The Classics Club has been around for a few years now, so I’m a bit late to the party. The plan is to read all 50 of the books listed below between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2019. So I have some time! I’ll add links here when I have read and reviewed the books listed.

I’ve tried to be quite wide and varied in my definition of “classic”, partly to keep my reading broad and to keep me interested in the challenge. Apparently changing your book list mid-challenge is allowed, so I have edited this a few times!

1. Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart – read August 2016

2. Jane Austen – Emma – read November 2016

3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Aurora Leigh – read May 2015

4. Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex

5. Gertrude Bell – The Desert and the Sown

6. Angela Carter – The Magic Toyshop – read October 2015

7. Anton Chekhov – A Russian Affair – read July 2017

8. Apsley Cherry-Garrard – The Worst Journey in the World – read August 2015

9. Colette – The Vagabond – read January 2016

10. Monica Dickens – My Turn to Make the Tea – read October 2015

11. Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem – read April 2015

12. Hilda “HD” Doolittle – HERmione – read February 2017

13. Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man – read October 2017

14. Madeleine l’Engle – A Wrinkle in Time

15. Hans Fallada – Alone in Berlin – read September 2016

16. F Scott Fitzgerald – The Beautiful and Damned – read February 2016

17. Janet Flanner – Paris Was Yesterday – read February 2015

18. E M Forster – A Passage to India – read May 2016

19. Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique

20. Patricia Highsmith – The Price of Salt – read February 2017

21. Tove Jansson – The Summer Book – read July 2016

22. Yasunari Kawabata – Snow Country – read December 2017

23. Nikos Kazantzakis – Zorba the Greek – read June 2019

24. Primo Levi – The Periodic Table – read July 2019

25. Daphne du Maurier – My Cousin Rachel – read July 2015

26. Mary McCarthy – The Group – read March 2018

27. Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – read January 2020

28. Grace Metalious – Peyton Place – read September 2018

29. Jessica Mitford – Hons and Rebels – read April 2020

30. Toni Morrison – Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

31. George Orwell – Burmese Days – read March 2017

32. Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Yellow Wallpaper and other stories – read January 2018

33. Sylvia Plath – The Colossus

34. Gerard Reve – The Evenings – read November 2017

35. Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet – read December 2016

36. Antoine De Saint-Exupéry – The Little Prince – read January 2015

37. Goliarda Sapienza – The Art of Joy

38. Dorothy L Sayers – Are Women Human? – read February 2018

39. Muriel Spark – The Girls of Slender Means – read March 2016

40. John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

41. Stendhal – The Red and the Black

42. William Styron – Darkness Visible

43. Wilfred Thesiger – Across the Empty Quarter

44. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina – read February 2018

45. Mark Twain – Can-cans, Cats and Cities of Ash – read April 2017

46. Boris Vian – Mood Indigo/Foam of the Days (It’s had various titles in English)

47. Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle

48. Evelyn Waugh – Scoop – read March 2016

49. P G Wodehouse – Uneasy Money – read December 2016

50. Virginia Woolf – On Fiction