The Classics Club was created to inspire people to read and blog about classic books (their words). In high school, I relied on SparkNotes to help me ace my tests and never read any of the required classics until Frankenstein, or the last assignment.

I learned about The Classics Club from This Tangled Skein and, as someone wanting to work classics into my reading, see it as a great challenge for myself. Having a community and as long as five years to complete my list makes this a practical challenge for myself, so I’m giving it a shot.

My list of 50 classics to read by January 7, 2024

Links to my reviews will be added as applicable.

1. “Affinity” by Sarah Waters
2. “Annie on My Mind” by Nancy Garden (1/20/20)
3. “Animal Farm” by George Orwell
4. “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy
5. “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
6. “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath
7. “Black Beauty” by Anna Sewell
8. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
9. “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
10. “Cold Sassy Tree” by Olive Ann Burns
11. “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
12. “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
13. “Dracula” by Bram Stoker
14. “Emma” by Jane Austen
15. “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
16. “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway
17. “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley (reread)
18. “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
19. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (reread, sort of)
20. “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell
21. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
22. “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett
23. “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Italo Calvino
24. “Inferno” by Dante Alighieri
25. “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë
26. “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo
27. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
28. “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
29. “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville
30. “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf
31. “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck (reread, sort of)
32. “The Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde
33. “The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James
34. “The Price of Salt” (or “Carol”) by Patricia Highsmith
35. “Rubyfruit Jungle” by Rita Mae Brown
36. “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
37. “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse
38. “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
39. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson
40. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston
41. “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells
42. “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
43. “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith
44. “Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare
45. “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins
46. “Ulysses” by James Joyce
47. “Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray
48. “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” by Shirley Jackson
49. “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
50. “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

My criterion for creating the list

• Diversity: Variety is important, whether expressed via genres, page counts, themes, author demographics, etc.
• No repeat authors: Because of the wide array of classics out there, I opted out of repeating authors so I cansample various classic authors without having to commit to them.
• Woman writers: 21/50 books on this list were written by women. I tried to find books that interested me and that I generally wanted to read for pop culture reasons, and titles written by women that I figured I could read off the list would suffice in favor of adding a book that I need a little more motivation to read to the list instead. Otherwise, half the list would be books written by women.

I used the list provided by The Classics Club, books commonly shelved #theclassicsclub on Goodreads, and Book Riot’s “Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books” list for assistance in creating my own.

In my review posts, I’ll be including why I selected a particular book if it’s one I selected for more than sampling reasons.

Banned and/or challenged books

From my list, a handful of books are banned/challenged:

• Animal Farm
• Brave New World
• Catch-22
• The Color Purple
• A Farewell to Arms
• Frankenstein
• The Great Gatsby
• Gone with the Wind
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Lolita
• Lord of the Flies
• Of Mice and Men
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Ulysses

Reading banned/challenged books has been a dream of mine for awhile, so I’m excited about this!

Milestones & rewards for myself

I initially had non-monetary/non-food rewards here for myself, but as I’ve practiced self-care and made a habit of it, those rewards have been redundant. I do them already, when I have the spoons.

Thus, instead of setting up milestones/rewards, I’ll consider the reward to be reading the books and completing however much of this list I complete.

Sharing my progress

I’ll be sharing my progress as I review the books! I selected many of them with deeper reasons that I think might interest certain people, i.e. those who like my book reviews already, but even more so when I get a little personal in them. I’ll a roundup of books I finish in monthly updates. I’ll also be tagging posts accordingly.

Fifty books comes out to, roughly, one book per month. As there are 60 total in five years, I should have 10 months leeway. I tend not to take one month to read a book, however, unless my mood causes me to jump around to different books.