The Classics Club

My first challenge for 2017 is courtesy of The Classics Club. I’ve set myself the goal to read the 50 classics listed below between 1st January 2017 and 31st December 2018.  I’ll add links to my reviews once I have read them.

The personal definition of “classic” I have used is a book published more than 40 years ago, i.e. anything published before 1976, although most of the books on my list are a good deal older than that.

I have decided to concentrate on two categories – women writers and the works of John Buchan (one of my favourite authors who I believe is much underrated).

 Women Writers

  1. Gothic Tales – Elizabeth Gaskell
  2. The Grass in Singing – Doris Lessing
  3. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
  4. Romola – George Eliot
  5. Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
  6. The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
  7. The Enchanted April – Elizabeth von Armin
  8. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
  9. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
  10. Lady Susan – Jane Austen
  11. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
  12. A Garden of Earthly Delights – Joyce Carol Oates
  13. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
  14. The Price of Salt – Patricia Highsmith
  15. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
  16. The Flowers of Adonis – Rosemary Sutcliffe
  17. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
  18. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
  19. All Passion Spent – Vita Sackville-West
  20. The Town House – Norah Lofts
  21. Katherine – Anya Seton
  22. Heat and Dust – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
  23. Invitation to the Waltz – Rosamond Lehmann
  24. Villette – Charlotte Bronte
  25. The Last Man – Mary Shelley
  26. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
  27. The Dark Tide – Vera Brittain
  28. The Crowded Street – Winifred Holtby
  29. Gaudy Night – Dorothy L Sayers
  30. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
  31. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
  32. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
  33. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
  34. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
  35. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
  36. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
  37.  In a German Pension: 13 Stories – Katherine Mansfield
  38. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  39. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
  40. The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood

John Buchan

  1. The Power House
  2. Sick Heart River
  3. A Lost Lady of Old Years
  4. Witch Wood
  5. Mr Standfast
  6. Castle Gay
  7. The Half-Hearted
  8. The Watcher by the Threshold
  9. John Macnab
  10. Greenmantle