As an English major and daughter of a (now retired) college English professor, I’m almost ashamed to admit I haven’t read any of the titles on this list of 52 classic books. Some of them might have been required reading for a literature class (oopsy!), or at least in my 20-plus years since college, I should have found the time to tackle them.

Well, I didn’t. And before you start silently scolding or judging me, know this: I’m 40 years old and while I am a busy working mom, I’m still a passionate lover of great books. Why not challenge myself this year with a more enriching alternative to streaming TV binges?

That’s why I’ve put together this plan to read 52 major literary classics in one glorious year. I figure one book a week is a reasonable goal, assuming the longer tomes will require extra time while the quicker reads will only take a day or two.

After consulting the Internetz and Dr. Babs (my mom), here are the 52 classic books I decided to finally read this year:

The list: 52 classic books to read this year

1. Persuasion by Jane Austen
2. Watership Down by Richard Adams
3. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
4. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
5. Cousin Pons / Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
8. The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
9. The Stranger by Albert Camus
10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
11. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
12. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
13. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
14. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
16. Middlemarch by George Eliot
17. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
18. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
19. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
20. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
21. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
22. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
23. Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
24. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
25. The Trial by Franz Kafka
26. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
27. Women in Love by D H Lawrence
28. The Call of the Wild/White Fang by Jack London
29. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
30. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville
31. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
32. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
33. 1984 by George Orwell
34. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
35. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
36. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
37. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
38. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
39. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
40. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
41. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
42. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
43. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
44. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
45. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
46. The War of the Worlds by H G Wells
47. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
48. Night by Elie Wiesel
49. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
50. Native Son by Richard Wright
51. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
52. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

To keep track of what I’ve read and my opinion on each book, I’ll be using both new and old-school methods. I have a list set up on Goodreads, where I can also track progress toward my personal goal for their Reading Challenge. I will also hand-write my thoughts about each book after I finish it in my copy of The Book Lover’s Journal by Rene J. Smith, which I got last year because I realized how easily I forget what I’ve read.

Photo credit: horrigans via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC