Classical Carousel
Commenting on old books
The Classics Club
Well how can one have a blog about classics without joining The Classics Club?
The idea is to challenge yourself to read at least 50 classics in the next 5 years, so my time frame will be from November 12, 2013 to November 11, 2018.
My list:
Ancients (5000 B.C. - A.D. 400):
The Histories (450 - 420 B.C.) - Herodotus (because I love my Greeks!)
The History of the Pelopponesian War (431 B.C.) - Thucydides (a very
interesting war. I can't wait to get Thucydides viewpoint)
Oedipus Rex (429 B.C.) - Sophocles (Sophocles is one of my favourite Greek
playwrights)
Oedipus at Colonus (406 B.C.) - Sophocles
Antigone (441 B.C.) - Sophocles
The Republic (380 B.C.) - Plato (Plato is referred to so many times when reading
anything intellectual, that I must read at least one of his books)
Aristotle, Ethics (330 B.C.) - Aristotle
Defense Speeches (80 - 63 B.C.) - Marcus Tullius Cicero (I've started this and
love it!)
Metamorphoses (8) - Ovid (I will finish this!)
Lives (75) - Plutarch (I've always meant to read it)
The Twelve Caesars (121) - Suetonius (he's supposed to be a little bit of a gossip
so this might prove interesting)
Meditations (170 - 180) - Marcus Aurelius (I think that I'll like him)
Address to Young Men (363) - Saint Basil (my daughter read it and loved it)
Medieval/Early Renaissance (400 - 1600 A.D.):
The City of God (426) - Augustine (loved Confessions and can't wait for this one)
The Consolation of Philosophy (524) - Boethius
The Rule of Saint Benedict (529)? - Saint Benedict
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) - Bede
The Decameron (1353) - Giovanni Boccaccio (I've always wanted to read this.)
The Canterbury Tales (1390s??) - Geoffrey Chaucer (groan! It intimidates me
but I must overcome!)
On the Imitation of Christ (1418 - 1427) - Thomas à Kempis
The Book of Margery Kempe (1430) - Margery Kempe
Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) - Thomas Mallory (this read is coming up soon!)
The Praise of Folly (1509) - Erasmus (intimidated but curious)
The Prince (1513) - Niccolo Machiavelli (this book has always intrigued me, plus it's a
nice short read!)
Utopia (1516) - Thomas More (looking forward to reading a good Utopian novel)
Bondage of the Will (1525) - Martin Luther
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532 - 1564) - François Rabelais (this is supposed
to be weird)
Essays (1580) - Michel de Montaigne
The Fairie Queene (1590 - 1596) - Edmund Spenser
Late Renaissance/Early Modern (1600 - 1850 A.D.):
The Taming of the Shrew (1590 - 1592) - William Shakespeare (keeping going
through my Shakespeare plays)
Romeo and Juliet (1591 - 1595) - William Shakespeare
Richard III (1592) - William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice (1596 - 1598) - William Shakespeare
Henry IV Part I (1597) - William Shakespeare
Henry IV Part II (1596 - 1599) - William Shakespeare
Henry V (1599) - William Shakespeare
Othello (1603) - William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1603 - 1604) - William Shakespeare
King Lear (1603 - 1606) - William Shakespeare
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1607 - 1608) - William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost (1667) - John Milton (time to use my guide by C.S. Lewis)
Pensées (1669) - Blaise Pascal
Tartuffe (1669) - Molière
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) - John Bunyan (Next on my WEM list. It calls
to me! ……… and I've ignored it.)
Moll Flanders (1722) - Daniel Defoe (I loved Robinson Crusoe, so another
Defoe it is!)
Gulliver's Travels (1726) - Jonathan Swift (I wonder if I'll like it)
On the Social Contract (1762) - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
She Stoops to Conquer (1773) - Oliver Goldsmith
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and a Journal of a Tour
to the Hebrides (1775) - Samuel Johnson
Common Sense (1775 - 1776) - Thomas Paine (so rare nowadays … hee hee!)
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 - 1789) - Edward Gibbons
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - Ann Radcliffe
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (expand my
horizons with poetry!)
Sense and Sensibility (1811) - Jane Austen
Persuasion (1818) - Jane Austen (I have read every other Austen novel but this
one. For shame!)
Ivanhoe (1820) - Sir Walter Scott
The History of Napoleon Buonoparte (1829) - John Gibson Lockhart
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) - Victor Hugo (the bells! the bells!)
Eugene Onegin (1825 - 1832) - Alexander Pushkin
The Pickwick Papers (1836 - 1837) - Charles Dickens (a fun read!)
Dead Souls (1842) - Nikolai Gogol (I've never read a Gogol)
Fear and Trembling (1843) - Soren Kierkegaard
Twenty Years After (1845) - Alexandre Dumas
Mary Barton (1848) - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Communist Manifesto (1848) - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
David Copperfield (1850) - Charles Dickens
The Man in the Iron Mask (1850) - Alexandre Dumas
Modern (1850 - Present):
Moby Dick (1851) - Herman Melville (I can wait a looong time to read this!)
Bleak House (1852/53) - Charles Dickens
The Warden (1855) - Anthony Trollope (looking forward to starting The
Barchestershire Chronicles)
Madam Bovary (1856) - Gustave Flaubert (just because)
Tom Brown's School Days (1857) - Thomas Hughes (I see this mentioned in a number of classics)
Barchester Towers (1857) - Anthony Trollope
Dr. Thorne (1858) - Anthony Trollope
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) - Jacob Burckhardt
Framely Parsonage (1860 - 1861) - Anthony Trollope
The Mill on the Floss (1860) - George Eliot (ready for more English social
commentary)
Great Expectations (1860/61) - Charles Dickens (adding to my Dickens marathon)
The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) - Charles Reade
Fathers and Sons (1862) - Ivan Turgenev
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) - Jules Verne (another Verne adventure!)
The Small House at Allington (1864) - Anthony Trollope
Wives and Daughters (1864/66) - Elizabeth Gaskell (I love Gaskell and haven't
read this yet)
Speeches and Letters (1809 - 1865) - Abraham Lincoln
Crime and Punishment (1866) - Fyodor Dostoevsky (his two crowning
achievements and I need to read them)
The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) - Anthony Trollope
The Moonstone (1868) - Wilkie Collins (for a light read)
War and Peace (1869) - Leo Tolstoy (going on and on and on ……)
Erewhon (1872) - Samuel Butler
La Curée (1871 - 1872) - Emile Zola (continuing the Rougon-Macquart series)
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) - Thomas Hardy (I dislike Hardy's novels but
should include one.)
La Conquête de Plassans (1874) - Emile Zola
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875) - Emile Zola
Daniel Deronda (1876) - George Eliot
Tom Sawyer (1876) - Mark Twain
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876) - Emile Zola
Au Page d'Amour (1878) - Emile Zola
A Doll's House (1879) - Henrik Ibsen
Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes (1879) - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) - Fyodor Dostoevsky (I can't wait for this one!)
Pot-Bouille (1882) - Emile Zola
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) - Emile Zola
Huckleberry Finn (1884) - Mark Twain
King Solomon's Mines (1885) - H. Rider Hagaard (for adventure)
Bel-Ami (1885) - Guy de Maupassant
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 - 1885) - Freidrich Nietzsche
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886) - Robert Louis Stevenson
Kidnapped (1886) - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Black Arrow (1888) - Robert Louis Stevenson
Le Rêve (1888) - Emile Zola
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) - Mark Twain
L'Argent (1891) - Emile Zola
Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (1894) - Sholem Aleichem
(looks like fun!)
Red Badge of Courage (1895) - Stephen Crane (I don't think I'll like it but I'll
try it)
The Time Machine (1895) - H.G. Wells
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) - Oscar Wilde
The Well at the World's End (1896) - William Morris
Dracula (1897) - Bram Stoker (scary ….. not my favourite genre)
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) - Sigmund Freud (I saw it on this list and
thought, "why not?' I haven't read anything funny in awhile.)
The Heart of Darkness (1899) - Joseph Conrad (I tried but didn't get it …. if
at first you don't succeed ………)
The Cherry Orchard (1904) - Anton Chekov
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) - G.K. Chesterton (love Chesterton!)
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (1904 - 1911) - M.R. James November 13, 2013
Tales of Ghosts and Men (1910) - Edith Wharton
Ethan Fromme (1911) - Edith Wharton
O Pioneers! (1913) - Willa Cather (I loved My Antonia & Death Comes for the
Archibishop, so why not another!)
Swann's Way (1913) - Marcel Proust
The Custom of the Country (1913) - Edith Wharton (Wharton's writing is
fantastic!)
We (1921) - Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Great Gatsby (1925) - F. Scott Fitzgerald (double groan. Since the first
time I read this was in high-school, I need to do a re-read to confirm that
I despise it)
The Waves (or other) 1931) - Virginia Woolf (great title for her style of writing)
The Good Soldier Svejk (1923) - Jaroslav Hasek
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) - Virginia Woolf
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) - C.S. Lewis (I think this is a more simpler Lewis)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - T.S. Eliot
The Bucanneers (1938) - Edith Wharton
Out of the Silent Planet (1938) - C.S. Lewis (love his Space Trilogy - a re-read)
The Robe (1942) - Lloyd C. Douglas (have been trying to get to for years)
The Stranger (1942) - Albert Camus
Perelandra (1943) - C.S. Lewis
Animal Farm (1945) - George Orwell (interesting social commentary, I'm sure)
That Hideous Strength (1945) - C.S. Lewis
The Great Divorce (1945) - C.S. Lewis (fascinating plot)
God in the Dock (1970) - C.S. Lewis
Brideshead Revisited (1945) - Evelyn Waugh
Seven Story Mountain (1948) - Thomas Merton (looking forward to it)
1984 (1949) - George Orwell
East of Eden (1952) - John Steinbeck (I hated Mice & Men but I will attempt
to keep an open mind with this one)
The Silver Chalice (1952) - Thomas Costain (looks interesting)
The Lord of the Flies (1954) - William Golding (I hated it in school but I have
a feeling that I'll really like it now)
Atlas Shrugged (1957) - Ayn Rand (another ugh, but I must …)
Once and Future King (1958) - T.H. White
To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) - Harper Lee
Droll Stories (1961) - Honore Balzac
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Slaughterhouse Five (1969) - Kurt Vonnegut
Invisible Cities (1972) - Italo Calvino
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (1979) - Italo Calvino
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978) - Barbara Tuchman
The Name of the Rose (1980) - Umberto Eco (I tried this once and felt like
braining Eco. However I know there is more to this novel than I allowed
myself to see so another try is needed)
Wow, this list looks long. I'm not even going to attempt to count the books since not knowing numbers will make it easier to attempt as well as easier to add or delete books. I read at least 35 classics last year, so if I can keep at the same pace, it might be possible to finish on time (cough, choke, splutter ….).
So without further ado, I am off to read!
Currently reading
