verse, poetry, plays, and short story collections, as well as some non-fiction essay and treatise type works. Also, I am including some re-reads as identified in the list.

So, without further ado, following is my list for entry into the Classics Club, looking at a projected completion date of September 1, 2027 for simplicity.

Novels

1. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood
2. Love in a Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez
3. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin
4. The Flight of the Falcon (1965) by Daphne du Maurier
5. Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
6. The Stone Angel (1964) by Margaret Lawrence
7. Till We Have Faces (1956) by C.S. Lewis*
8. To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee (re-read)
9. On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
10. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
11. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
12. House of Earth (1947) by Woody Guthrie
13. The Green Years (1944) by A.J. Cronin
14. Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh
15. Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert†
16. Steppenwolf (1929) by Herman Hesse
17. The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922) by Baroness Emma Orczy
18. Indiana (1832) by George Sand
19. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) by Agatha Christie
20. This Side of Paradise (1920) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb
22. A Lady of Quality (1896) by Frances Hodgson Burnett‡
23. The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton
24. The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells
25. The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke§
26. The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. Our Mutual Friend (1865) by Charles Dickens
28. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) by Jules Verne
29. The Marble Faun (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
30. The Quaker City: The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) by George Lippardǁ
31. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (re-read)
32. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe¶
33. Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens
34. Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes

Novellas and Short Story Collections

35. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
36. The Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
37. Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton
38. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892-93), also published as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (re-read)
39. The Gambler (1887) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Poetry, Verse, and Plays

40. The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot
41. Pygmalion (1913) by George Bernard Shaw
42. Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
43. Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton
44. The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer
45. Beowulf, Unknown
46. The Aeneid by Virgil
47. The Iliad by Homer

Essays and Treatises

48. The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
49. The Prince (1532) by Niccolò Machiavelli
50. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

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*ed. March 30, 2023, replaced Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

†ed. October 22, 2022, replaced The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

‡ed. October 22, 2022, replaced Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

§ed. February 4, 2023, replaced Middlemarch by George Eliot

ǁed. March 30, 2023, replaced Hard Times by Charles Dickens

¶ed. January 19, 2024, replaced Moby Dick by Herman Melville