nut free nerd

Hi, everyone! Today’s post is a very special TBR list, as I have decided to join the Classics Club Reading Challenge! You can read more about the specifics of this challenge here, but basically it means that you make a list of classics you’d like to read by a certain date. Each time you read a classic on your list you have to write about it and then link the review back to your original list.

I have chosen to set a date of five years for this challenge, meaning that I hope to read all of these classics by September 2020. (Aside: how is 2020 already in five years??? My mind is eternally stuck in 2008, I swear!) I’m not going to stress about finishing this list or anything; I’d rather use this a way to see how many classics I read. I’d love to read more of them, hence my participation in this challenge!

In no particular order, here are the fifty classics I have chosen!

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. Persuasion by Jane Austen
3. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
4. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
5. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
6. Emma by Jane Austen
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
8. Watership Down by Richard Adams
9. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
10. Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
11. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. Stranger by Albert Camus
14. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
17. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
18. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
19. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
20. Middlemarch by George Eliot
21. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
22. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
23. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
24. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
25. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
26. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
27. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
28. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
29. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
30. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
31. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
32. Animal Farm by George Orwell
33. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
34. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
35. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
36. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
37. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
38. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
39. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
40. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
41. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
42. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
43. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
44. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
45. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
46. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
47. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
48. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
49. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
50. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I anticipate changing these titles a bit as I progress with this challenge, mostly because I’ll be discovering which authors I like and dislike, wanting to explore new themes and time periods, and my reading tastes will probably change with time. However, I think these classics are a good place to start!

I’ll be doing updates every few months on the progress I’m making with this challenge, but if you want to stay up to date more regularly I’ll also make this list its own page at the top of this blog. You can click on the Classics Club Challenge tab to see my list, the changes I’ve made to it, and links to reviews of all the books.

Have you read any of these classics? Which ones should I start with? Are there ones I should add or replace with different ones? Let me know in the comments section below!

Yours,
HOLLY