100 Classics List

Well, this is my 100 Classics list for Classics Club and it took me ages! The first 25 were relatively easy, then I started going through classics lists and then I had to figure out what I thought  a classic was. Although almost all books on this list are from the early 1900's, it has barely anything to do with age. It's just that after 2 generations, a book has proven it is successful . I find it very hard to write down what I think a classic is, it just has a certain quality to it that makes it both recognizable as being from a certain area but also timeless and essentially human.

I chose to give myself 3 years to read this. I am going to University for English so I am expecting to have to read some of these anyway and the list will probably change a bit. I already removed one after starting it, 'Crash' by Ballard. One strange, messed-up book!

Anyways, here is my list! It goes all the way to 100, sorry for the long read. Just be happy I cut out all my explanations on why I wanted to read them! ;)

  1. ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ – Anne Bronte
  2. ‘Germinal’ – Emile Zola
  3. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ - Ray Bradbury
  4. ‘The Iliad’ – Homer
  5. ‘Paradise Lost’ – John Milton
  6. ‘Cherry Orchard’ – Anton Checkov
  7. 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' - Anonymous
  8. ‘Heart of Darkness’ – Joseph Conrad
  9. ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ – James F. Cooper
  10. ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ – Oscar Wilde
  11. ‘Moll Flanders’ - Daniel Defoe
  12. ‘Hard Times’ – Charles Dickens
  13. ‘Notes from Underground’ – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  14. 'The Alchemist' - Paulo Coelho
  15. ‘Ivanhoe’ – Walter Scott
  16. ‘The Lifted Veil’ – George Eliot
  17. ‘The Waste Land’ – T.S. Eliot
  18. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’– Olaudah Equino
  19.  ‘As I Lay Dying’ – William Faulkner
  20. ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ – E.M. Forster
  21. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac 
  22. ‘The Diary of a Nobody’ – George Grossmith
  23. ‘The Call of the Wild’ – Jack London
  24. ‘The Good Soldier’ – Ford Madox Ford
  25. ‘The Plague’ – Albert Camus
  26. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ – George Orwell
  27. 'The Time Machine' - H.G. Wells
  28. ‘On The Road’ – Jack Kerouac
  29. ‘Betrayal’ – Harold Pinter
  30. ‘Lolita’ – Vladimir Nabokov
  31. Things Fall Apart’ – Chinua Achebe
  32. ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ – Gabriel G. Marquez
  33. ‘The Executioner’s Song’ – Norman Miller
  34. ‘Love’ – Toni Morrison
  35. ‘If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller’ – Italo Calvino
  36. ‘Lanark’ – Alasdair Gray
  37. ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ – Milan Kundera
  38. ‘War and Peace’ – Leo Tolstoy
  39. ‘An American Tragedy’ – Theodore Dreiser
  40. ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ – Flann O’Brien
  41. ‘The Blind Assasin’ – Margaret Atwood
  42. ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’ – Thornton Wilder
  43. ‘The Corrections’ – Jonathan Franzen
  44. ‘A Death in the Family’ – James Agee
  45. The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen
  46. ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ – John Fowles
  47. ‘Electra' - Sophocles
  48. ‘The Man Who Loved Children’ – Christina Stead
  49. ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ – Goethe
  50. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ – Virginia Woolf
  51. ‘The Painted Bird’ – Jerzy Kosinski
  52. ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ – Muriel Spark
  53. 'The Awakening' - Kate Chopin
  54. ‘Angels in America’ – Tony Kushner
  55. ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ – Kurt Vonnegut
  56. ‘The Sound and the Fury’ – William Faulkner
  57. 'Anthem' - Ayn Rand
  58. ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ – Jules Verne
  59. ‘The Tale of Genji’ – Lady Murasaki
  60.  ‘London Fields’ – Martin Amis
  61. ‘Die Blechtrommel’ – Gunter Grass
  62. ‘Far From The Maddening Crowd’ – Thomas Hardy
  63. The Secret Garden’ – Frances H. Burnett
  64. ‘The Fountainhead’ – Ayn Rand
  65. ‘I Capture the Castle’ – Dodie Smith
  66. ‘The Famished Road’ – Ben Okri
  67. River of Fire’ – by Qurratulain Hyder
  68. ’Baudolino’ – Umberto Eco
  69. ‘The Mandrake’ – Nicolo Machiavelli
  70. ‘De Droomkoningin’ – Maarten ‘t Hart.
  71. ‘Faust’ - Goethe
  72. ‘The Day of the Locust’ – Nathanael West
  73. ‘The Decameron’ – Giovanni Boccaccio
  74. 'The Stranger' - Albert Camus
  75. ‘The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare’ – G. K. Chesterton
  76. ‘Waiting for Godot’ – Samuel Beckett
  77. ‘Watership Down’ – Richard Adams
  78. ‘Candide’ – Voltaire
  79. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ – Erich M. Remarque
  80. ‘The Pearl’ – John Steinbeck
  81. ‘The Feigned Courtesan’ – Aphra Behn
  82. ‘The Count of Monte Christo’ – Alexander Dumas
  83. ‘My Antonia’ – Willa Cather
  84. ‘Flowers for Algernon’ – Daniel Keyes
  85. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ – Tennessee Williams
  86. ‘The Master and Margarita’ – Mikhail Bulgakov
  87. ‘Franny and Zooey’ – J.D. Salinger
  88. ‘Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ – Edward Albee
  89. ‘Die Hamletmachine’ – Heiner Muller
  90. ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ – Agatha Christie
  91. ‘Equus’ – Peter Shaffer
  92. ‘The Poetic Edda’ - Anonymous
  93. ‘Catch-22’ – Joseph Heller
  94. ‘Breakfast of Champions’ - Kurt Vonnegut
  95. ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ – V.S. Naipaul
  96. ‘Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town’ – Stephen Leacock
  97. ‘Housekeeping’ – Marilynne Robinson
  98. 'Les Misérables' - Victor Hugo
  99. ‘Bluebeard’ – Kurt Vonnegut
  100. ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ – Edmond Rostand

I'd love a link to your list so leave a link behind in the comments!!!

Comments

  1. Some wonderful books here with a good variety of authors. 1984 and Lolita are among my favourites.

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  2. Great choices! Anne Bronte is one of my favourites, I hope you end up loving her as well :) You have quite a few I've never heard of, so I'll have to investigate!

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  3. The Iliad and The Alchemist are two of my all time favorites.

    Electra is indeed a classic as well as Paradise Lost and 100 Years of Solitude, but I have to add Love in The Time of Cholera and Oedipus Rex as well. GGM is truly an artist. I prefer The Prince to The Mandrake and you can't go wrong with Tolstoy, such a perfect representation of Russia at that time.

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  4. 'Fahrenheit 451' is one of my all time favs. I read it at least once a year, and it's one of those books where I find something new to appreciate each time.

    You should include some more Steinbeck on here -- 'The Pearl' is fantastic, but so are his other novels ('Grapes of Wrath' in particular).

    Great list!

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  5. Wow, an impressive list! I see that you intend to read as much as authors as possible. Germinal is the best choice from Zola, I'm reading it right now, and I can feel already that this will be very good.

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