As I mentioned last week, I am trying to recommit myself to the Classics Club challenge.  I signed up for the challenge back in August of 2013.  The challenge is to read and blog about at least 50 classic books in five years.  Full of bravado and ambition, I declared that if I was smart about my reading priorities, I could get to way more than that – so I challenged myself to 100.  That would only work out to twenty classic books in a year, and as I had read 100 or more books per year for several of the previous years, I figured that should be no problem at all.  The best laid plans…  Toddlerhood, library mishaps, and rejoining the workforce all took their toll, as did pregnancy, a difficult housing hunt and move, and a fall season in which everything seemed to go wrong at once.  I’ve been in a reading slump for many months now, and getting to any book is a challenge, let alone some of the classics I’ve targeted, which require time and attention – neither of which I have to spare at the moment.

So it’s a year and a half into the challenge.  I should have knocked off at least thirty of the books on my list by now.  Instead I’ve done… twelve.  Wow.  So classics.  Very reader.  Much intellectual.

Here’s my list.  Items with asterisks indicate re-reads.  Completed items are struck through and the reviews are linked.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte*
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
Daisy Miller, by Henry James
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton
Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
Silas Marner, by George Eliot
The House of Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev*
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Litte Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
Confessions, by Saint Augustine of Hippo
What Maisie Knew, by Henry James
The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty*
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen*
Emma, by Jane Austen*
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen*
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen*
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen*
Persuasion, by Jane Austen*
A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
My Antonia, by Willa Cather*
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee*
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo*
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins*
Everything that Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O’Connor
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell
Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger*
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte
The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte
Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte*
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte*
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
The Iliad, by Homer
The Odyssey, by Homer
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift*
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol*
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov*
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin*
A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier*
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
The House on the Strand, by Daphne du Maurier
Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce
Henry IV, Part I, by William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part II, by William Shakespeare
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
Richard II, by William Shakespeare
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
Howards End, by E.M. Forster
Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy
The Ambassadors, by Henry James
The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James
Washington Square, by Henry James
The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym
Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott*
Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery*
Anne of Avonlea, by L.M. Montgomery*
Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery*
Anne of Windy Poplars, by L.M. Montgomery*
Anne’s House of Dreams, by L.M. Montgomery*
Anne of Ingleside, by L.M. Montgomery*
Rainbow Valley, by L.M. Montgomery*
Rilla of Ingleside, by L.M. Montgomery*
The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett*
The Purloined Letter, by Edgar Allen Poe
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
Castle Richmond, by Anthony Trollope

Yeah, I really need to do a better job at this.  I did at least knock out Middlemarch, thanks to a read-along (and I loved it – I can easily see myself re-reading it many times over… once this challenge is a little further along, at any rate).  But there are plenty of other options on the list that shouldn’t be at all difficult to make time for.  Re-reads that I know I love.  New classics I’ve been itching to try.  A few plays.  What has been taking me so long?  Life, I know.  In any event, I’ve said I want to recommit, and I meant it.  Expect to see more “reviews” and more Classics Club participation around here in the coming months.  I’ve got three-and-a-half years to read the rest of this list, and every single book on here is a book I really want to read.  Time to hop to it!

Have you ever bombed out of a reading challenge?