50 Classics
I had left this on the back burner to filter suggestions and sources before making a final call. This personal project has its roots in an earlier blog post I made called A Notso Novel Idea. Essentially, I was disappointed with how little I recalled and appreciated from the so-called core or classic works of fiction. After I had my final list, I was even more shocked at just how many I’d only read under the demands of high school or college. So without further delay (ok, maybe a couple days to dig up the first few books I plan to read), I’ve set my goal…
Fifty classics as chosen by various experts, literature courses, friends and of course, my own whim. I’d like to finish all fifty in one year’s time. Not a particularly aggressive goal, but hopefully a realistic one rather than a manic dash through the stacks. Here are my selections in alphabetical order (merely for convenience):
| Title | Author |
| 1984 | George Orwell |
| All Quiet on the Front | Erich Marie Remarque |
| All The King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren |
| Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand |
| Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| Candide | Voltaire |
| Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Cyrano de Bergerac | Edmond Rostand |
| Don Quixote | Miguel De Cervantes |
| Emma | Jane Austin |
| Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| I, Claudius | Robert Graves |
| Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison |
| Les Miserables | Victor Hugo |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| Madam Bovary | Gustav Flaubert |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| Of Human Bondage | W. Somerset Maugham |
| On The Road | Jack Kerouac |
| Peter Pan | J.M. Barrie |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Sons and Lovers | D.H. Lawrence |
| Stranger in a Strangeland | Robert Heinlein |
| Tales of the South Pacific | James A. Michener |
| The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton |
| The Black Sheep | Honore De Balzac |
| The Call of the Wild | Jack London |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Earnest Hemmingway |
| The Scarlet Pimpernel | Barones Emmuska Orczy |
| The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| The Way of All Flesh | Samuel Butler |
| To Kill A Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| To The Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf |
| Ulysses | James Joyce |
| Watership Down | Richard Adams |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy |
I’ll add these to my online Bookshelf at Cafe Arcane as time allows.
8 Responses
[…] Oops by Mystech @ 8:25 pm Apparently, my 50 Classics post ate the book/author list. It’s been corrected now and the full list is viewable again. Sorry for the confusion. I’ll flog the WordPress software for it’s impertenance. Posted in: LiveJournal, 50 Classics | 1 reads | | Permalink Digg this | Del.icio.us Bookmark […]
[…] 50 Classics: 1984 by George Orwell by Mystech @ 8:37 pm This post is a few days late, so send me to the Ministry of Love. On Sunday I started my 50 Classics project with 1984 by George Orwell. Although this was one of those books on the list that I’ve read before, I still found myself entranced by the dystopia spell just as I had been almost two decades ago. […]
[…] one. 🙂 Posted in: LiveJournal, 50 Classics | 2 reads | No Comments | Permalink Digg this | Del.icio.us Bookmark (No Ratings Yet) Loading… […]
[…] look, finished another title off my long-suffering 50 Classics list! Regrettably, it was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strangeland. Finishing it took enormous force […]
[…] the grueling chore of Stranger in a Strangeland I had to read something light off my 50 Classics list that I knew I would enjoy. Cyrano de Bergerac was both and within arm’s reach so I […]
[…] to eventually unwind enough to sit down and finish Watership Down from my slowly shrinking list of 50 Classics. I’d seen the animated version decades ago in bits and pieces and remembered it fondly. As […]
[…] was tempted to continue the Russian immersion, turn right around and start Anna Karenina (also on my list), but I think I’ll save that one to revisit […]
[…] a tough call between that and Anna Karenina) and its time to choose another classic to knock off the list. I have the following at hand without having to drop in the (modest) Buckhead Library or go […]