Joining the Classics Club!

Happy Saturday, friends. This is a special edition of my Messy Marginalia and I’m here to say that I’ve decided to join The Classics Club! My sweet friend Laila at Big Reading Life recently joined and it looked like just the club I needed to be in!

What is The Classics Club?

It’s a group of readers who have decided to get serious about reading the classics. The idea is to create a list of at least 50 classics that you’d like to read, give yourself a time table (usually about 5 years), and then report back to other club members when you make progress. How great is that?! Not only do you get to connect with others who want to read great literature, but there’s a bit of accountability to get through your own list. And even better is the fact that this group is pretty liberal about what is considered a “classic,” so there seems to be a lot of leeway when picking your books!

The Classics Club has a great list of books to help you get started and it was really hard to narrow things down. But I decided to do something a little different and focus on female writers for this challenge. Trust me, I’d love to curl up with Dickens and Tolstoy and Fitzgerald, but I think this little twist might be fun.

Without further ado, I hope to read the following books by March 3, 2018:

	Author Name	Title	pub’d	Reread?	Date Finished	notes
1	Allende, Isabel	The House of the Spirits	1982
2	Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice	1813	Y
3	Austen, Jane	Sense and Sensibility	1811
4	Austen, Jane	Emma	1815	Y
5	Austen, Jane	Persuasian	1817
6	Austen, Jane	Northanger Abbey	1817
7	Bronte, Anne	Agnes Gray	1847
	Bronte, Anne	The Tenant of Wildfell Hall	1848			DNF
8	Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre	1847	Y
9	Bronte, Charlotte	Villette	1853
10	Cather, Willa	O Pioneers!	1913
11	Chopin, Kate	The Story of an Hour	1894
12	Eliot, George	Middlemarch	1871
13	Eliot, George	Adam Bede	1859
14	Gaskell, Elizabeth	Cranford	1853
15	Gibbons, Stella	Cold Comfort Farm	1932
16	Hurston, Zora Neale	Dust Tracks on a Road	1937
17	Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1942
18	Jackson, Shirley	Come Along With Me	1968
19	Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird	1960	Y
20	L’Engle, Madeleine	A Wrinkle in Time	1962	Y
21	L’Engle, Madeleine	A Wind in the Door	1973
22	L’Engle, Madeleine	A Swiftly Tilting Planet	1978
23	L’Engle, Madeleine	Many Waters	1986
24	L’Engle, Madeleine	An Acceptable Time	1989
25	Mitchell, Margaret	Gone With the Wind	1936
26	Morrison, Toni	Beloved	1987
27	Morrison, Toni	The Bluest Eye	1970	Y
28	Morrison, Toni	Song of Solomon	1977
29	O’Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find	1953
30	O’Connor, Flannery	Everything that Rises Must Converge	1965
31	O’Connor, Flannery	Wise Blood	1952
32	O’Connor, Flannery	The Violent Bear It Away	1960
33	Read, Miss	Thrush Green (TG #1)	1959
34	Read, Miss	Winter in Thrush Green (TG #2)	1961
35	Read, Miss	Village School (FA #1)	1955
36	Read, Miss	Village Diary (FA #2)	1955
37	Rhys, Jean	Wide Sargasso Sea	1966
38	Robinson, Marilynne	Housekeeping	1980
39	Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein	1818
40	Smith, Betty	A Tree Grows in Brooklyn	1943
41	Undset, Sigrid	The Wreath	1920
42	Undset, Sigrid	The Wife	1921
43	Undset, Sigrid	The Cross	1922
44	Walker, Alice	The Color Purple	1982
45	Woolf, Virginia	Mrs. Dalloway	1923
46	Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse	1927
47	Woolf, Virginia	A Room of One’s Own	1929
48	Woolf, Virginia	Jacob’s Room	1922
49	Woolf, Virginia	The Common Reader	1925
50	Angelou, Maya	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	1969	Y

I’ll be back in a few days with yet another list because the club is doing something called a Classics Spin. My task is to come up with twenty unread books on my list (pretty easy right now, right?) and assign each a number between 1-20. The club will then randomly choose a number in that range and – ta da! – that’s the book that I’ll read for this challenge. It sounds like fun!