Wednesday 27 August 2014

The Classics Club: A Revamp

I originally joined the Classics Club when it was first started by Jillian (of the now defunct blog A Room of One's Own) back in 2012, which means I'm almost half way through the original time allotted for my list. Clearly, this isn't working out.

Admittedly I've taken a slight step back from the club since having babies, but it's still something I'm very much interested in, so in the pursuit of staying interested, I'm having a revamp of my list! I'm whittling it down to only 50 books,half of which must be books I already own.

You will notice that the list runs to 58, but that's because I'd already read eight of the listed books before I started revamping, so I now actually have 50 books on my list. I'm also resetting my time schedule for it so that today is the start point. Therefore I have until 27th August 2019 to complete my list :-) Much more doable.

The List

20th Century 


1. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
2. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
3. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. Charlotte's Web * by E.B White
6.Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
7.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
8.Forever by Judy Blume 
9.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
10.Gone with the Wind * by Margaret Mitchell
11.Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
12.Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
13.Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H Lawrence
14.Let the Circle Be Unbroken * by Mildred D. Taylor
15.Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winnifred Watson
16.Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm * by Kate Wiggins Douglas
17.Robin Hood by Henry Gilbert
18.Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry * by Mildred D. Taylor
19.Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
20.Tell me the Truth About Love by W.H Auden 
21The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
22.The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
23.The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

24.The Bell Jar * by Sylvia Plath
25.The Cocktail Party by T.S Eliot
26.The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
27.The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
28.The Great Gatsby * by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
30-37.The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Big Woods *, Little House on the Prairie *, On the Banks of Plum CreekBy the Shores of the Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, & The First Four Years)
38.The Outsiders by S.E Hinton
39.The Marvellous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum  

40.The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
41.The Road to Memphis * by Mildred D. Taylor
42.The Stranger by Albert Camus
43.Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

19th Century


44.A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
45.Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
46.Grimms' Fairytales by Jacob & Willhelm Grimm

48.Nights with Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris
49.Quo Vadis? * by Henryk Sienkiewicz

50.Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
51.The Awakening by Kate Chopin 
52.The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
53.The Professor by Charlotte Bronte
54.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
55.Walden by Henry David Thoreau

17th Century

56.Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault


1st Century B.C (approx)

57.The Aeneid by Virgil

8th Century B.C (approx)

58.The Odyssey by Homer 

The Classics Club

I think I might actually make a dedicated Classics Club shelf for the books that I own now, which will hopefully help to motivate me a bit more as well. I've been reading a lot of parenting books and such recently and after a particularly hectic day the other day I retreated to The Professor and realised how much I miss reading the classics, and reading for myself rather than always with the goal to learn how to do something. I think it's important for my kids to know that I love reading for its' own sake as well as for the skills that I can learn from books and aside from reading to them (which I really do love). I want them to grow up seeing that reading is a viable and fulfilling hobby to have, and I hope this shift will help with that. 

4 comments:

  1. Mine has rather fallen by the wayside as well and I don't even have the genuine excuse of having gone off to have babies! I'm at the halfway point as well and every book I've checked off has been purely co-incidental - I haven't actually TRIED...

    I think I'm at... hang on....31 books out of 100. Not as bad as I thought, but I haven't crossed anything off in AGES.

    http://www.bookinginheels.com/2011/11/project-fill-in-gaps.html

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  2. And THIS is why I never signed up - because with the best will in the world, I read such a mishmash of stuff (and so slowly) that I'm almost guaranteed to fail at the five-year thing miserably. Although, I have to say, watching BazPierce on BookTube has helped buck me up a bit, because MAN that boy puts me to shame. He's what, like, 16? This month he's read Villette, Moby Dick, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Maus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Where Angels Fear to Tread, two YA novels and two of the Man Booker Longlist. WHAAAAAT?! I am in AWE.

    And so I went to the library today and pulled out a shit ton of amazing-sounding books, because I suddenly want to read everything, right now, no messing about. I should probably get off the internet first though, right?

    OOOH, but first, I'll pick three of my favourites off your list for no reason except I LOVE LISTS: Cold Comfort Farm (so charming), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (so funny) and The Outsiders (HELLO TEEN NOSTALGIA). I have a whole bunch of these on Mount TBR/my library list too, so... buddy reads sometime? Doesn't have to be a readalong with posts and stuff, just reading the same book at the same time and Twitter chatting maybe? I've got nine on my actual TBR shelves and more that I want, so we should talk crossovers sometime. :D

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    Replies
    1. *cough* Long comment, oops. :(

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    2. Yes! Definitely buddy reads :-) sounds great, a bit of motivation but no pressure

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