A new challenge to get me reading more classic novels, especially all those 'Great Novels' that all lovers of literature should read. The plan is to select fifty classic novels to read over a five year period. No specific rules other than 'revisits' don't count, so if I chose to re-read a classic, that is not included in the fifty. Ideally, I would like to read authors that I have not read before, or forgotten classics of beloved writers, and have no more than one book by an author on this list.
I have compiled a wish-list and will link blog posts as I go. Undoubtedly, I will add/remove titles as I trip down rabbit holes, but here is the plan (as at August 2023) of what I will read from 2023-2028.
Fifty Over Five
- Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
- Elizabeth Bowen - The Heat of the Day* or The Death of the Heart
- John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Willa Cather - O Pioneers or My Antonia
- Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
- Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White* or The Moonstone*
- Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim*
- Charles Dickens - David Copperfield*
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov
- Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo*
- George Eliot - Daniel Deronda*
- Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
- Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier or Parade's End*
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude*
- Elizabeth Gaskell - Mary Barton
- Graham Greene - Brighton Rock* or The Quiet American*
- Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon* or The Thin Man*
- Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises*
- Homer - The Iliad
- Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame* or Les Miserables*
- Henry James - Portrait of a Lady* or The Golden Bowl
- Jerome K Jerome - The Men on a Boat
- Rudyard Kipling - Kim*
- Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
- DH Lawrence - Sons and Lovers* or Lady Chatterley's Lover*
- Rosamond Lehmann - The Weather in the Streets
- Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook*
- Sinclair Lewis - Main Street*
- Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano*
- Katherine Mansfield - The Garden Party*
- W Somerset Maugham - Razor's Edge
- Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
- Herman Melville - Moby Dick*
- Nancy Mitford - The Pursuit of Love*
- Iris Murdoch - A Severed Head or The Sea, The Sea or Under the Net
- Vladamir Nabakov - Lolita* or Pale Fire*
- Edna O'Brien - The Country Girls*
- George Orwell - Burmese Days*
- Marcel Proust - Swann's Way*
- Jean Rhys - Good Morning, Midnight*
- Samuel Richardson - Clarissa*
- Dorothy L Sayers - The Nine Tailors*
- Nevil Shute - A Town Like Alice or On the Beach
- Upton Sinclair - The Jungle*
- Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children
- William Makepeace Thackery - Vanity Fair*
- Anthony Trollope - The Warden or The Way We Live Now
- Winnifred Watson - Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
- Patrick White - The Vivisector or Voss
- Virginia Woolf - The Voyage Out* or Between the Acts*
*on the 1001 list