The Classics Club

The Classics Club is the brainchild of Jillian at A Room of One's Own.  It's not only a reading challenge, but a kind of book club for like minds to share (and perhaps discuss) a certain amount of classics over a certain amount of time (participants discretion).  Listed below are the club basics, as outlined by Jillian.  Visit this POST for complete details on how everything works.  Dedicated blog here.

The club basics:

• choose 50+ classics
• list them at your blog
• choose a reading completion goal date up to five years in the future and note that date on your classics list of 50+ titles
• come back here and link your classics list to this blog according to these instructions
• write about each title on your list as you finish reading it, and link it to your main list
• when you’ve written about every single title, come back here and reply to your initial comment when you joined, to let us know you won (instructions when you achieve your challenge)!

My plan:

I will read 100  101 classics in five years time.  I am also participating in the Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project, which is also 100 books in five years time, but these can be any books from your to-be-read list (or in my case, shelves) that you've been wanting to read.  My FITG list consists of some classics so I did not include them on my Classics Club list.  I figure I can easily manage 200 books over five years for both challenges.  My Classics Club list is mostly culled from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Peter Boxall) book, the three editions combined, 2006, 2008, and 2010.  I will be including modern classics as well from the 1001 lists and the remainder are classics (books written more than 50 years ago or modern, prize winning/nominated books) that are not on the 1001 list.  I already own every book on my list so I do not have to buy or borrow any books for this challenge.  Woot! Also, my good friend Heather at Between the Covers (and my loyal TuesBookTalk buddy) is doing this challenge as well and I told her I would pick some of the books from her list so we can discuss the books from time to time.  It turns out that a lot of the ones I wanted to pick were on her list so there are a lot of shared titles on our lists.

My start date:  March 11, 2012

Finish date goal:  March 11, 2017
My Prize: I'll treat myself to a nice lunch by myself at 50 and 100 books read.

Books in red are re-reads

Books in blue are not on the 1001 lists

Books marked with an (H) are shared titles with Heather

All reviews on books I read for this challenge will be posted on The True Book Addict (or on Castle Macabre in the case of horror or speculative fiction titles).  All challenge progress (titles crossed off) will be tracked here on this blog.  Completed titles will have the month completed beside them and will be linked to my review.

My List:

Peter Ackroyd

1. The Lambs of London

Jane Austen (H)

2. Emma

3. Mansfield Park

4. Northanger Abbey

5. Persuasion  (completed January 2013 review)

Louisa May Alcott

6. Little Women  (H)

Isabel Allende

7. The House of the Spirits

Maya Angelou

8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Anne Bronte

9. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall  (H)

Charlotte Bronte

10. Jane Eyre

11. Villette  (H)

Emily Bronte

12. Wuthering Heights

Anthony Burgess

13. A Clockwork Orange

Albert Camus

14. The Plague 

Truman Capote

15. Breakfast at Tiffany's  (H)

16. In Cold Blood

Lewis Carroll  (H)
Dual Review Here

17. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (read in 2012)

18. Through the Looking Glass (read in 2012)

Blaise Cendrars

19. Moravagine

Paulo Coelho

20. The Devil and Miss Prym

Wilkie Collins

21. The Woman in White

Thomas B. Costain

22. The Silver Chalice

Honore de Balzac

23. Cousin Bette

Charles Dickens

24. David Copperfield  (H)

25. Great Expectations  (H)

26. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

27. Little Dorritt

28. A Tale of Two Cities  (H)

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

29. Out of Africa

Fyodor Dostoevsky

30. Crime and Punishment  (H)  (read in 2013)

Margaret Drabble

31. The Red Queen

Daphne du Maurier

32. Rebecca  (H)  (Read)

Alexandre Dumas

33. The Count of Monte-Cristo  (H)

34. Queen Margot

George Eliot  (H)

35. Middlemarch  (read in 2012 review)

36. The Mill on the Floss

37. Silas Marner

Bret Easton Ellis

38. American Psycho

Henry Fielding

39. Tom Jones

Gustave Flaubert

40. Madame Bovary  (H)

E.M. Forster

41. Howard's End  (H) (Read 2014)

John Fowles

42. The Collector

43. The French Lieutenant's Woman

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
44. The Sylph

Stella Gibbons
45. Cold Comfort Farm (Read)

H. Rider Haggard
46. She

Thomas Hardy
47. The Mayor of Casterbridge

Nathaniel Hawthorne
48. The House of Seven Gables  (H)  2014 - did not finish
49. The Marble Faun

Victor Hugo  (H)
50. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
51. Les Miserables  

Aldous Huxley
52. Brave New World

John Irving
53. The World According to Garp

Kazuo Ishiguro
54. Never Let Me Go (Read)

Henry James
55. The Portrait of a Lady  (H)
56. The Golden Bowl
57. What Maisie Knew

Barbara Kingsolver
58. The Poisonwood Bible

D.H. Lawrence
59. Sons and Lovers  (H)

Sheridan Le Fanu
60. Uncle Silas

Gaston Leroux
61. The Phantom of the Opera

Doris Lessing 
62. The Golden Notebook

M.G. Lewis
63. The Monk

Cormac McCarthy
64. All the Pretty Horses

Ann-Marie MacDonald
65. Fall on Your Knees (Read 2014)

Thomas Mann
66. Buddenbrooks

Rohinton Mistry
67. A Fine Balance

Iris Murdoch
68. The Bell

Joyce Carol Oates 
69. Blonde

Michael Ondaatje
70. The English Patient

George Orwell
71. 1984

Boris Pasternak
72. Doctor Zhivago

Sylvia Plath
73. The Bell Jar

E. Annie Proulx
74. The Shipping News

Ann Radcliffe
75. The Mysteries of Udolpho  (H)

Jean Rhys
76. Wide Sargasso Sea  (Read 2014)

Marilynne Robinson
77. Gilead  (read in 2012- not reviewed)

Carl Sagan
78. Contact

J.D. Salinger
79. The Catcher in the Rye  (read April 2012 review)

Sir Walter Scott
80. Rob Roy

Mary Shelley
81. Frankenstein  (H)

Carol Shields

82. The Stone Diaries  (Read 2014)

Robert Louis Stevenson
83. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (read in 2012 review)

Patrick Suskind
84. Perfume

Booth Tarkington
85. The Magnificent Ambersons

Donna Tartt
86. The Secret History

William Makepeace Thackeray
87. Vanity Fair  (H)

Colm Toibin
88. The Master

J.R.R. Tolkien
89. The Hobbit  (H)  (read December 2012 review)

Leo Tolstoy
90. War and Peace  (H)

Sigrid Undset
91. Kristin Lavransdatter

Kurt Vonnegut
92. Slaughterhouse Five

Lew Wallace
93. Ben-Hur

Sarah Waters
94. Fingersmith

Evelyn Waugh
95. Brideshead Revisited

Edith Wharton
96. The Age of Innocence
97. Ethan Frome  (H)
98. The House of Mirth  (H)

T.H. White
99. The Once and Future King

Virginia Woolf
100. Mrs. Dalloway  (H)
101. Orlando