100 Classics Challenge - Let's Do This Thing! ⋆ Wonderfully Bookish

One thing that’s clear about me (probably due to the fact that I run a book blog) is that I like books and I’ve read a lot of them. But one type of book I’ve never really been interested in – or never even really read, come to think of it – is classics.

I’ve always been under the impression that classics aren’t for me, that I prefer contemporary and that the language might be too old, or the themes too outdated. But how do I know if I’ve never read any?

That’s why, starting last month, I’m going to embarking on a new personal challenge: to read at least one classic book every month.

I haven’t just picked these books at random. I found a list recently that is apparently “100 Books to Read In A Lifetime”, and compiled by Goodreads users. (I found the list on Goodreads and it now has over 1000 books in it, so I don’t know how the name makes sense anymore, but I went with it anyway.)

This list has a mixture of modern classics and older ones (classic classics?) and some I’ve already read, most I haven’t. (I’ve tweaked the list I originally found a bit because there were some I definitely don’t want to read for various reasons, but I now have a list I’m happy with!)

Here are the 100 books on my list:

Note: I’ll keep updating this list as I go along, so come back here if you want to see how I’m getting on!

Books already read before the challenge:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire (The Hunger Games Book 2) by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay (The Final Book of the Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Books read as part of the challenge:

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle (read August 2019)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (read September 2019)

Books still to read:

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
1984 by George Orwell
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Fahrenheit 451: A Novel by Ray Bradbury
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Night by Elie Wiesel
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas pere
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Stand by Stephen King
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel by Arthur Golden
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 1) by George R.R. Martin
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen
The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingslover
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Odyssey by Homer
Celebrating Silence: Excerpts From Five Years of Weekly Knowledge 1995-2000 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Helen Keller: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I’ve put all of these books in a jar (see above), and every time I want to read a new one, I’ll pick one out of the jar and find a copy of it, whether it’s cheap on Kindle or I can get it from my local library. I’ll read it, write my thoughts about it on the blog (or make a video if I have a lot of thoughts), and see how many I can get through.

If you want to join in, please do! Feel free to use my list above and write about the challenge on your own blog. Or if you don’t have a blog, play along anyway.

It’ll be interesting to see if I love books I never would have expected to like, or even read in the first place. I’m excited about this!