Classics Club Book List

Posted on by Fictitiously Yours, Gail

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. Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes
  2. The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke1
  3. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe2
  4. Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb
  5. Indiana (1832) by George Sand
  6. Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens
  7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (re-read)
  8. Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert3
  9. The Marble Faun (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  10. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) by Jules Verne
  11. Our Mutual Friend (1865) by Charles Dickens
  12. The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  13. A Lady of Quality (1896) by Frances Hodgson Burnett4
  14. The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells
  15. The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton
  16. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) by Agatha Christie
  17. This Side of Paradise (1920) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  18. Whose Body? (1923) by Dorothy L. Sayers5
  19. Clouds of Witness (1926) by Dorothy L. Sayers6
  20. Steppenwolf (1929) by Herman Hesse
  21. Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh
  22. Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1932) by Lloyd C. Douglas7
  23. The Green Years (1944) by A.J. Cronin
  24. House of Earth (1947) by Woody Guthrie
  25. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
  26. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
  27. Till We Have Faces (1956) by C.S. Lewis8
  28. On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
  29. To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee (re-read)
  30. The Stone Angel (1964) by Margaret Laurence
  31. The Flight of the Falcon (1965) by Daphne du Maurier
  32. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin

Novellas & Short Story Collections

  1. The Gambler (1887) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892-93), also published as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (re-read)
  3. Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton
  4. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) by Stephen Leacock9
  5. The Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
  6. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka

Poetry, Verse, & Plays

  1. The Iliad by Homer
  2. The Aeneid by Virgil
  3. Beowulf, Unknown
  4. Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton
  5. Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
  6. Pygmalion (1913) by George Bernard Shaw
  7. The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot

Non-Fiction

  1. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
  2. The Prince (1532) by Niccolò Machiavelli
  3. Aeropagitica & Of Education (1644) by John Milton10
  4. The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
  5. The Curve of Time (1961) by M. Wylie Blanchet11
  1. ed. February 4, 2023, replaced Middlemarch (1872) by George Eliot ↩︎
  2. ed. January 19, 2024, replaced Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville ↩︎
  3. ed. October 22, 2022, replaced The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner ↩︎
  4. ed. October 22, 2022, replaced Of Human Bondage (1929) by W. Somerset Maugham ↩︎
  5. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood ↩︎
  6. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced Love in a Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez ↩︎
  7. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert ↩︎
  8. ed. March 30, 2023, replaced Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller ↩︎
  9. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Quaker City: The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) by George Lippard; ed. March 30, 2023, replaced Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens ↩︎
  10. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer ↩︎
  11. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922) by Baroness Emma Orczy ↩︎

32 thoughts on “Classics Club Book List”

    1. I’m looking forward to reading Dune, but also a little apprehensive, not having had the best experiences with sci-fi books recently. Good for you reading the series! I don’t have any plans to read more of them, but if I like the first one, who knows?

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