My Classics Club List 3.0

10 years ago, on my book blog, I wrote a list of classic books that I wanted to complete in 5 years. If I’m not mistaken, it was this challenge by the Classics Club that inspired me to start a book blog in the first place.

The Classics Club is an online community where readers all over the world participate in challenges, memes and events revolving around reading the classics as well as share their reviews of the books they read. As a nerdy book lover, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Now, a decade later, while I have read several classics I wouldn’t have otherwise, I still haven’t finished the challenge. I didn’t realize it had been so long since that first list!! I did write a 2.0 version back in 2018 and I was supposed to complete it in 2023. However, I haven’t been keeping up with it. This year, I want to revisit it one more time and give it another try! Classics Club List 3.0!

This list has books that I’ve been wanting/needing to read for years, re-reads just for fun or because I didn’t appreciate them the first time, and books that have been on my shelves but haven’t been touched. The titles vary – chunky, short, landmark, foreign, etc.. I’m looking forward to digging into classic books again- it’s been too long!

Alright, enough with the preamble. Here we go!

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(alphabetized by author)

1. Little Women//Louisa May Alcott (re-read)
2. An Old-Fashioned Girl//Louisa May Alcott (re-read)
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings//Maya Angelou
4. Persuasion//Jane Austen (re-read)
5. Pride & Prejudice//Jane Austen (re-read)
6. The Handmaid’s Tale//Margaret Atwood
7. Go Tell it On the Mountain//James Baldwin
8. Fahrenheit 451//Ray Bradbury
9. Jane Eyre//Charlotte Bronte (re-read)
10. The Pilgrim’s Progress//John Bunyan
11. The Good Earth//Pearl S. Buck (re-read. My mom had me read this when I was probably in junior high and I didn’t appreciate it. I want to give it another chance!)
12. The Awakening//Kate Chopin
13. The Red Badge of Courage// Stephan Courage
14. David Copperfield//Charles Dickens
15. Crime and Punishment//Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16. The Count of Monte Cristo//Alexandre Dumas
17. Middlemarch//George Eliot
18. Invisible Man//Ralph Ellison
19. The Great Gatsby//F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. This Side of Paradise//F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. Room with a View//E.M. Forster
22. North and South//Elizabeth Gaskell
23. Lord of the Flies//William Golding
24. A Raisin in the Sun//Lorraine Hansberry
25. The Scarlett Letter//Nathaniel Hawthorne (re-read. I haven’t read this since high school!)
26. Catch-22//Joseph Heller
27. For Whom the Bell Tolls//Ernest Hemingway
28. The Sun Also Rises//Ernest Hemingway
29. Les Miserables//Victor Hugo
30. Portrait of a Lady//Henry James
31. The Story of My Life//Helen Keller
32. To Kill a Mockingbird//Harper Lee
33. Moby Dick//Herman Melville
34. Paradise Lost//John Milton
35. Anne of the Island//Lucy Maud Montgomery
36. Beloved//Toni Morrison
37. 1984//George Orwell
38. Animal Farm//George Orwell
39. Common Sense//Thomas Paine
40. The Catcher in the Rye//J.D. Salinger
41. Twelfth Night//William Shakespeare (this is my favorite Shakespeare but I’ve never actually read the play all the way through. My copy has been sitting untouched for too long!)
42. Pygmalion//George Bernard Shaw
43. The Jungle//Upton Sinclair
44. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn//Betty Smith
45. Civil Disobedience//Henry David Thoreau
46. Anna Karenina//Leo Tolstoy
47. Huckleberry Finn//Mark Twain
48. The Color Purple//Alice Walker
49. Ben Hur//Lew Wallace (re-read. I read this in 8th grade and hated it. I like the movie but I think I was too young to appreciate the book. I want to give it another try)
50. A Room of One’s Own//Virginia Woolf

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If you’re interested in looking into any of these titles, you can check out my complete list on Amazon And if you want to find out more about the Classics Club and how the challenge works, checkout the details here.

Happy Reading!