Joining The Classics Club

I am so happy to have found The Classics Club! Thanks to Carissa at Bookshelves and Daydreams for pointing me in the direction of this!

 

The club basics (the short version):

• – choose 50+ classics
• – list them at your blog
• – choose a reading completion goal date up to five years in the future and note that date on your classics list of 50+ titles
• – e-mail the moderators of this blog (theclassicsclubblog@gmail.com) with your list link and information and it will be posted on the Members Page!
• – write about each title on your list as you finish reading it, and link it to your main list
• – when you’ve written about every single title, let us know!

So those are the basic 'rules' of the club.

As I have mentioned before, my grandpa worked at Oxford University Press and I inherited his collection of Oxford classics. Plus I have purchased other copies of my own along the way.

 

This whole shelf is full of them! They are tiny books, only measuring 9.5 x 15cm. So they are actually three deep in that shelf. The printing is tiny and the pages are so fine. I used to adore reading these when I was younger (and, of course, still do - although not sure if my eyesight is still up to the task!)

So I will be selecting my list from lots of these, as well as a few modern classics.
Much as I would like to say I will read 200, or 2000!, classics in the five year timeframe, I will try to be realistic and shoot for 50. I can always add to the list later if I read faster!

My list, in no particular order, is as follows:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke
3. St Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West
4. Lancelot of the Lake
5. Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
6. The Golden Fleece by Padraic Colum
7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
8. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
11. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
12. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
13. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
14. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Shiralee by D'Arcy Niland
17. A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute
18. I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall
19. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
20. The Sign Above The Door by William W. Canfield
21. The Odyssey
22. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
23. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
24. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
25. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
26. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
27. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
28. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
29. The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
30. The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
31. Passage To India by E.M. Forster
32. The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell
33. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
34. The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
35. The Dubliners by James Joyce
36. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
37. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith
40. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
41. Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
42. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
43. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
44. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
45. The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley
46. Hans Anderson's Fairy Tales
47. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
48. Watership Down by Richard Adams
49. Little Women by Louise May Alcott
50. Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling

And I will put my timeframe as being February 2016 to February 2021. Wow, that sounds SO far away!

I am really looking forward to all this wonderful reading - it was hard to narrow it down!

I have not chosen my first book yet. So how about we say first person to comment with a book title from the above list will be the first book I read and review? Maybe you would like to join in as well?

Maybe I am mad - but it will be fun!