The Classics Club

I mostly do not post about reading challenges here since I have my challenge blog where I keep track of all of the reading challenges I'm participating in.  However, this is such an awesome challenge, I had to post about it here first.  The Classics Club is the brainchild of Jillian at A Room of One's Own.  It's not only a reading challenge, but a kind of book club for like minds to share (and perhaps discuss) a certain amount of classics over a certain amount of time (participants discretion).  Listed below are the club basics, as outlined by Jillian.  Visit this POST for complete details on how everything works.

UPDATE: The Classics Club took on a life of it's own (with Jillian's blessing) and now has a dedicated blog.

The club basics:

• 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
• come back here and link your classics list to this blog according to these instructions
• 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, come back here and reply to your initial comment when you joined, to let us know you won (instructions when you achieve your challenge)!

My plan:

I will read 100 classics in five years time.  I am also participating in the Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project, which is also 100 books in five years time, but these can be any books from your to-be-read list (or in my case, shelves) that you've been wanting to read.  My FITG list consists of some classics so I did not include them on my Classics Club list.  I figure I can easily manage 200 books over five years for both challenges.  My Classics Club list is mostly culled from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Peter Boxall) book, the three editions combined, 2006, 2008, and 2010.  I will be including modern classics as well from the 1001 lists and the remainder are classics (books written more than 50 years ago or modern, prize winning/nominated books) that are not on the 1001 list.  I already own every book on my list so I do not have to buy or borrow any books for this challenge.  Woot! Also, my good friend Heather at Between the Covers (and my loyal TuesBookTalk buddy) is doing this challenge as well and I told her I would pick some of the books from her list so we can discuss the books from time to time.  It turns out that a lot of the ones I wanted to pick were on her list so there are a lot of shared titles on our lists.

My start date:  March 11, 2012

Finish date goal:  March 11, 2017
My Prize: I'll treat myself to a nice lunch by myself at 50 and 100 books read.

Books in red are re-reads

Books in blue are not on the 1001 lists

Books marked with an (H) are shared titles with Heather

All reviews on books I read for this challenge will be posted on this blog (or on Castle Macabre in the case of horror or speculative fiction titles).  All challenge progress (titles crossed off) will be tracked over at my challenge blog, Challenges of The True Book Addict).

My List:

Peter Ackroyd

1. The Lambs of London

Jane Austen (H)

2. Emma

3. Mansfield Park

4. Northanger Abbey

5. Persuasion

Louisa May Alcott

6. Little Women  (H)

Isabel Allende

7. The House of the Spirits

Maya Angelou

8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Anne Bronte

9. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall  (H)

Charlotte Bronte

10. Jane Eyre

11. Villette  (H)

Emily Bronte

12. Wuthering Heights

Anthony Burgess

13. A Clockwork Orange

Albert Camus

14. The Plague

Truman Capote

15. Breakfast at Tiffany's  (H)

16. In Cold Blood

Lewis Carroll  (H)

17. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

18. Through the Looking Glass

Blaise Cendrars

19. Moravagine

Paulo Coelho

20. The Devil and Miss Prym

Wilkie Collins

21. The Woman in White

Thomas B. Costain

22. The Silver Chalice

Honore de Balzac

23. Cousin Bette

Charles Dickens

24. David Copperfield  (H)

25. Great Expectations  (H)

26. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

27. Little Dorritt

28. A Tale of Two Cities  (H)

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

29. Out of Africa

Fyodor Dostoevsky

30. Crime and Punishment  (H)

Margaret Drabble

31. The Red Queen

Daphne du Maurier

32. Rebecca  (H)

Alexandre Dumas

33. The Count of Monte-Cristo  (H)

34. Queen Margot

George Eliot  (H)

35. Middlemarch

36. The Mill on the Floss

37. Silas Marner

Bret Easton Ellis

38. American Psycho

Henry Fielding

39. Tom Jones

Gustave Flaubert

40. Madame Bovary  (H)

E.M. Forster

41. Howard's End  (H)

John Fowles

42. The Collector

43. The French Lieutenant's Woman

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
44. The Sylph

Stella Gibbons
45. Cold Comfort Farm

H. Rider Haggard
46. She

Thomas Hardy
47. The Mayor of Casterbridge

Nathaniel Hawthorne
48. The House of Seven Gables  (H)
49. The Marble Faun

Victor Hugo  (H)
50. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
51. Les Miserables

Aldous Huxley
52. Brave New World

John Irving
53. The World According to Garp

Kazuo Ishiguro
54. Never Let Me Go

Henry James
55. The Portrait of a Lady  (H)
56. The Golden Bowl

Barbara Kingsolver
57. The Poisonwood Bible

D.H. Lawrence
58. Sons and Lovers  (H)

Sheridan Le Fanu
59. Uncle Silas

Gaston Leroux
60. The Phantom of the Opera

Doris Lessing 
61. The Golden Notebook

M.G. Lewis
62. The Monk

Cormac McCarthy
63. All the Pretty Horses

Ann-Marie McDonald
64. Fall on Your Knees

Thomas Mann
65. Buddenbrooks

Rohinton Mistry
66. A Fine Balance

Iris Murdoch
67. The Bell

Joyce Carol Oates 
68. Blonde

Michael Ondaatje
69. The English Patient

George Orwell
70. 1984

Boris Pasternak
71. Doctor Zhivago

Sylvia Plath
72. The Bell Jar

E. Annie Proulx
73. The Shipping News

Ann Radcliffe
74. The Mysteries of Udolpho  (H)

Jean Rhys
75. Wide Sargasso Sea

Marilynne Robinson
76. Gilead

Carl Sagan
77. Contact

J.D. Salinger
78. The Catcher in the Rye

Sir Walter Scott
79. Rob Roy

Mary Shelley
80. Frankenstein  (H)

Carol Shields

81. The Stone Diaries

Robert Louis Stevenson
82. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Patrick Suskind
83. Perfume

Booth Tarkington
84. The Magnificent Ambersons

Donna Tartt
85. The Secret History

William Makepeace Thackeray
86. Vanity Fair  (H)

Colm Toibin
87. The Master

J.R.R. Tolkien
88. The Hobbit  (H)

Leo Tolstoy
89. War and Peace  (H)

Sigrid Undset
90. Kristin Lavransdatter

Kurt Vonnegut
91. Slaughterhouse Five

Lew Wallace
92. Ben-Hur

Sarah Waters
93. Fingersmith

Evelyn Waugh
94. Brideshead Revisited

Edith Wharton
95. The Age of Innocence
96. Ethan Frome  (H)
97. The House of Mirth  (H)

T.H. White
98. The Once and Future King

Virginia Woolf
99. Mrs. Dalloway  (H)
100. Orlando