Over a year ago in September 2015 I posted this introduction to the Classics Club Reading Challenge. The official specifics of this challenge can be found 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.

The other day I realized that I haven’t kept this blog up to date with my progress at all since posting that first introduction. A lot has changed since then– I was just entering my freshman year of college– so I feel as though a proper update is definitely warranted.

Originally I created a list of fifty classics I wanted to read by the year 2020. Though I would certainly still love to read those specific classics, I’ve since branched out as my reading tastes have expanded in some ways and narrowed in others. Though I have read 9 classics from my original list, I have read far more in general.

Since beginning the challenge I have read the following classics:

1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
3. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
4. The Distracted Preacher by Thomas Hardy
5. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
6. Galileo by Bertolt Brecht
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
8. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
10. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
11. My Antonia by Willa Cather
12. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
14. The Parish and the Hill by Mary Doyle Curran
15. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
16. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
17. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
18. Animal Farm by George Orwell
19. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
20. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
21. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Mulligan Guard Ball by Edward Harrigan
23. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
24. Light in August by William Faulkner
25. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
27. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Moving forward, I would like to use this challenge as a way to keep track of the literature I read. Though I will continue to use my original list as a guide, I’m more interested in keeping a record of the classics that I read in general.

Are you participating in the Classics Club Reading Challenge? Have you read any of the classics I’ve mentioned? Are there classics that I should add to my list or prioritize on my TBR? Let me know in the comments section below!

Yours,

HOLLY