I’ve been following The Classic Club blog for a while now and, the whole time I had my first blog, wanted to join in with their reading challenge.  It was part of a master plan I never quite got round to and a way to make sure I read any number of books that always seem to be on my “to be read” list.  The idea is you choose 50 classics you want to read and commit to reading them within a set period of time – no more than five years.

With starting my new blog, and the focus being on books, I thought now might be a good time to join at last – it also ties in nicely with their Classic Club Spin on Monday, which should be a nice way to kick start my classics reading. 

So, without further ado, here are the 50 books I plan on reading by 7th August, 2019 (I went for the longest time frame because I always find classics take longer to read than I ever think they will):

1. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

2. The Secret History – Donna Tartt

3. 1984 – George Orwell

4. Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas

5. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

6. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

7. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

8. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

9. The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien

10. On the Road – Jack Kerouac

11. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Path

12. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote

13. East of Eden – John Steinbeck

14. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

15. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

16. The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan

17. The Satanic Verses – Salmon Rushdie

18. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

19. Sons and Lovers  – D H Lawrence

20. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

21. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

22. War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells

23. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Wolf

24. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

25. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brone

26. Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare

27. The 39 Steps – John Buchan

28. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

29. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy

30. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

31. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

32. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

33. Carrie – Stephen King

34. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

35. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John le Carre

36. The Golden Notebook – Dorothy Lessing

37. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

38. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandlor

39. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins

40. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

41. Middlemarch – George Elliot

42. White Teeth – Zadie Smith

43. Beloved – Toni Morrison

44. Lacuna – Barbara Kingslover

45. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

46. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

47. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

48. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

49. Possession – A S Byatt

50. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas – John Boyne

And that’s it. It seems like a lot now I’ve written it down but five years means it’s definitely doable, even the ones I’m not looking forward to (I have never made it through Dickens yet). Wish me luck!

Emma