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

--Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (re-read)

--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

--Astrophel and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney

--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