The Classics Club

After a week of prevaricating, I was starting to feel like a character in a Nick Hornby novel. So here, at last, is my list of classic books.

I'm taking up the challenge of  The Classics Club and setting myself the target of reading fifty classic books over the next five years. Fifty books is quite enough for me, as I'll still be trying to keep up with contemporary fiction.  Most of the books here I've never read before, although I am revisiting a few old favourites such as the Camus I read at university more than twenty years ago.

I've interpreted the term 'classic' quite loosely, including what you might call 'modern classics' and also some genre fiction. I drew the line at Lord of the Rings, but can I learn to love science fiction, I wonder? We'll have to wait and see.

1. Asimov - Foundation
2. Austen - Persuasion
3. Beckett - Murphy
4. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
5. Camus - The Plague
6. Camus - The Outsider
7. Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
8. Carter - The Magic Toyshop
9. Chandler - The Big Sleep
10. Chopin - The Awakening
11. Dante - Inferno
12. di Lampedusa -The Leopard
13. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
14. Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
15. Dineson - Out of Africa
16. du Maurier - My Cousin Rachel
17. Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
18. Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
19. Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
20. Forster - Where Angels Fear To Tread
21. Gaskell - North and South
22. Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
23. Greene - Brighton Rock
24. Hamilton - Hangover Square
25. Hardy - The Return of the Native
26. Hugo - Les Miserables
27. Huxley - Brave New World
28. James - The Turn of the Screw
29. Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
30. Lawrence - Women in Love
31. Mann - Death in Venice
32. Marlowe - Dr Faustus
33. Maupassant - Bel Ami
34. Mitford - Love in a Cold Climate
35. Ondaatje - The English Patient
36. Orwell - Animal Farm
37. Pasolini - The Ragazzi
38. Pasternak - Dr Zhivago
39. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
40. Sartre - Nausea
41. Shute - A Town Like Alice
42. Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
43. Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
44. Thackeray - Vanity Fair
45. Voltaire - Candide
46. Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
47. Waugh - A Handful of Dust
48. Wharton - The House of Mirth
49. Woolf - To the Lighthouse
50. Zola - L'Assommoir

I'm looking forward to my classics journey, and meeting other classics readers along the way.