I participate in The Classics Club, which encourages people to read more classics and blog about them. The basic idea is that one selects at least 50 classics and picks a deadline of up to 5 years in the future to have them read and written about. I have chosen 102 and my start date was 1 September 2013. I have given myself five years to do this, mainly to allow myself to read other things as well! I will link to the individual blogs as and when they’re written. I have only selected things I haven’t read before, or at least haven’t read in full. Hopefully I haven’t missed anything, but please let me know if I am missing out on an amazing classic!

Ann Ratcliffe – The Mysteries of Udolpho

Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms

Hilary Mantel – Fludd

Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlett Letter

William Thackeray – Vanity Fair

Charles Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit

Nancy Mitford – Love in a Cold Climate

Nancy Mitford – In Pursuit of Love

John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

Irene Nemirovsky – Suite Francaise

J.M. Coetzee – Foe

Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake

Joe Haldeman – The Forever War

Julian Barnes – Flaubert’s Parrot

Homer – Illiad

Homer – Odyssey

Ira Levin – The Stepford Wives

Franz Kafka – The Trial

Dante – The Divine Comedy

Robert Penn Warren – All The King’s Men

Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Brothers Karamazov

Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita

Anton Chekov – Collected Short Stories

Lawrence Sterne – The Life and Options of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

John Milton – Paradise Lost

Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

George and Weedon Goldsmith – Diary of a Nobody

Charlotte Bronte – Villette

Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea

Iris Murdoch – The Black Prince

Frederick Rolfe – Hadrian VII

Daphne du Maurier – Don’t Look Now

Olivia Manning – The Balkan Trilogy

Muriel Sparke – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson – The Master of Ballentrae

Oliver Goldsmith – The Vicar of Wakefield

Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – The Sorrow of Young Werther

Ford Maddox Ford – The Good Solider

Victor Hugo – Les Miserables

Thomas de Quincey – Confessions of An English Opium Eater

Henry Fielding – Tom Jones

Thomas Hardy – Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy – Far From The Madding Crowd

Henry James – The Golden Bowl

Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina

Victor Hugo – The Count of Monte Cristo

John Galsworthy – The Forsyte Saga

L.P. Hartley – The Go-Between

Thomas Hardy – The Woodlanders

Kingsley Amis – Take A Girl Like You

Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote

William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

Iris Murdoch – The Message to the Planets

Alan Paton – Cry, The Beloved Country

Rumer Godden – In The House of Brede

Elizabeth Jane Howard  – The Cazalet Saga

Philip K. Dick – The Man in the High Castle

Paul Bowles – The Sheltering Sky

John Kennedy O’Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces

John Irving – The Cider House Rules

Toni Morrison – Song of Soloman

Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Edmund White – A Boy’s Own Story

Andrea Ashworth – Once in a House on Fire

Colm Toibin – The Heather Blazing

Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Trollope – The Warden

P.G. Wodehouse – Collected Stories

Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out

Ursula Le Guin – The Wizard of Earthsea

Mervyn Peake  – Gormenghast

Stephen King – The Stand

Vassily Grossman – Life and Fate

Wilkie Collins – Armadale

Charles Dickens – Hard Times

Robert Louis Stevenson – The Black Arrow

Compton MacKenzie – Whisky Galore

Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses

Ian McEwan – The Innocent

James Hogg – Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Martin Amis – The Rachel Papers

Michael Ondaajte – The English Patient

Truman Capote – Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

George Eliot – Daniel Deronda

Nina Bawden – Carrie’s War

Herman Melville – Moby Dick

George du Maurier – Trilby

J.D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos – Dangerous Liaisons

John Bunyan – The Pilgrim’s Progress

Anthony Trollope – The Way We Live Now

Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep

J.J.R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings

Graham Green – The Power and the Glory

Peter Carey – Oscar and Lucinda

Khalid Hosseini – The Kite Runner

William Boyd – Any Human Heart

3 done, 99 to go!