Old English Rose Reads

The Classics Club: 101 Classics

Every time I reorganise my bookshelves, or even spend too long looking at them, I find myself wanting to read all of them right now.  Clearly, this isn’t possible as I have to do things like go to work, eat and occasionally talk to my husband, but what it illustrates is how much I love thinking about books that I’m not reading.  A large part of my pleasure in books is derived from anticipating them and pondering them, just as much as actually reading them.  Do I read this one next, or that one?  If I read this one immediately after that one, will it not seem as good as I suspect it is?  Should I plough through this series all in one go or leave gaps?  Shall I immerse myself completely in this author’s works and read them all right now or will I find I reach saturation point and no longer appreciate them as much?  Will I savour this author’s works and ration them out as I know there are only a limited number, or will I devour them all at once?  I can occupy myself for hours in musings like this.

As a result, there are few things I love more than compiling lists of books.  I don’t like to plan my reading in a regimented way (“I will read this, then this,  then this”) but I do like thinking about the books that I might read, that I could read if I wanted to.  That is the beauty for me of Jillian’s Classics Club, in which participants agree to read a certain number of classic books (according to their own definition of ‘classic’) over a certain period of time.  It allows me to indulge my delight in bookish planning and list making, but it’s so unrestricted that it’s not going to feel like a chore.  Books which have sat unread on my shelves for years are imbued with a certain allure now that I have placed them on my list, and already I can’t wait to start reading them all.

After much fiddling about with my selections, I’ve come up with the following list of one hundred and one classic books which I’m going to read over the next five years, so by 12th March 2017 (which seems improbably far in the future at the moment; good lord, I’ll be thirty by then).  Despite my best efforts, I haven’t quite managed to create a list which is 50:50 men:women and English:translated fiction, but I’ve come as close as I can.  Here they are, arranged by date.  Titles marked with an asterisk are rereads or partial rereads.

Ancient World

• The Iliad by Homer (Ancient Greek)
• The Odyssey by Homer (Ancient Greek)*
• If Not, Winter by Sappho (Ancient Greek)
• The Aeneid by Virgil (Latin)*
• Beowulf by Anon. (Anglo-Saxon)*

1000′s

• The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (Japanese)
• The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
• The Poetic Edda by Anon. (Old Norse)*

1100′s

• Lais of Marie de France by Marie de France (Anglo-Norman)

1200′s

• The Prose Edda by Snori Sturluson (Old Norse)*

1300′s

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anon.*
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio*

1400′s

• The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan (Old French)
• The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe

1500′s

• The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser

1600′s

• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish)
• Complete English Poems by John Donne*
• The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette (French)
• Poems, Protest and a Dream by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Spanish)

1700′s

• Letters of a Peruvian Woman by Francoise de Graffigny (French)
• Fanny Hill by John Cleland
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox
• Candide by Voltaire (French)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German)
• Evelina by Fanny Burney
• Dangerous Liasons by Choderlos de Laclos (French)
• A Simple Story by Elizabeth Inchbald

1800′s

• Belinda by Maria Edgeworth
• Zofloya by Charlotte Dacre
• Corinne, or, Italy by Madame de Stael (French)
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen*
• Persuasion by Jane Austen*
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen*
• Persuasion by Jane Austen*
• Marriage by Susan Ferrier
• The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (French)
• Indiana by George Sand (French)
• The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf (German)
• The Jew’s Beech by Annette von Druste-Hulshoff (German)
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (French)
• Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
• Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
• Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Devil’s Elixirs by E. T. A. Hoffman (German)
• North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
• Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
• Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
• Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (French)
• East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood
• No Name by Wilkie Collins
• Armadale by Wilkie Collins
• Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Felix Holt by George Eliot
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
• Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant (French)
• The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde & The Weir of Hermistoun by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Aspen Papers & The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin

1900′s

• Poems by Antonia Pozzi (Italian)
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
• I Am A Cat by Soseki Natsume (Japanese)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
• Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (Norwegian)
• The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
• Passage to India by E. M. Forster
• Mrs Dalloway by Virgina Woolf
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
• Passing by Nella Larsen
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (French)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
• Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan (French)
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Russian)
• Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras (French)
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys*
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian)
• Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Complete Claudine by Colette (French)
• If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (Italian)
• Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

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