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!!!