Classics Club

The Classics Club is a challenge-slash-book-club designed to promote blogging about classic books! The goal is to read and blog about at least 50 classic books within five years. I like the idea because there are so many books I’ve been meaning to read for a lifetime, and engaging with a classic is rewarding both on a personal level and in building a mental library of allusions and literary conventions… Plus we’re encouraged to define our own classics as long as they’re more than 25 years old, so I’m counting some scifi/horror/comics/queer classics because that’s how I roll.

I’ll link each title as I review it, which should be about once a month given the time limit. This list is sorted roughly by how soon I might be able to read the book, but I’ll reorder it as things develop further. I may also change out a few titles if something isn’t working out or I don’t have anything to say on it, so feel free to recommend more books (or vote to move a book higher if you’re super into it!)

Goal date: March 1, 2022

  1. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (February 2017)
  2. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor (March 2017)
  3. The Wonder Woman by George Perez Omnibus (May 2017)
  4. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (June 2017)
  5. Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon (August 2017)
  6. The Crooked Mirror and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (September 2017)
  7. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (October 2017)
  8. Cain by Lord Byron (November 2017)
  9. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (December 2017)
  10. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (January 2018)
  11. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (February 2018)
  12. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (March 2018)
  13. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (June 2018)
  14. Faust: A Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (June 2018)
  15. Emma by Jane Austen (August 2018)
  16. The Doom Patrol Archives, Vol. 1
  17. Persuasion by Jane Austen
  18. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  19. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  20. Dune by Frank Herbert
  21. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
  22. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
  23. The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
  24. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  25. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  26. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
  27. The Iliad by Homer
  28. The Odyssey by Homer
  29. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
  30. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
  31. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  32. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  33. Showcase Presents: The Phantom Stranger, Vol. 1
  34. The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
  35. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  36. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
  37. Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer
  38. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  39. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
  40. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  41. She by H. Rider Haggard
  42. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  43. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  44. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  45. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Kovacs/Sandars/Mason versions, counting as one)
  46. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
  47. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
  48. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
  49. The Love Poems by Ovid
  50. Metamorphoses by Ovid
  51. 1984 by George Orwell
  52. Renard the Fox (reread)