Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Classics Club Challenge List

As a voracious reader of classic novels, essays, plays, poetry, etc, I thought it was high time I officially joined the Classics Club!  The Club connects book bloggers who are also avid readers of the classics and provides a place for readers to share and discuss their reading.  Each member selects at least 50 classic titles and takes on a challenge to read all of the books by a certain date.  I have just started to check out the club and its members' blogs, but am finding it all to be really excellent, and I did miss reading challenges during my lost hiatus from blogging.

Actually one of the reasons I stopped blogging for such a long while is that I felt less interested in reviewing the new releases that are a big part of the book blogosphere culture because I realized (as I started a dual English/History degree) that I really wanted to start reading much older books, the classics that have shaped other books since and our world as a whole.  Hopefully this challenge will help me keep up my classics-reading momentum.

I hope to complete my list of 55 books by May 18th, 2017, exactly one year from now (May 18th, 2016.)   In addition to literature, I have included a few historical surveys which are considered true classics in their fields.  I will try to review each book as I finish it and link to the review here.  Without further much ado about nothing (which, btw, is a great play!), here is my alphabetical list of the 55 books I am going to read: 


--Agamemnon by Aeschylus
--Eumenides by Aeschylus
--The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus
--Lysistrata by Aristophanes
--Selected Poems by Aphra Behn
--The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
--Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
--Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
--The Professor by Charlotte Brontë
--Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
--Villette by Charlotte Brontë
--The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
--The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
--The Awakening by Kate Chopin (review in progress)
--Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
--The Idea of History by R.G. Collingwood (history)
--The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
--The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre
--Confessions of an Engish Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey
--Hard Times by Charles Dickens
--La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
--Middlemarch by George Eliot
--A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
--A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
--Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
--Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
--Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell
--The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell
--Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
--Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy
--Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James
--Selected Essays by Rosa Luxemburg
--Paradise Lost by John Milton (re-read)
--Selected Essaies by Montaigne (French)
--1984 by George Orwell
--Animal Farm by George Orwell
--The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
--Phèdre by Jean Racine (French)
--The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (review in progress)
--Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
--Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
--Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
--Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw
--Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
--The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
--Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
--The Annals by Tacitus
--Selected Poems by Lord Tennyson
--The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson (history)
--Walden by Henry David Thoreau
--Selected Poems by Paul Verlaine (French)
--The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
--Selected Poems by William Wordsworth

1 comment:

Brona said...

Welcome to the club!

Like you I joined as I found myself drifting more towards classics. But being a bookseller means I have to keep in touch with the contemporary stuff as well. Some years this is easier than others.

Classics still call me though - so much so that I had to start a second classics club list even though I was only halfway through my first one! After seeing your list I realise I forgot to add in my George Bernard Shaw plays!

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