The Classics Club

The Classics Club

I'm psyched that I just found a great site for those who read and want to discuss classics. To join, one must put together a list of fifty (or more) classics to read within the next 5 years which would be January 31, 2018 for me. I figure I can read about 1 classic a month. So, I've made my list and am looking forward to the fun.

For the most part, I put books on the list if I think I need to read them for school. There is an off chance that I might apply at some time to be a reader for the AP English Literature exam. If accepted and asked to read the open question, I would need to be familiar with a wide variety of books and plays. Sad to say, I've spent the past 15 years reading the same classics over and over and over again. I can tell you anything you want to know about Wuthering Heights, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Frankenstein. Most of what you want to know about The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Kite Runner, The Crucible, Pride and Prejudice, and Heart of Darkness, and some of what you want to know about Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Obason.

I'd love to have meaningful discussions with my fellow teachers about other works. I hate when I'm at an AP conference and someone mentions a classic I haven't read, and everyone gives me the look which suggests I'm no kind of English teacher if I haven't read a particular book.

So, without further ado:

1. Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart
2. Aeschylus: Oresteia
3. Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
4. Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima
5. Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
6. Aristophanes: Lysistrata
7. Atwood, Margaret: A Handmaid’s Tale    - Finished on Feb. 6, 2013
8. Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot
9. Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451
10. Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange
11. Burns, Olive: Cold Sassy Tree - Finished March 28, 2013
12. Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop - Finished April 6, 2013
13. Crane, Stephen: Red Badge of Courage
14. de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote
15. de Laclos, Choderlos: Dangerous Liaisons
16. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
17. Dickens, Charles: Little Dorrit - Finished on March 10, 2013
18. Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
19. Dreiser, Theodore: American Tragedy
20. Eliot, George: Middlemarch - Finished March 30, 2014
21. Euripedes: Four Tragedies
22. Forster, E.M.: Howard’s End
23. Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
24. Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
25. Gaskell, Elizabeth: Wives and Daughters
26. Hamilton, Edith: Mythology
27. Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure
28. Hardy, Thomas: Mayor of Casterbridge - Finished December 15, 2013
29. Heller, Joseph: Catch-22
30. Hesse, Hermann: Siddhartha
31. Hugo, Victor: Les Miserables
32. Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God - Finished April 23, 2013
33. Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World
34. Irving, John The World According to Garp
35. Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day - Finished on January 30, 2014
36. James, Henry: The Wings of the Dove
37. Kawabata, Yasunari: Snow Country
38. Kerouac, Jack: On the Road
39. Lady Muraski: The Tale of the Genji
40. Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus
41. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: Love in the Time of Cholera
42. McCullers, Carson: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
43. Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman
44. Morrison, Toni: Beloved - Finished May 31, 2013
45. O’Connor, Flannery: Wise Blood
46. Orczy, Baroness: The Scarlet Pimpernel
47. Orwell, George: 1984
48. Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country
49. Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News - Finished on March 2, 2014
50. Radcliffe, Anne: The Mysteries of Udolpho
51. Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye
52. Seton, Anya: Katherine - Finished November 20, 2013
53. Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle
54. Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays (Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus)
55. Soseki, Natsume: Kokoro
56. Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row
57. Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
58. Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
59. Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons
60. Voltaire: Candide
61. Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse Five
62. Walker, Alice: The Color Purple - Finished April 20, 2013
63. Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited
64. Welch, James: Winter in the Blood
65. Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire - Finished on March 30, 2013
66. Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse

The following works were added after my original list.

67. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Anne Bronte
68. Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady: Samuel Richardson
69: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - Finished August 10, 2013
70. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (re-read finished March 19, 2013)
71. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
72. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
73. Parade's End by Ford Maddox Ford
74. The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather - Finished July 15, 2013
75. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - Finished July 30, 2013
76. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte - Finished August 22, 2013
77. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe - Finished May 15, 2014
78. Shirley by Charlotte Bronte