My Starting List

Well, I took some time last night and this morning to make up my list of 60 classic books that I would like to read in the next 5 years.  I went with 60 because that gives me one book per month.  I know that there are several books on the list that I could read in an afternoon, but I didn't want to overwhelm myself.  I figure that this way I can finish some of the easier books more quickly, and leave plenty of time for the more challenging works.  Plus, it should give me time to read other books that I'm interested in at the same time.  My hope is that as I go through this list, my interests will branch out into other related books, and it will become something of an incredible journey of reading.

I found that most of the books on my list are British, which can probably be explained by the fact that I'm fascinated with the British Isles.  However, as I work through this list I hope to continue adding more, non-British books.  However, since my list is so Britain heavy, I will also be participating in the "Reading England 2016" challenge to help encourage me through this list.

The goal of the Reading England challenge is to read books from a variety of English counties.  I'm going to be starting with 10, but I give myself permission to change it. 

Now, without further ado, here my list for the next 5 years (until 1/1/2021)

Author	Title
Adams, Richard	Watership Down
Austen, Jane	Emma
Austen, Jane	Northanger Abbey
Austen, Jane	Persuasion
Austen, Jane	Mansfield Park
Blackmore, Richard	Lorna Doone
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Burnett, Frances Hodges	The Secret Garden
Cather, Willa	My Antonia
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Cleland, John	Fanny Hill
Cookson, Catherine	The Black Velvet Gown
Dante	Paradiso
Dante	Purgatorio
Dante	The Inferno
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel	Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles	Nicholas Nickleby
Dickens, Charles	Great Expectations
Dickens, Charles	Hard Times
Dickens, Charles	Oliver Twist
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	The Brother's Karamazov
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan	Hound of the Baskervilles
Dumas, Alexander	The Count of Monte Cristo
Dumas, Alexander	Man in the Iron Mask
Dumas, Alexander	The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George	Middlemarch
Felding, Henry	The History of Tom Jones
Gaskell, Elizabeth	North and South
Gaskell, Elizabeth	Cranford
Gothe	Faust
Grahame, Kenneth	The Wind in the Willows
Hardy, Thomas	Far From the Madding Crowd
Joyce, James	The Dubliners
Lawrence, DH	Lady Chatterley's Lover
More, Thomas	Utopia
Orczy, Emmuska	The Scarlet Pimpernel
Plutarch	The Rise and Fall of Athens
Pyle, Howard	The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Rand, Ayn	The Fountainhead
Scott, Walter	Rob Roy
Scott, Walter	Ivanhoe
Shakespeare, William	As you Like It
Shakespeare, William	Much Ado about Nothing
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Richard V
Solzhenitsyn	The Gulag Archipelago
Sterne, Lawrence	The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman
Stoker, Bram	Dracula
Swift, Johnathan	Gulliver's Travels
Tacitus	The Annals of Imperial Rome
Thackerary, William	Vanity Fair
Tocqueville, Alexis de	Democracy in America
Tolstoy, Leo	Anna Karenina
Twain,, Mark	Huckleberry Finn
Twain,, Mark	The Prince and the Pauper
Verne, Jules	20000 Leagues Under the Sea

The New Year

Ever since I was little I've loved the start of things.  I suspect that it is because I see it as a time to change things. I always enjoyed shopping for new school supplies, and enjoyed thinking how this year I would become the amazing note taker and studious student that I always wanted to be.  When I take a vacation from work, I always anticipate that when I go back to work I'll implement all the changes that I think about and become the most amazing, most on top of things nurse that there has ever been.  And then there is the New Year, the most widely regarded time for changes that I know of.

January 1st sees millions of people making resolutions, usually aimed and becoming a better version of themselves.  I'm fairly certain that I've resolved to lose weight every new year since I was 16, and my results have been mixed.  I've resolved multiple times to get out of debt, and while I've made some progress, and good portion of my paycheck still goes to pay for things that I already own or have already experienced.  So, while becoming more fit and more financially sound are still on my list, I decided to add a resolution this year that is a little less mainstream.  This year is the year that I'm going start making a dent in the list of classic books that I want to read.

I've been a prolific reader since I was a child, and generally I feel like a well-read individual, but there are still thousands of worthwhile books out there that I haven't read.  I firmly believe that classic literature helped to shape our society, and that one of the best ways to understand the past is to read the literature that our ancestors read and wrote. To that end, I am going to start working my way through the stacks of classic literature that I haven't yet touched.  I expect that I will also reread some of the books that I read when I was younger but didn't fully appreciate.

To help encourage me to keep up with the reading of the classics, I plan to join The Classics Club, which is basically an online group where you commit to reading at least 50 pieces of classic literature within 5 years.  That is only 10 books a year, a very reasonable number (especially once I finish writing my thesis and am able to read guilt free again).  That does mean that I need to create a list of classic books that I want to read, which will take some more thought.  My next post should include my classics reading list.

Until then, read on!