The more book blogs I read, the more The Classics Club comes up, and the more I think, "I can do that... I should totally do that." And then I look at other peoples' lists and get all excitable and want to read errrrthing. Except... that's not really true because I am what you call a Book Snob. But I digress.
What I really like is organization and direction. This is why I am excellent at my job: I really like to check things off of lists. And what better list than a book list? Plus, as my friend Tex is always telling me, I'm very buttoned-up and Victorian myself,* and 19th c. Tika would totally have joined a Classics Club. She would also have kept a better diary. You know - for posterity.
And speaking of posterity, I've been talking (via Twitter! @tikabelle) with Rayna over at Libereading about our choices and how it's so hard you guys to get up a classics list that involves an appropriate amount of female/minority authors because if you think your first world problems are bad, consider being Other in an English-speaking country 150 years ago and getting a book published. And then couple that with being Me in 2012 and having a decided preference for giant-foreheaded white male authors with whiskers and you come up with a list that is highly alphabetical but singularly lacking in the wimminz and the non-white people.
- Adams, Douglas The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1979
- Aeschylus The Oresteia 458 BCE
- Aristophanes The Frogs 405 BCE
- Aristophanes Lysistrata 411 BCE
- Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid's Tale 1985
- Austen, Jane The Big Six 18**
- Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan 1911
- Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron 1351
- Bronte, Anne The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1848
- Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre 1847
- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh 1856
- Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth 1931
- Bulgakov, Mikhail The Master and Margarita 1967
- Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game 1985
- Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote 1605
- Collins, Wilkie Poor Miss Finch 1872
- Collins, Wilkie Armadale 1866
- Collins, Wilkie Antonina 1850
- Dante The Divine Comedy 1321
- de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1782
- Dickens, Charles Bleak House 1852
- Dickens, Charles Pickwick Papers 1837
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 1866
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov 1880
- Dreiser, Theodore Sister Carrie 1900
- Eliot, George Middlemarch 1871
- Eliot, George Mill on the Floss 1860
- Euripedes Medea 431 BCE
- Euripedes The Trojan Women 415 BCE
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby 1925
- Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 1857
- Forster, E.M. Howard's End 1910
- Fowles, John The French Lieutenant's Woman 1969
- Galsworthy, John The Forsyte Saga 1921
- Gaskell, Elizabeth Wives and Daughters 1865
- Gaskell, Elizabeth North and South 1854
- Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure 1895
- Hardy, Thomas The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886
- Hardy, Thomas Tess of the D'Urbervilles 1891
- Hardy, Thomas Under the Greenwood Tree 1872
- Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast 1964
- Herbert, Frank Dune 1965
- Hugo, Victor Les Miserables 1862
- James, Henry Portrait of a Lady 1881
- James, Henry The Wings of the Dove 1902
- Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterly's Lover 1928
- Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea 1968
- Lewis, M.G. The Monk 1796
- Lindgren, Astrid Pippi Longstocking 1945
- Melville, Henry Moby Dick 1851
- Mitford, Nancy The Pursuit of Love 1945
- Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita 1955
- Naylor, Gloria The Women of Brewster Place 1982
- Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar 1963
- Proust, Marcel Swann's Way 1913
- Richardson, Samuel Clarissa 1747
- Smith, Betty A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1943
- Smith, Zadie On Beauty 2005
- Sophocles The Theban Plays 470 BCE
- Steinbeck, John Cannery Row 1945
- Steinbeck, John The Winter of our Discontent 1961
- Steinbeck, John Grapes of Wrath 1939
- Steinbeck, John East of Eden 1952
- Sterne, Lawrence Tristram Shandy 1767
- Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina 1877
- Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace 1869
- Voltaire Candide 1759
- Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead, Revisited 1945
- Waugh, Evelyn The Complete Stories 2000
- Waugh, Evelyn Decline and Fall 1928
- Waugh, Evelyn A Handful of Dust 1934
- Waugh, Evelyn The Loved One 1948
- Wharton, Edith The Custom of the Country 1913
- Wharton, Edith Ethan Frome 1911
- White, T.H. The Once and Future King 1958
- Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass 1855
- Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792
- Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse 1927
- Xuequin, Cao The Story of the Stone 1760
That's roughly 38,500 pages worth of classic books - why yes, I did add them all up via spreadsheet, thank you for asking! - and I'll have finished reading them by... let me see... August 31, 2017. BAM!
*I am not certain this is a compliment, but I'm going to assume so as it's almost always followed by, "and then you go and tell me THAT story!"
Edit 9/5 to add various Greeks, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hemingway, and others.
