The Classics Club

I found The Classics Club while browsing through book blogs and found it brilliant! As you can guess by the name, it’s a book club for people who love (or try to understand) classics. You can join the club by setting a goal to read 50/100/200 classics in five years. Setting a goal for my reading is something I usually avoid based on my experience with Goodreads Challenge. I felt pressured to read more books for the sake of just completing the goal without really enjoying them, but the Classic Club challenge is very well structured and I can see the benefit of doing it: reading more classics that I have been too afraid to start, practising writing book review, and having fellow readers to discuss them with.

I added more challenge for myself: to read more classics written by POC authors. The 50 books I listed here are some already in my possession (yes, I have a problem) and the rest I picked from Book Riot ‘100 Must-Read Classics by People of Colours’.

If you are interested in joining this challenge, here are some basics:

1. choose 50+ classics
2. list them at your blog
3. choose a reading completion goal date up to five years in the future and note that date on your classics list of 50+ titles
4. 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! (Or submit your entry here)
5. write about each title on your list as you finish reading it, and link it to your main list
6. when you’ve written about every single title, let the moderator know.

50 classics I want to read in five years and will be completed on 15th June 2025:

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
2. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
3. The Makioka Sister by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
4. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
5. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
6. Emma by Jane Austen
7. All Quiet in the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
8. Herzog by Saul Bellow
9. Dune by Frank Herbert
10. Germinal by Emilé Zola
11. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
12. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
13. A Highwind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
14. Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
15. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
16. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
17. Don’t Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford
18. Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
19. Transit by Anna Segher
20. Young Once by Patrick Modiano
21. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
22. The Wisdom of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
23. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
24. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
25. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
26. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
27. Memet, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal
28. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
29. A Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse
30. The Classic Horror Stories by H.P. Lovecraft
31. White Walls by Tatyana Tolstaya
32. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
33. The Confession of Lady Nijō by Lady Nijō
34. The Story of the Stone, part 1 by Cao Quexin
35. The Heart of Hyacinth by Onoto Watanna
36. I am a Cat by Sasuki Natsome
37. The Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
38. Native Son by Richard Wright
39. The President by Miguel Ángel Asturia
40. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
41. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
42. A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
43. The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe
44. A Backward Place by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
45. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
46. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling
47. A Backward Place by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
48. Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang
49. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
50. The Real story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China by Lu Xun

Wish me luck!