My second classics list for The Classics Club. This time I played it smart and am challenging myself to read 50 classics from the dates November 30, 2018 to November 29, 2023.
Ancients (5000 B.C. – A.D. 400):
Theogony (8th century) – Hesiod
Works and Days (8th century) – Hesiod
Homeric Hymns (6th-7th century)
Meno (4th century) – Plato
The Women of Trachis (450-425 B.C. ) – Sophocles
Ajax (445-440 B.C.) – Sophocles
Electra (420 B.C. or later) – Sophocles
Philoctetes (409 B.C.) – Sophocles
Gorgias (382 B.C.) – Plato
The Republic (380 B.C.) – Plato
Aristotle, Ethics (330 B.C.) – Aristotle
On The Good Life (75 – 71 B.C.) – Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Gallic Wars (58 – 49 B.C.) – Caesar
Lives (75) – Plutarch
The Twelve Ceasars (121) – Suetonius
Meditations (170-180) – Marcus Aurelius
The Voyage of Argo (3rd century) – Apollonius of Rhodes
Address to Young Men (363) – Saint Basil
Medieval/Early Renaissance (400 – 1600 A.D.):
The City of God (426) – Augustine
The Consolation of Philosophy (524) – Boethius
The History of the Franks (605 – 664) – Gregory of Tours
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) – Bede
Cur Deus Homo (1094-1096) – Anselm of Canterbury
The History of the Kings of Britain (1136) – Geoffrey Monmouth
The Romance of Tristan (c. 12th century) – Beroul
The Journey Through Wales (1191) – Gerald of Wales
Inferno (1320) – Dante Alighieri
The Mabinogion (1350 – 1410)
The Decameron (1353) – Giovanni Boccaccio
Troilus & Criseyde (1382-86) – Geoffrey Chaucer
Revelations of Divine Love (1395) – Julian of Norwich
On the Imitation of Christ (1418-1427) – Thomas à Kempis
The Praise of Folly (1509) – Eramus
The Prince (1513) – Niccolo Machiavelli
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564) – François Rabelais
Heptaméron (1558) – Marguerite of Navarre
The Faerie Queene (1590-1596) – Edmund Spenser
Late Renaissance/Early Modern (1600 – 1850 A.D.):
Richard III (1592) – William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice (1596-1598) – William Shakespeare
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1607-1608) – William Shakespeare
MacBeth (1623) – William Shakespeare
Pensées (1669) – Blaise Pascal
Tartuffe (1669) – Molière
The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) – John Bunyan
The Complete Fairy Tales (1691-97) – Charles Perrault
Moll Flanders (1722) – Daniel Defoe
Joseph Andrews (1742) – Henry Fielding
Clarissa (1748) – Samuel Richardson
The History of Rasselas (1759) – Samuel Johnson
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767) – Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey (1768) – Laurence Sterne
She Stoops to Conquer (1773) – Oliver Goldsmith
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) – Johann von Goethe
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1775) – Samuel Johnson
Evelina (1778) – Frances Burney
Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782) – Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) – James Boswell
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – Ann Radcliffe December 31, 2020
Ivanhoe (1820) – Sir Walter Scott March 18, 2024
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) – Victor Hugo
Fairy Tales (1831) – Hans Christian Andersen
Eugénie Grandet (1834) – Honoré de Balzac
Père Goriot (1835) – Honoré de Balzac
Oliver Twist (1838) – Charles Dickens
The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) – Stendhal
Dead Souls (1842) – Nikolai Gogol November 16, 2024
A Christmas Carol (1843) – Charles Dickens
Mary Barton (1848) – Elizabeth Gaskell July 27, 2024
Shirley (1849) – Charlotte Brontë
Modern (1850 – Present):
The Scarlet Letter (1850) – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick (1851) – Herman Melville December 16, 2022
Bleak House (1852/53) – Charles Dickens February 15, 2024
The Professor (1857) – Charlotte Brontë
Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) – Thomas Hughes
Little Dorrit (1857) – Charles Dickens
Phantastes (1858) – George MacDonald
Oblomov (1859) – Ivan Goncharov
Adam Bede (1859) – George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss (1860) – George Eliot
Silas Marner (1861) – George Eliot
Great Expectations (1860/61) – Charles Dickens June 18, 2024
Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) – Jules Verne
Our Mutual Friend (1865) – Charles Dickens
Wives and Daughters (1864/66) – Elizabeth Gaskell
Crime and Punishment (1866) – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Gambler (1866) – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Way We Live Now (1875) – Anthony Trollope
Tom Sawyer (1876) – Mark Twain
The Return of the Native (1878) – Thomas Hardy
Huckleberry Finn (1884) – Mark Twain
Bel Ami (1885) – Guy Maupassant
King Solomon’s Mines (1885) – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886) – Robert Louis Stevenson
Kidnapped (1886) – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) – Thomas Hardy
She: A History of Adventure (1887) – H. Rider Haggard
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) – Mark Twain
News from Nowhere (1890) – William Morris
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) – Thomas Hardy
Tevye the Dairyman and Moti the Cantor’s Son (1894) – Sholem Aleichem
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) – Anthony Hope
Jude the Obscure (1895) – Thomas Hardy
Quo Vadis (1895-96) – Henry Sienkiewicz
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – H.G. Wells
Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1898) – Jerome K. Jerome
The Observations of Henry (1901) – Jerome K. Jerome
Kim (1901) – Rudyard Kipling
The Call of the Wild (1903) – Jack London
Nostromo (1904) – Joseph Conrad
The Jungle (1906) – Upton Sinclair
The Secret Agent (1907) – Joseph Conrad
The Forsyte Saga (1906-21) – John Galsworthy
Howard’s End (1910) – E.M. Forster
Death in Venice (1912) – Thomas Mann
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) – John Buchan June 29, 2019
The Age of Innocence (1920) – Edith Wharton August 28, 2023
The Enchanted April (1922) – Elizabeth von Arnim
Captain Blood (1922) – Rafael Sabatini
The Good Soldier Svejk (1923) – Jaroslav Hasek
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – Agatha Christie
The Metamorphosis (1936) – Franz Kafka April 7, 2023
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) – John Steinbeck August 31, 2025
The Power and the Glory (1940) – Graham Greene
The Stranger (1942) – Albert Camus
Animal Farm (1945) – George Orwell
1984 (1949) – George Orwell February 10, 2025
The Little World of Don Camillo (1950) – Giovannino Guareschi
The Lord of the Flies (1954) – William Golding
The End of the Affair (1955) – Graham Greene
The Leopard (1958) – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Catch-22 (1961) – Joseph Heller
One Day in the LIfe of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Life and Fate (1980) – Vasily Grossman
- 25 Read