The Classics club

 

 

"The Classics club : a community of classics lovers", how could I resist ? I love classics ! Old classics, modern classics, golden age mysteries, everything goes.

I happened upon this blog and this Goodreads group through Emma at Words and peace. 

To enter this club, you have to make a list of 50 classics (whatever kind of books you name classics) to read in 5 years. The complete list of instructions on how to join is here.

 

During this year 2020, I have read/re-read 57 novels and short stories - each title is linked to the review :

 

- Jane Austen : The beautiful Cassandra, Emma, Love and freindship, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sanditon, Sense and sensibility, The Watsons

- Boccaccio : Mrs Rosie and the priest and other stories

- Ray Bradbury : The machineries of joy

- The Brontës : Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

- Anne Brontë : Agnes Grey

- Charlotte Brontë : The professor

- Emily Brontë : Poems, Wuthering heights

- Frances Hodgson Burnett : The secret garden

- Agatha Christie : The ABC murders, Elephants can remember, The man in the brown suit, Poirot investigates, The secret of Chimneys

- Wilkie Collins : The haunted house

- Dinah Craik : Olive

- Thomas de Quincey : On murder considered as one of the fine arts

- Charles Dickens : A Christmas carol, The Pickwick papers

- Arthur Conan Doyle : Memories and adventures, A study in scarlet, The sign of four

- Daphne du Maurier : The doll

- Elizabeth Gaskell : The life of Charlotte Brontë

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman : The yellow wall-paper

- George Gissing : The odd women

- Anna Katherine Green : The affair next door

- Gerald Manley Hopkins : As kingfishers catch fire

- Molly Hughes : A London child of the 1870s

- James Joyce : Dubliners

- Lucy Maud Montgomery : Anne of Green Gables

- Barbara Pym : Excellent women

- The saga of Gunnlaug serpent tongue

- Mary Shelley : Frankenstein

- Robert Louis Stevenson : Treasure island

- Bram Stoker : Dracula

- Jonathan Swift : A modest proposal

- J.R.R. Tolkien : The Hobbit, The lord of the rings

- Anthony Trollope : The warden, Barchester towers, Doctor Thorne

- Mary Wesley : The camomille lawn

- Rebecca West : The return of the soldier

- Oscar Wilde : The ballad of the Reading gaol

- P.G. Wodehouse : Jeeves and the feudal spirit

- Virginia Woolf : Londres (in French)

- Emile Zola : Germinal

Next, I would like to read/re-read (those books are on my physical shelf, mostly) - I linked the titles to their Goodreads pages :

 

- Honoré de Balzac : Eugénie Grandet, Le lys dans la vallée, Les Chouans 

- Beaumarchais : Le mariage de Figaro

- Ray Bradbury : Dandelion wine

- Pearl Buck : East wind, west wind

- Samuel Butler : The way of all flesh

- Albert Camus : Caligula

- Agatha Christie : The murder of Roger Ackroyd, Death on the Nile, After the funeral, Cards on the table, The moving finger

- Jean Cocteau : La machine infernale

- Wilkie Collins : The dead secret, The woman in white

- Corneille : Polyeucte

- Charles Dickens : Great expectations

- Daphne du Maurier : The loving spirit, My cousin Rachel

- Elizabeth Gaskell : North and south, Mary Barton

- Gustave Flaubert : Madame Bovary

- Elizabeth Goudge : The city of bells, Island magic

- George and Weedon Grossmith : The diary of a Nobody

- Ernest Hemingway : To have and have not 

- Victor Hugo : Hernani

- Henry James : Portrait of a lady 

- Joseph Kessel : Vent de sable, Le lion

- Mme de la Fayette : La princesse de Clèves

- D.H. Lawrence : The virgin and the gipsy, Selected poems 

- Ngaio Marsh : Vintage murder, Death at the dolphin

- Mishima : Dojoji

- Nietzsche : Aphorisms 

- Edgar Poe : The fall of the house of Usher, Histoires extraordinaires

- Rabelais : Gargantua, Pantagruel

- Arthur Rimbaud : Une saison en enfer, Illuminations, Oeuvres diverses

- Dorothy Richardson : The tunnel, Honeycomb

- Angela Thirkell : Wild strawberries

- J.R.R. Tolkien : The Silmarillion

- Patricia Wentworth : Outrageous fortune, Nothing venture

Phew ! Linking was a long job ! 

 

These are the classic titles that I will read next, but they probably won't be the only ones : I have several complete works on my kindle : Oscar Wilde, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Von Arnim and so on. And I'm currently re-reading all of the Brontës, Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier. No special reason other than I just love them. 

I applied to the Goodreads group last evening, I intend to join the blog and each time I'll publish a review of a book on this list, I will link it with this logo :

 

This is going to be just great ! I intend to read all these before 2025 (probably before the end of 2021...)