Tuesday, August 18, 2015

I'm Not Getting Any Younger: A Reading Challenge

When you go to the bookstore, or the library, or browse books online, are there certain books you notice over and over again and keep saying "Wow, I really need to read this, it's a classic! Everyone else has read this! It's supposed to be amazing! I really need to remember to read it this year"? I do this all the time. I majored in English in college, and even though I graduated two years ago, I still feel like it's my duty to read all the great classics. Well, all the interesting-looking ones anyway (aka all the ones not written by Charles Dickens, whose Great Expectations almost destroyed my love for reading in the 9th grade).

I just feel like I'm missing out on something big. So I'm making a list of all the major classics I want to read, and I vow to read at least 5 of them per year. Yes, I know, that's a very modest goal, but I have two jobs and am a stay-at-home mom, so cut me some slack! I'm being realistic. 


Ulysses by James Joyce

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Watership Down by Richard Adams

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in Spanish)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (!!! No, I haven't read it!)

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Into the Wild by John Krakauer

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner


How many of these classics have you read? Are any of these also on your TBR list?