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. The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke1
  2. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe2
  3. Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb
  4. Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens
  5. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (re-read)
  6. Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert3
  7. The Marble Faun (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  8. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) by Jules Verne
  9. Our Mutual Friend (1865) by Charles Dickens
  10. The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  11. A Lady of Quality (1896) by Frances Hodgson Burnett4
  12. The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells
  13. The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton
  14. Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910) by Lucy Maud Montgomery5
  15. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) by Agatha Christie
  16. This Side of Paradise (1920) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  17. Whose Body? (1923) by Dorothy L. Sayers6
  18. Clouds of Witness (1926) by Dorothy L. Sayers7
  19. Steppenwolf (1929) by Herman Hesse
  20. Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh
  21. Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1932) by Lloyd C. Douglas8
  22. The Green Years (1944) by A.J. Cronin
  23. House of Earth (1947) by Woody Guthrie
  24. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
  25. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
  26. Till We Have Faces (1956) by C.S. Lewis9
  27. On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
  28. To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee (re-read)
  29. The Stone Angel (1964) by Margaret Laurence
  30. The Flight of the Falcon (1965) by Daphne du Maurier
  31. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin

Novellas & Short Story Collections

  1. The Double (1846) by Fyodor Dostoevsky10
  2. The Gambler (1887) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892-93), also published as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (re-read)
  4. Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton
  5. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) by Stephen Leacock11
  6. The Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
  7. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka

Poetry, Verse, & Plays

  1. The Aeneid by Virgil
  2. Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
  3. Pygmalion (1913) by George Bernard Shaw
  4. 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 Milton12
  4. Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes13
  5. Fear and Trembling (1843) by Søren Kierkegaard14
  6. The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
  7. Homage to Catalonia (1938) by George Orwell15
  8. The Curve of Time (1961) by M. Wylie Blanchet16
  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. May 13, 2026, replaced Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes ↩︎
  6. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood ↩︎
  7. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced Love in a Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez ↩︎
  8. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert ↩︎
  9. ed. March 30, 2023, replaced Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller ↩︎
  10. ed. May 13, 2026, replaced The Iliad by Homer ↩︎
  11. 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 ↩︎
  12. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer ↩︎
  13. ed. May 13, 2026, replaced Indiana (1832) by George Sand ↩︎
  14. ed. May 13, 2026, replaced Beowulf, Unknown ↩︎
  15. ed. May 13, 2026, replaced Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton ↩︎
  16. ed. October 20, 2024, replaced The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922) by Baroness Emma Orczy ↩︎

34 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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