50 Classics in 5 Years


When I finish a book that is considered a CLASSIC I feel awash in a sense of accomplishment!
Mission Accomplished GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY
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!
sally field meme you really like me - Google Search (With images ...
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.  



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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Comments

  1. Oh wow, I need to look into that classics club! I have been trying to read a classic per month this year, but that long-term goal sounds terrific! And the accountability of pledging to read those books is helpful for a rule-follower like myself, haha!

    Here are the books from your list I’ve read:
    1. Heights (the first book I really enjoyed even though I hated the main characters!)
    2. And then There Were None: FANTASTIC!!!
    3. A Moveable Feast: read it while on vacation in Paris, which was a fun reading experience!!
    4. Rebecca: creepy but so good!!!
    5. Anne books are such comfort reads as well as entertaining!
    6. Alice in Wonderland was so much more witty than I expected!
    7. Just finished Gone With the Wind... still processing it.
    8.The Princess Bride is soooo funny!!!

    Travels with Charley was so good! I vote you adding that honorable mention to your list ;)

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much for your feedback on the classics! I just finished Wuthering Heights and I agree that I loved it without loving the characters! Or liking them... I cannot believe you read A Moveable Feast in Paris - I am green with envy!

      Thanks so much for stopping by the blog :)

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    2. Hi Leslie! I just posted my Classics Club post! I am looking forward to tackling the books, one by one! Here is the link if you'd like to see the list!

      https://elle-alice.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-classics-club-55-classics-in-5.html#more

      I am looking forward to following along with your progress and reading your thoughts!!

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    3. Oh great! I will check out your post! I did check out your June reads, but for some reason my computer isn't letting me post my comment. I'll try again later. But yes, absolutely looking forward to reading through some classics together! :)

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    4. I’m not sure how I missed that Hinds Feet is on your list! And I totally agree with you that this club is so addictive! It’s 5am, I just finished a nursing session w/my infant son, and what am I doing instead of sleeping? Contemplating which books to add because I think I’m going to increase to 75 books, lol. So I’m right there with you! I have The Phantom Tollbooth and Cannery Row on current my list too!
      Call of the Wild was good! I want to see the recent movie with Harrison Ford. Anne of Green Gables is SO good!

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  2. Hi! I randomly stumbled onto your blog and I just wanted to pop in and say that I love your list! I'm working on the Classics Club Challenge too on my blog and it's really helpful in making sure I actually read all the classics I have sitting on my shelves.

    Also, Watership Down is weirdly amazing! I'm looking forward to seeing what you think about all those cute, fierce bunnies.

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