A number of the bloggers I follow are members of The Classics Club. I have actually wanted to join for a while, but found the idea of putting together a list of 50 books to read in 5 years very daunting. On the one hand, there are so many books to read. On the other hand, where to begin?
Feeling like I was missing a party I really wanted to attend, I finally hit on a two-part strategy. The first part of my list came from my existing TBR on Goodreads. That part of the list contains “classic” classics (if that’s a thing) that I just haven’t found time for – a.k.a., I wasn’t assigned – like Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
The second part came from an imprint that I absolutely love, and wanted to explore more thoroughly, NYRB Classics. I love this imprint because of its broad range: history, biography, memoir, mystery, humor, and romance are all represented. Because of the nature of the list, these books are more international in nature, decidedly modern, and maybe a bit more obscure, including titles such as Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel and Nancy Mitford’s Voltaire in Love.
There are no re-reads on my list, which is a bit scary. A majority of the authors are completely new to me as well. But I feel like I will have accomplished something when I finally get through the list. Hopefully, that will be before August 5, 2018!
1. Baker, Dorothy: Cassandra at the Wedding
2. Bengtsson, Frans G.: The Long Ships
3. Borges, Jorge Luis: Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi
4. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley’s Secret
5. Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop
6. Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre: Dangerous Liaisons
7. Collette: The Pure and Impure
8. Collodi, Carlo: Pinocchio
9. De Balzac, Honore: The Unknown Masterpiece
10. De Maupassant, Guy: Alien Hearts
11. Dundy, Elaine: The Dud Avocado
12. Edwards, G.B.: The Book of Ebeneezer Le Page
13. Eliot, George: Middlemarch
14. Eliot, T.S.: Murder in the Cathedral
15. Fearing, Kenneth: The Big Clock
16. Fermor, Patrick Leigh: The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands
17. Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
18. Finley, F.I.: The World of Odysseus
19. Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
20. Gadda, Carlo Emilio: That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
21. Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
22. Gogol, Nikolay: Dead Souls
23. Grossman, Vasily: An Armenian Sketchbook
24. Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Blithedale Romance
25. Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast
26. Hughes, Richard: A High Wind in Jamaica
27. Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
28. Inoue, Yasushi: Tun-Huang
29. Ishiguro, Kazuo: The Remains of the Day
30. Jansson, Tove: The True Deceiver
31. Kerouac, Jack: On the Road
32. Malory, Sir Thomas: Le Morte d’Arthur
33. Mitford, Jessica: Hons and Rebels
34. Mitford, Nancy: Voltaire in Love
35. Murakami, Haruki: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
36. Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
37. Pepys, Samuel: Diary of Samuel Pepys
38. Pirandello, Luigi: The Late Mattia Pascal
39. Pym, Barbara: Excellent Women
40. Sabbatini, Rafael: Scaramouche
41. Simenon, Georges: Act of Passion
42. Sorokin, Vladimir: The Queue
43. Taylor, Elizabeth: Angel
44. Twain, Mark: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
45. Van Vechten, Carl: The Tiger in the House
46. Von Arnim, Elizabeth: The Enchanted April
47. Warner, Rex: Men and Gods
48. Wharton, Edith: Ghost Stories
49. White, T.H.: The Once and the Future King
50. Zola, Emile: The Belly of Paris
I'll be tracking my progress on a separate blog page. Right now the 0/50 has me pretty motivated to get moving on some classics!
