I’m officially committing to The Classics Club, and taking on the challenge of not only reading a specific list of classics within five years, but dedicating a blog post to each of them too. You can learn more about The Classics Club here, and keep reading for my list of of 50 Classics I want to read before January 1st, 2026.
- Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740)
- The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794)
- Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818)
- Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (1847)
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)
- Shirley by Charlotte Brontë (1849)
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
- Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)
- Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854)
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)
- The Pearl of Orr’s Island by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1861)
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
- The Watsons by Jane Austen (abandoned by Jane Austen around 1805 and published by her nephew in 1871; my edition was published in 1958)
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)
- Wynema: A Child of the Forest by S. Alice Callahan (1891)
- The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett (this collection/my particular edition was published in 1981)
- Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)
- A Room With a View by E.M. Forster (1908)
- Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (1911)
- Herland (1915) and Selected Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this collection was published in 1992)
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
- The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)
- Chaka by Thomas Mofolo (1925)
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
- My People the Sioux by Luther Standing Bear (1928)
- The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing (1929), Quicksand (1928), and The Stories (this collection was published in 1992)
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
- Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)
- Where There’s Love, There’s Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo (1946)
- The Living is Easy by Dorothy West (1948)
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953)
- The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart (1961)
- The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe (1962)
- House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968)
- Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber (1973)
- Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (1973)
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
- Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (1988)
- The Grass Dancer by Susan Power (1994)
Many of the books here are books I have copies of and want to read, or, in a few cases, reread. Others I found on various BookRiot and Literary Hub book lists, as well as literary award lists. I’m planning to talk about which books are rereads and, when warranted, talk about the edition I read in the individual posts (I thought about doing so in this post, but compiling this list was exhausting enough 😆), and I hope you will join in the discussions I have about the various stories, topics, writing styles, and time periods covered by these classics. Stay tuned!
