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
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
- I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
- Cousin Pons / Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- Women in Love by D H Lawrence
- The Call of the Wild/White Fang by Jack London
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville
- Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
- A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
- The War of the Worlds by H G Wells
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
- 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
This is exactly what I was looking for.
Really appreciate that you took the time to make this list.
Thank you on behalf of everyone who has come across this.