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My Classics Club List


Well how can one have a blog about classics without joining The Classics Club?



The idea is to challenge yourself to read at least 50 classics in the next 5 years, so my time frame will be from November 12, 2013 to November 11, 2018.  


My list:

Ancients  (5000 B.C. - A.D. 400):

The Odyssey - Homer (end of the 8th century B.C.)  March 23, 2014
The Histories (450 - 420 B.C.) - Herodotus (because I love my Greeks!)  April 17, 2017
The History of the Pelopponesian War (431 B.C.) - Thucydides  (a very
       interesting war.  I can't wait to get Thucydides viewpoint) June 15, 2017
Oedipus Rex (429 B.C.) - Sophocles  (Sophocles is one of my favourite
      Greek playwrights)  May 25, 2014
Oedipus at Colonus (406 B.C.) - Sophocles   June 24, 2014
Antigone (441 B.C.) - Sophocles  December 28, 2014
Apology (after 399 B.C.) - Plato   December 12, 2013
The Republic (380 B.C.) - Plato  (Plato is referred to so many times when
      reading anything intellectual, that I must read at least one of his books)
Aristotle, Ethics (330 B.C.) - Aristotle
Defense Speeches (80 - 63 B.C.) - Marcus Tullius Cicero  (I've started this
      and love it!)  August 20, 2014
Metamorphoses (8) - Ovid  (I will finish this!)  March 31, 2016
Lives (75) - Plutarch  (I've always meant to read it)
The Twelve Caesars (121) - Suetonius  (he's supposed to be a little bit of
      a gossip so this might prove interesting)
Meditations (170 - 180) - Marcus Aurelius  (I think that I'll like him)
Address to Young Men (363) - Saint Basil  (my daughter read it and loved
      it)



Medieval/Early Renaissance (400 - 1600 A.D.):

The City of God (426) - Augustine  (loved Confessions and can't wait for
      this one)
The Consolation of Philosophy (524) - Boethius
The Rule of Saint Benedict (529)? - Saint Benedict  December 2, 2015
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) - Bede
The Decameron (1353) - Giovanni Boccaccio  (I've always wanted to read
      this.)
The Canterbury Tales (1390s??) - Geoffrey Chaucer  (groan!  It intimidates
      me but I must overcome!)  November 15, 2015
On the Imitation of Christ (1418 - 1427) - Thomas à Kempis
The Book of Margery Kempe (1430) - Margery Kempe   August 1, 2014
Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) - Thomas Mallory  (this read is coming up soon!)  December 6, 2014
The Praise of Folly (1509) - Erasmus  (intimidated but curious)
The Prince (1513) - Niccolo Machiavelli (this book has always intrigued me,
      plus it's a nice short read!)
Utopia (1516) - Thomas More  (looking forward to reading a good Utopian
      novel)  December 15, 2014
Bondage of the Will (1525) - Martin Luther
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532 - 1564) - François Rabelais (this is
      supposed to be weird)
Selected Essays (1580) - Michel de Montaigne  November 30, 2015
The Fairie Queene (1590 - 1596) - Edmund Spenser


Late Renaissance/Early Modern (1600 - 1850 A.D.):

The Taming of the Shrew (1590 - 1592) - William Shakespeare  (keeping
      going through my Shakespeare plays)
Romeo and Juliet (1591 - 1595) - William Shakespeare   October 13, 2014
Richard III (1592) - William Shakespeare
Richard II (1595) - William Shakespeare   November 30, 2014
The Merchant of Venice (1596 - 1598) - William Shakespeare
Henry IV Part I (1597) - William Shakespeare  December 21, 2014
Henry IV Part II (1596 - 1599) - William Shakespeare  December 24, 2014
Henry V (1599) - William Shakespeare  June 22, 2016
Othello (1603) - William Shakespeare   October 28, 2014
Hamlet (1603 - 1604) - William Shakespeare  January 27, 2015
King Lear (1603 - 1606) - William Shakespeare  December 3, 2014
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1607 - 1608) - William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost (1667) - John Milton (time to use my guide by C.S. Lewis)  February 27, 2014
Pensées (1669) - Blaise Pascal
Tartuffe (1669) - Molière
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) - John Bunyan (Next on my WEM list.  It
      calls to me! ……… and I've ignored it.)
Moll Flanders (1722) - Daniel Defoe (I loved Robinson Crusoe, so another
       Defoe it is!)
Gulliver's Travels (1726) - Jonathan Swift  (I wonder if I'll like it)   January 3, 2015
Candide (1759) - Voltaire   March 21, 2014
On the Social Contract (1762) - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
She Stoops to Conquer (1773) - Oliver Goldsmith
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and a Journal of a Tour
              to the Hebrides (1775) - Samuel Johnson
Common Sense (1775 - 1776) - Thomas Paine (so rare nowadays ….. hee
       hee!)
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 - 1789) - Edward Gibbons
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - Ann Radcliffe
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (expand my
        horizons with poetry!)
Sense and Sensibility (1811) - Jane Austen  January 25, 2015
Persuasion (1818) - Jane Austen (I have read every other Austen novel but
        this one.  For shame!)   February 21, 2015
Ivanhoe (1820) - Sir Walter Scott
The History of Napoleon Buonoparte (1829) - John Gibson Lockhart
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) - Victor Hugo (the bells!  the bells!)
Eugene Onegin (1825 - 1832) - Alexander Pushkin   December 1, 2013 & February 8, 2014
The Pickwick Papers (1836 - 1837) - Charles Dickens  (a fun read!)  November 5, 2017
Dead Souls (1842) - Nikolai Gogol (I've never read a Gogol)
Fear and Trembling (1843) - Soren Kierkegaard
Twenty Years After (1845) - Alexandre Dumas
Wuthering Heights (1847) - Emily Brönte   February 1, 2014
Mary Barton (1848) - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Communist Manifesto (1848) - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Shirley (1849) - Charlotte Brontë
David Copperfield (1850) - Charles Dickens   January 15, 2014
The Man in the Iron Mask (1850) - Alexandre Dumas



Modern (1850 - Present):

Moby Dick (1851) - Herman Melville  (I can wait a looong time to read this!)
Bleak House (1852/53) - Charles Dickens
Villette (1853) - Charlotte Brönte  March 31, 2016
The Warden (1855) - Anthony Trollope  (looking forward to starting The
      Barchestershire Chronicles)  April 8, 2014
Madam Bovary (1856) - Gustave Flaubert  (just because)   April 4, 2014
Tom Brown's School Days (1857) - Thomas Hughes (I see this mentioned
      in a number of classics)
Barchester Towers (1857) - Anthony Trollope   August 7, 2014
The Professor (1857) - Charlotte Brontë
Doctor Thorne (1858) - Anthony Trollope  September 25, 2014
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) - Jacob Burckhardt
Framely Parsonage (1860 - 1861) - Anthony Trollope  December 8, 2016
The Mill on the Floss (1860) - George Eliot  (ready for more English social
       commentary)
Great Expectations (1860/61) - Charles Dickens  (adding to my Dickens
       marathon)
The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) - Charles Reade
Fathers and Sons (1862) - Ivan Turgenev  September 19, 2014
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) - Jules Verne (another Verne
       adventure!)
The Small House at Allington (1864) - Anthony Trollope  March 31, 2017
Wives and Daughters (1864/66) - Elizabeth Gaskell (I love Gaskell and
       haven't read this yet)
Speeches and Letters (1809 - 1865) - Abraham Lincoln
Crime and Punishment (1866) - Fyodor Dostoevsky (his two crowning
       achievements and I need to read them)
The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) - Anthony Trollope
The Moonstone (1868) - Wilkie Collins  (for a light read)  January 1, 2016
War and Peace (1869) - Leo Tolstoy  (going on and on and on ……)  August 3, 2014
Erewhon (1872) - Samuel Butler  May 16, 2015
La Curée (1871 - 1872) - Emile Zola (continuing the Rougon-Macquart
        series)  April 23, 2014
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) - Thomas Hardy (I dislike Hardy's
        novels but should include one.)  June 23, 2016
La Conquête de Plassans (1874) - Emile Zola
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875) - Emile Zola
Daniel Deronda (1876) - George Eliot   February 24, 2014
Tom Sawyer (1876) -  Mark Twain 
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876) - Emile Zola   January 31, 2014
Au Page d'Amour (1878) - Emile Zola
A Doll's House (1879) - Henrik Ibsen  July 27, 2016
Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes (1879) - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) - Fyodor Dostoevsky (I can't wait for this
        one!)  November 10, 2016
Pot-Bouille (1882) - Emile Zola
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) - Emile Zola
Huckleberry Finn (1884) - Mark Twain
King Solomon's Mines (1885) - H. Rider Hagaard  (for adventure)
Bel-Ami (1885) - Guy de Maupassant
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 - 1885) - Freidrich Nietzsche
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886) - Robert Louis
         Stevenson
Kidnapped (1886) - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Black Arrow (1888) - Robert Louis Stevenson   November 20, 2013
Le Rêve (1888) - Emile Zola
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) - Mark Twain
L'Argent (1891) - Emile Zola  August 21, 2015
Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (1894) - Sholem Aleichem
      (looks like fun!)
Red Badge of Courage (1895) - Stephen Crane (I don't think I'll like it but I'll
       try it)
The Time Machine (1895) - H.G. Wells  January 11, 2016
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) - Oscar Wilde  September 18, 2014
The Well at the World's End (1896) - William Morris  October 5, 2016
Dracula (1897) - Bram Stoker  (scary ….. not my favourite genre)  October 19, 2015
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) - Sigmund Freud
The Heart of Darkness (1899) - Joseph Conrad  (I tried but didn't get it …. if
         at first you don't succeed ………)
The Cherry Orchard (1904) - Anton Chekov
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) - G.K. Chesterton  (love Chesterton!)  August 20, 2014
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (1904 - 1911) - M.R. James
          November 13, 2013
Tales of Ghosts and Men (1910) - Edith Wharton
Ethan Fromme (1911) - Edith Wharton  May 11, 2015
O Pioneers! (1913) - Willa Cather (I loved My Antonia & Death Comes
          for the Archibishop, so why not another!)
Swann's Way (1913) - Marcel Proust
The Custom of the Country (1913) - Edith Wharton (Wharton's writing is
          fantastic!)
We (1921) - Yevgeny Zamyatin
 The Great Gatsby (1925) - F. Scott Fitzgerald (double groan.  Since the
          first time I read this was in high-school, I need to do a re-read to
          confirm that I despise it)   January 2, 2014
The Waves (or other) 1931) - Virginia Woolf  (great title for her style of
          writing)
The Good Soldier Svejk (1923) - Jaroslav Hasek
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) - Virginia Woolf   January 13, 2014
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) - C.S. Lewis  (I think this is a more simpler
          Lewis) {No - this was incredibly complex!} November 30, 2013
Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - T.S. Eliot
The Bucanneers (1938) - Edith Wharton
Out of the Silent Planet (1938) - C.S. Lewis  (love his Space Trilogy - a re-
          read)  September 19, 2014
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - John Steinbeck
The Robe (1942) - Lloyd C. Douglas  (have been trying to get to for years)
The Stranger (1942) - Albert Camus
Perelandra (1943) - C.S. Lewis   October 22, 2014
Animal Farm (1945) - George Orwell  (interesting social commentary, I'm
         sure)
That Hideous Strength (1945) - C.S. Lewis
The Great Divorce (1945) - C.S. Lewis (fascinating plot)  June 15, 2014
God in the Dock (1970) - C.S. Lewis
Brideshead Revisited (1945) - Evelyn Waugh
Seven Story Mountain (1948) - Thomas Merton  (looking forward to it)  March 15, 2014
1984 (1949) - George Orwell
East of Eden (1952) - John Steinbeck  (I hated Mice & Men but I will attempt
          to keep an open mind with this one)   February 17, 2015
The Silver Chalice (1952) - Thomas Costain  (looks interesting)
The Lord of the Flies (1954) - William Golding  (I hated it in school but I
         have a feeling that I'll really like it now)
Atlas Shrugged (1957) - Ayn Rand  (another ugh, but I must …)
To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) - Harper Lee  April 5, 2016
Droll Stories (1961) - Honore Balzac
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Slaughterhouse Five (1969) - Kurt Vonnegut
Invisible Cities (1972) - Italo Calvino
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (1979) - Italo Calvino
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978) - Barbara
        Tuchman
The Name of the Rose (1980) - Umberto Eco (I tried this once and felt like
         braining Eco.  However I know there is more to this novel than I allowed
         myself to see so another try is needed)
How to Think About The Great Ideas (2000) - Mortimer J. Adler

  

   Wow, this list looks long.  I'm not even going to attempt to count the books since not knowing numbers will make it easier to attempt as well as easier to add or delete books.  I read at least 35 classics last year, so if I can keep at the same pace, it might be possible to finish on time (cough, choke, splutter ….).

So without further ado, I am off to read!

~~ last updated January 19, 2014 ~~

(Once and Future King by T.H. White removed from list)

14 comments:

  1. So glad you decided to join the fun! It's great to have the encouragement of other classics lovers along the way! -Melissa

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the welcome, Melissa. The Classics Club is wonderful! So glad I could join in on the fun!

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  2. What an impressive list - good luck and welcome :-)
    Nice to have someone else who loves the Greeks (although there are none on my list as I read so many in my teens and early twenties!)

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    1. I find the Greeks and their culture fascinating. I would have included a number of other Greek books on my list but I knew that would make it too long and I already have a hard task ahead of me to finish all these in 5 years!

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  3. I don't know it I'll join the club but the list looks very interesting. Some I've read, some I haven't. Nice to find your blog.

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    Replies
    1. Welcome to my blog, Sharon! I'm so glad that you found it.

      I have quite a heavy list. Many people just pick 50 classics which is much easier to get through than 170! I hope you give it a try.

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  4. Wow, this is a super impressive list! I love the way you have it separated by time period. Looks like you're making good progress, too.

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    1. Thanks and welcome! I was going along really well until recently when I got diverted --- but diverted by other classics, so that's okay. ;-) I hope to get back on track in the coming months!

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  5. Great list!!! You posted on my blog about having spin choices in common. You have a lot on your 5 year list that are not on my list but I want to get to. I see you have "If On a Winters Night a Traveler". Funny, but I just found my copy of that last week. It was hidden on a shelf, I had bought it be never read it. I read the first chapter on Friday, and it looks so interesting I think I will have to add it to my 5 year list. Good luck!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Dawn! I attempted "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" once upon a time and failed, so I hope you have better luck with it. I think one needs to be in the right mindset for it. I must go back and check out your list to see if I can pick up any titles for my second Classics Club list. Thanks for stopping by!

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  6. I've just started my own blog, so I might be joining this challenge. At first I thought of waiting until January, but maybe not. I'm going to make a potential list soon, and then decide when to post it.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Beth and welcome! I think the sooner you make the list, the better. My list anniversary is coming up and I've hardly made a dent, but on second thought, I've read many more than 50 books so I'll be happy with that. Best of luck with your new blog. How exciting! I'll pop over and take a look!

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