20 “Classics”

I meant to post this on January 1, but hadn’t quite figured out my list of “classics” for the 20 classics in a year. As with that book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I’m missing a lot of really good stuff. Some of which I’ve read before, some of which I am not sure I’ll ever want to read. In any case, below is a list of 35 books for me to choose from for the year of classics. I’ll mark when I’ve read them.

These books were chosen based on a lot of random interests. The main reason I’m doing the “read classics” challenge is because I read way too much from the science fiction and fantasy genres. Although these genres are absolutely chock full of high quality writing and story telling I do need to expand my reading a bit more to include the influences of the writers I love best too.

20 Classics to be chosen from among the list below:

Middlemarch – George Eliot
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The White Goddess – Robert Graves
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
American Psycho – Brett Easton Ellis
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Ecco
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
Henry and June – Anais Nin
Ulysses – James Joyce
Walden Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Grapes of Wrath -John Steinbeck
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Journey to America – Alexis de Tocqueville
Essays of Elia – Charles Lamb
Four Socratic Dialogues – Plato
Imaginary Conversations – Walter Savage Landor
The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer
Inferno – Dante
Hamlet – Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Iliad/Odyssey – Homer
Decameron – Boccacio
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway