The Classics Club - Everyone in the Pool

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.

1. Adams, Douglas The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1979
2. Aeschylus The Oresteia 458 BCE
3. Aristophanes The Frogs 405 BCE
4. Aristophanes Lysistrata 411 BCE
5. Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid's Tale 1985
6. Austen, Jane The Big Six 18**
7. Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan 1911
8. Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron 1351
9. Bronte, Anne The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1848
10. Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre 1847
11. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh 1856
12. Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth 1931
13. Bulgakov, Mikhail The Master and Margarita 1967
14. Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game 1985
15. Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote 1605
16. Collins, Wilkie Poor Miss Finch 1872
17. Collins, Wilkie Armadale 1866
18. Collins, Wilkie Antonina 1850
19. Dante The Divine Comedy 1321
20. de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1782
21. Dickens, Charles Bleak House 1852
22. Dickens, Charles Pickwick Papers 1837
23. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 1866
24. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov 1880
25. Dreiser, Theodore Sister Carrie 1900
26. Eliot, George Middlemarch 1871
27. Eliot, George Mill on the Floss 1860
28. Euripedes Medea 431 BCE
29. Euripedes The Trojan Women 415 BCE
30. Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby 1925
31. Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 1857
32. Forster, E.M. Howard's End 1910
33. Fowles, John The French Lieutenant's Woman 1969
34. Galsworthy, John The Forsyte Saga 1921
35. Gaskell, Elizabeth Wives and Daughters 1865
36. Gaskell, Elizabeth North and South 1854
37. Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure 1895
38. Hardy, Thomas The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886
39. Hardy, Thomas Tess of the D'Urbervilles 1891
40. Hardy, Thomas Under the Greenwood Tree 1872
41. Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast 1964
42. Herbert, Frank Dune 1965
43. Hugo, Victor Les Miserables 1862
44. James, Henry Portrait of a Lady 1881
45. James, Henry The Wings of the Dove 1902
46. Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterly's Lover 1928
47. Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea 1968
48. Lewis, M.G. The Monk 1796
49. Lindgren, Astrid Pippi Longstocking 1945
50. Melville, Henry Moby Dick 1851
51. Mitford, Nancy The Pursuit of Love 1945
52. Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita 1955
53. Naylor, Gloria The Women of Brewster Place 1982
54. Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar 1963
55. Proust, Marcel Swann's Way 1913
56. Richardson, Samuel Clarissa 1747
57. Smith, Betty A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1943
58. Smith, Zadie On Beauty 2005
59. Sophocles The Theban Plays 470 BCE
60. Steinbeck, John Cannery Row 1945
61. Steinbeck, John The Winter of our Discontent 1961
62. Steinbeck, John Grapes of Wrath 1939
63. Steinbeck, John East of Eden 1952
64. Sterne, Lawrence Tristram Shandy 1767
65. Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina 1877
66. Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace 1869
67. Voltaire Candide 1759
68. Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead, Revisited 1945
69. Waugh, Evelyn The Complete Stories 2000
70. Waugh, Evelyn Decline and Fall 1928
71. Waugh, Evelyn A Handful of Dust 1934
72. Waugh, Evelyn The Loved One 1948
73. Wharton, Edith The Custom of the Country 1913
74. Wharton, Edith Ethan Frome 1911
75. White, T.H. The Once and Future King 1958
76. Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass 1855
77. Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792
78. Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse 1927
79. 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.