I’m embarking on a new 5-year project of reading 50 classics in 5 years. Hopefully the next five years will be a bit less…historic than the previous five! I read just over half my list (and switched out a couple titles) last time, but I’m hoping to do better this time.

Here’s the plan: 50 classics. 5 years. October 2023 – October 2028. Here’s my list, and I’ll link to reviews once I’ve read them:

1. Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women (January 2024)
2. Aurelius, Marcus: Meditations
3. Burnett, Frances Hodgson: The Secret Garden
4. Burns, Olive: Cold Sassy Tree
5. Cather, Willa: My Antonía
6. Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
7. Dickens, Charles: Little Dorrit
8. Dickens, Charles: Our Mutual Friend (May 2025)
9. Dickens, Charles: The Old Curiosity Shop
10. Dickens, Charles: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (November 2023)
11. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov
12. Du Maurier, Daphne: Jamaica Inn
13. Eliot, George: Middlemarch (October 2024)
14. Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss
15. Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast
16. Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
17. Le Guin, Ursula: A Wizard of Earthsea
18. Le Guin, Ursula: The Farthest Shore
19. Le Guin, Ursula: The Tombs of Atuan
20. Lewis, C. S.: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
21. Lewis, C. S.: Prince Caspian
22. Lewis, C. S.: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
23. Lewis, C. S.: The Silver Chair
24. Lewis, C. S.: The Horse and His Boy
25. Lewis, C. S.: The Magician’s Nephew
26. Lewis, C. S.: The Last Battle
27. Lewis, C. S.: An Experiment in Criticism
28. Newbigin, Lesslie: The Household of God
29. Orwell, George: Animal Farm
30. Pargeter, Edith: The Green Branch
31. Pargeter, Edith: The Heaven Tree
32. Pargeter, Edith: The Scarlet Seed
33. Potok, Chaim: The Chosen
34. Sayers, Dorothy: Clouds of Witness (May 2025)
35. Sayers, Dorothy: Gaudy Night
36. Sayers, Dorothy: Whose Body? (February 2024)
37. Soltzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
38. Sophocles: Antigone
39. Sophocles: Oedipus Rex
40. Stoppard, Tom: Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
41. Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Fellowship of the Ring (January 2025)
42. Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Two Towers (February 2025)
43. Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Return of the King (February 2025)
44. Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
45. Trollope, Anthony: The Warden
46. Trollope: Anthony: Framley Parsonage
47. Von Arnim, Elizabeth: The Enchanted April
48. Watson, Winifred: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
49. Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited
50. Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence

Removed (List edited/updated July 2025):

• Bronte, Charlotte: Villette
• Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary
• Steinbeck, John
• Wharton, Edith: Ethan Frome