Introducing: The Classics Club

Introducing: The Classics Club

• Mar 10, 2012

Jillian, the blogger and avid reader behind A Room of One's Own, has come up with a really exciting way to connect bloggers that love the classics. It's a book club of sorts named The Classics Club. 

How does it work? Each individual reader sets a goal to read a certain number of classics over a certain period of time. Create your list, post it on your blog, and share the link on Jillian's Join page. And then get to reading! The idea is connect bloggers that love classics AND encourage people to read more classics. I absolutely love classics, but there are so many I haven't read. 

My personal goal is to read 70 classics over the next five years. I'm reading all novels - mostly from the 19th and 20th Century. The majority of my list will be new-to-me reads, but I've also included quite a few re-reads. I absolutely love re-reading books, so I'm looking forward to returning to some old favorites as well as I few I didn't love the first time around. I want to see how time has changed the book for me.

The club is meant to be very low key. Everyone picks their own list - and they can change it as desired. You'll see my list 70 books to savor (tackle?) over the next 5 years below. But that doesn't mean I won't change my mind on a few! I make no promises. I'm most looking forward to reading Middlemarch by George Eliot and re-reading Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

Jillian also suggest setting personal rewards based on different milestones, and I love that idea. In college, I used to “reward” myself for every hour of schoolwork with like 30 minutes of downtime. It probably wasn’t the most productive reward system, but I liked it. For every 10 books I read, I’m going to buy a really pretty version of my favorite book from those 10 (like a Penguin Classic clothbound edition). I'll be reading a lot of these on my Kindle, which is why the idea of choosing a lovely hard copy sounds like a nice reward.

I've set up a page that you can find underneath my header for easy access to the list at any time AND a sidebar button with a progress bar to track my status!

Interested in joining? Any blogger can be a part of The Classics Club - just click on the link to sign-up on Jillian's website. 

Start Date: March 2012

Goal Finish Date: March 2017
Books marked with asterisk = re-read

Pre-1700s (1)

Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan (1678)

1700s (3)

Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe (1722)

Evelina – Fanny Burney (1778)

The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe (1794)

1800s (35)

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (1811)*

The Swiss Family Robinson – Johann Wyss (1812)

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (1813)*

Emma – Jane Austen (1815)*

Persuasion – Jane Austen (1817)*

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (1847)

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (1847)*

Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë (1848)

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (1850)

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)*

Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell (1851)

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (1852)

Villette – Charlotte Brontë (1853)

Bleak House – Charles Dickens (1853)

Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens (1857)

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (1857)

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (1859)*

The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (1859)

The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot (1860)

Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (1862)

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)

Wives and Daughters – Elizabeth Gaskell (1866)

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott (1867)*

Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll (1871)

Middlemarch – George Eliot (1871)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain (1876)*

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (1877)

The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James (1881)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (1884)*

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)

A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett (1888)*

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde (1891)

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (1891)

The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux (1897)

1900s (31)

The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1903)

The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton (1905)

A Room with a View – E.M. Forster (1908)*

The Anne of Green Gables series – L.M. Montgomery (1908 – 1939)

The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (1910)*

The Forsyte Saga – John Galsworthy (1920)

The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (1920)

A Passage to India – E.M. Forster (1924)

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (1925)

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway (1929)*

Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (1936)*

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (1937)

The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)

Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier (1938)*

For Whom the Bell Toll – Ernest Hemingway (1940)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers (1940)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith (1943)

1984 – George Orwell (1949)

The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis (1950 – 1956)

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (1951)

Charlotte's Web – E.B. White (1952)*

East of Eden – John Steinbeck (1952)

The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (1960)*

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (1963)

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez (1985)