Classics Club Reading Plan

I've done it.  Because I've had it.  I am tired of spinning my wheels on this Classics Club reading list.  I adore the Matchbook Magazine list, I really do.  But some of the books on there are not my thing.  They are ones I would read to/with a daughter, but they are not ones I would just read on my own.  And I'm not going to have a daughter old enough to read those books to within the next five years (the Good Lord willing, that is).  So I have temporarily scrapped that list, sort of, and cherry-picked from another good reading list, thus creating this list.  My Classics Club Reading List.

I already established Gilmore Girls as the catalyst for my interest in reading the classics.  I watched the show and was just mesmerized by all of the great, interesting books.  I already loved reading.  I had already read a number of the classics by then.  But I didn't decide to make a conscious effort of it until I saw this TV show that made reading seem sexy.  I found the original WB list.  There are already several good blogs out there of people committed to reading all of the books, or even all of the books in order, so I don't want to try to replicate that.  I just want to cherry pick the classics from the list that actually interest me, add a few others--making sure that the ones from the Matchbook list that interested me were on there and other additional books that I want to read--then go from there.

I'm really not sure how many books are on this list.  They are currently in the order that they appeared on the show.  I am going to read them in any order I choose because that's how I roll.  My goal is to read fifty from this list by my 29th birthday.  Never y'all mind precisely how long that is from now.  Let's just say that I have enough time to read all fifty without killing myself to do it.  

There are a number of titles on this list that are part of my single author projects.  If they're on this list, they'll count forwards the fifty; if not, they won't count.  I don't think.  We'll see how desperate I get towards the end.  I'd like to not need to rely on such tricks to boost my count.  I also might allow myself substitutions if something else by the same author interests me more than the one of the list when I get to it.  Then again, that will also depend on my desperation.

I'm doing this list for me.  I'll share my reaction to these works as I finish each.  But I'm not doing this to tell anyone about it.  I'm doing it for my own personal growth.  Some of these will be re-reads for me, but re-reading is the spice of life.  Or something like that.  There's some fiction and non-fiction, some essays, some poetry, some drama, some plays, and, of course, lots of novels.  I should not get bored.  The best part is that I already own most of these books, so there will be very little further expense on my part.  Or maybe the best part is that I know I will feel pretty good about myself once I'm done.

Without further ado, here is the list:

[Gilmore Girls List]

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
King Richard III by William Shakespeare
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
The Group by Mary McCarthy
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
The New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Ulysses by James Joyce
Out of Africa by Isac Denison
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty
The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Iliad by Homer
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Candide by Voltaire
The Bhagavad Gita 
Othello by William Shakespeare
Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/ Angels on Toast/ A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Woolf
The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche
Inferno by Dante
Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Mutiny On The Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
1984 by George Orwell
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Daisy Miller by Henry James
A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Sexus by Henry Miller
The Canterbery Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

[Additional Books]

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Howard's End by E.M. Forster

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

The World According to Garp by John Irving

Therese Raquin by Emil Zola

The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm going ahead and starting my Modernist March reading because I finished The Paris Wife last night (amazing!; Separate post to follow).  I'm thinking about starting Mrs. Dalloway.  I read somewhere that I should just dive on in, so that's my plan.  A note about my copy--there's a good chance that I bought it in 2004, so it's about bloody time that I'm reading it.