I have always been fascinated by literature.

Most of my readings have focused on historical fiction, and fantasy. I am honest when I say that I don’t know if I’ve ever read any book called a ”classic”, but then again, it all depends on how you define a ”classic” work of literature. Because there are ”classics” that no one really likes – and there are just as many that are loved by thousands – therefore, a ”classic” is perhaps just definition of a really well known book (?), but then I still have to ask myself, why I never really felt intrigued by them before. Up until now.

For several months now,

I’ve been reading the posts over at 101books, and very often I end up reading by the comments. This time I found myself over at ”A room of one’s own”, a wonderful blog that has this romantic, almost chic, atmosphere flowing of the pages. In the end, it has inspired me to join in with her ”Classics club”, to read no less than 50 classics over the course of up to five years. So my first step in this new journey for me, was to establish this list of ”classics” which I would like to explore. My list includes many of the traditional ”classics” such as Dickens, Tolstoy etc. but also a few Swedish writers such as Strindberg, and von Heidenstam, mixed with some more modern classic works.

My personal goal…

…is to finish this list in four years time, that is by 30th of April 2016. Some of the books might be read in parallell with others, for example, the bible and the koran will most likely be two longer reads over the course of this journey.

The list I’ve put up is in no way a complete list, and it’s not meant to be read in any particular order. I’ve chosen, so far, 100 books from various sources, but I reserve the right to revise it as I go along.

Quick Facts:

• Rereads: 3(100)
• Most looking forward to: Tales of 100,1 Nights, by Anonymous, The Bible, and The Koran (Hard to pick just one..)
• Most dreading: Jane Austen (Never read that kind of genre before)

***

Read as of: 2012-June-08 … 5/101

This is it:

1. Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders
2. Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
3. Choderlos de Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses
4. Honoré de Balzac - Père Goriot
5. Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
6. Charlotte Brintë - Jane Eyre
7. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
8. Charles Dickens - Bleak House
9. Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
10. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
11. Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
12. Leo Tolstoy - Resurrection
13. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
14. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
15. Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
16. Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
17. Franz Kafka - ”The Metamorphosis”
18. Franz Kafka - The Trial
19. Marcel Proust - Remembrance of Things Past
20. James Joyce - Ulysses
21. Virginia Wolf - To the Lighthouse
22. William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
23. García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
24. Verner von Heidenstam - Karolinerna
25. J.R.R Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
26. J.R.R Tolkien - The Hobbit
27. John Milton - Paradise Lost
28. Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
29. Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility
30. Jane Austen - Emma
31. Anonymous - Tales of 100,1 Nights
32. Anonymous – The Bible
33. Homer - The Iliad
34. Jesse L Byock - The Saga of the Volsungs
35. Anonymous - Beowulf
36. H.P Lovecraft - The Call of C’thulu
37. Anonymous - The Koran
38. Murasaki Shikibu - The Tale of Genji
39. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
40. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
41. Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
42. William Styron - Sophie’s Choice
43. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
44. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
45. Wu Ch’êng-ên - Monkey
46. Hans Fallada - Alone in Berlin
47. Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dam
48. Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
49. Alice Walker - The Color Purple
50. Augustine of Hippo - City of God
51. Augustine of Hippo - Confessions
52. Mary Wollstonecraft - The Vindication of the Rights of Woman
53. Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
54. William Shakespear - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
55. William Shakespear - Othello
56. William Shakespear - Julius Ceasar
57. Lewis Carroll - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
58. Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 days
59. Jules Verne - Journey to the center of the earth
60. Hjalmar Söderberg - Den allvarsamma leken
61. Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
62. August Strinberg - Röda Rummet
63. Frans G. Bengtsson - Röde Orm
64. Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor
65. Johann Wolgang von Goethe - Faust
66. Selma Lagerlöf - Gösta Berlings Saga
67. Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
68. H.G Wells - The War of The Worlds
69. H.G Wells - The Invisible Man
70. Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden
71. Voltaire - Candide
72. William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
73. W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
74. D.H Lawrence - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
75. Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe
76. Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin
77. Nicolai Gogol - The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil
78. Harriet A. Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
79. Anna Sewell - Black Beauty
80. Agatha Christie - The Secret Adversary
81. Ray Radbury - Fahrenheit 451
82. Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage
83. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes
84. Anonymous - The Cakrasamvra Tanra
85. Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
86. Jenny M. Jones - The Godfather
87. T.S Eliot - The Waste Land
88. Samuel taylor Coleridge - The Ancient Mariner
89. Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm - Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales
90. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
91. Dante Aighieri - Divine Comedy
92. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
93. Henrik Ibsen - A Doll’s House
94. Douglas Adams - The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
95. George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
96. E.M. Forster - A Room With a View
97. John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
98. Benjamin Franklin - Spectator
99. Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
100. Arthur Miller - The Crucible
101. Mallanaga Vatsyayana – The Art of Kama Sutra