50 Classics in 5 Years

When I finish a book that is considered a CLASSIC I feel awash in a sense of accomplishment!

Like when I grade a fat stack of papers, clean out the refrigerator, get all the laundry done... actually I have 4 kids - I have no idea how that feels. 

Not to mention, I just found this article from MSU that basically says reading Classics makes us smarter: see it here. 

So right now, while I'm at home feeling like my life is wasting away, and not getting much done besides housework (and by housework I mean reading), it feels like the right time to make a commitment to my Classic TBR list!! 

In researching a Classical Reading Challenge - I found THE CLASSICS CLUB!  And now I am completing my initiation to join the super-exclusive, private and coveted Classics Club (just kidding, anyone can join as long as you make a list of at least 50 Classics you are committing to read over the next 5 years or less, want to join? Click here).  But I'm still excited to be in a club!

Just kidding - also not a requirement.  And thank goodness for that! 😂

So, without further ado, here is my list of 50 Classics I plan to read in the next 5 years!  (My plan is actually to read one classic per month, but 50 in 5 years gives me a couple months to slack off if need be!) If all goes well, I will finish the list by June of 2025. In alphabetical (not reading) order...

1. Watership Down by Richard Adams
2. Aesop's Fables by Aesop
3. A Death in the Family by James Agee
4. (Re-read) Little Women and (Read) Little Men by Louisa May Alcott
5. The Complete Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson
6. Sanditon by Jane Austen
7. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
8. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury - Read July 2020
9. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
10. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte - Read July 2020
12. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
13. Kindred by Octavia Butler - Read June 2020
14. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
15. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
16. My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers
17. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton
18. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
19. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
20. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
21. The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie
22. Crooked House by Agatha Christie
23. Endless Night by Agatha Christie
24. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
25. No Name by Wilkie Collins
26. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge
28. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
29. Introduction to the Devout Life by Francis De Sales
30. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
31. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
32. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier - Read July 2020
33. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier
34. Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
36. Save Me the Waltz by Ella Fitzgerald
37. A Room With A View by E.M. Forster
38. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
39. Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm
40. Roots by Alex Haley
41. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
42. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
43. Hinds' Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard
44. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
45. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
46. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
47. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
48. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
49. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
50. The Dead by James Joyce

The Next 50 (I've started working on the next 50 classics I'd like to read because this challenge is strangely addictive!  I have discovered so many I would like to read and hope to double up!)

1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
2. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis
3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
4. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
5. Till We Both Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
6. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
7. The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft
8. Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace
9. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
10. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
11. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Group by Mary McCarthy
13. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCollough
14. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
15. The Redhouse Mystery by A.A. Milne
16. Paradise Lost by John Milton
17. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
18. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
19. Utopia by Thomas More
20. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
21. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
22. 1984 by George Orwell
23. Essential Tales & Poems by Edgar Allen Poe
24. The Murders of Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe
25. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
26. The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen
27. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
28. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
29. Miss Pinkerton by Mary Roberts Rineheart
30. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
31. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
32. Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
33. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
34. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
35. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
36. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
37. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
38. Dracula by Bram Stoker
39. Gulliver's Travels by Johnathan Swift
40. The Pursuit of Man by A.W. Tozer
41. Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
42. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
43. Night by Elie Weisel
44. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
45. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
46. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
47. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
48. A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf
49.  
50. 
    

Classics I've Read (so you know why they're not on the list)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Interior Castles by Teresa of Avila
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
The Boy Scout's Handbook (1911)
The American Boys Handybook by Daniel Carter Beard (founder of Boy Scouts)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie
By the Pricking of my Thumbs by Agatha Christie
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Innocence of Father Brown by GK Chesterton
Matilda by Roald Dahl (and others by him but are these classics? They’re not very old, but I've seen them included on lists...)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Dark Night of the Soul by San Juan de la Cruz
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Emily Dickinson's Poems
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Odyssey by Homer
The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kirkegaard
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
The Problem with Pain by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe
The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling (modern classic?)
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Black Beauty by Anne Sewell
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Ain't I A Woman? by Sojourner Truth
Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
Charlotte's Web by EB White
Stuart Little by EB White
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Complete Mother Goose
All the original Dr. Seuss books
And probably more I'm forgetting...

If you made it all the way to end of this massive post, I salute you! 😂. And now... TELL ME WHAT I'VE MISSED!!?? What CLASSICS do you love??? 

I want to read the classics that are IMPORTANT, but also the ones that are BEAUTIFUL.  I loved The Great Gatsby because it whisks you away into a new world, heavy on description, heavy on heartbreak (you know how I love my books to ruin me).  So please give me suggestions!  Even though my list(s) are already entirely too long :) 

What good is a TBR list if you finish it, right??  Clearly I'm already working on my list of 50 for the next 5 years 😂

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