Grinding the gears on the way-back machine, back in August of 2013 (can it really be that long ago?) I joined The Classics Club.  The basic idea behind the Classics Club challenge is this: choose 50 (or more) classics – they can be books you’ve never read or old favorites that you want to re-read – and pick a date five years in the future, by which point you will have read and written about every book on the list.  Sounds fun, yes?  Well – in August of 2013 I was a stay-at-home mom with one easygoing baby, who slept regularly and was a breeze to care for.  I’m sure you see where this is going.

Why settle for fifty when I could read one hundred classics in five years?  It seemed perfectly doable.  I tend to read about 100 books per year no matter what I do – sometimes 102, sometimes 98 – and over five years, that would average out to 20% of my reading being devoted to classics.  Considering I love classics, 20% seemed easy.  And 2018 seemed so far away.

For whatever reason, I didn’t manage to pull it off.  My five year deadline is coming up, and I have barely scratched the surface of my classics list.  I’m not actually sure why not.  Over the course of new jobs, moves, another pregnancy and newborn days I’ve kept up a steady pace of reading, yet for some reason I haven’t read the books on the list.  I can’t explain it.  So I have to admit failure on this challenge.  But I love the Classics Club community, and I want to try again.  So here we go – a new list, targeted for completion by July 27, 2023.

• Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope
• Framley Parsonage, by Anthony Trollope
• The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope
• The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
• Sanditon, by Jane Austen
• Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Sylvia’s Lovers, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
• Washington Square, by Henry James
• Queen Lucia, by E.F. Benson (re-read)
• Miss Mapp, by E.F. Benson
• Lucia in London, by E.F. Benson
• Mapp and Lucia, by E.F. Benson
• The Worshipful Lucia, by E.F. Benson
• Trouble for Lucia, by E.F. Benson
• The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
• Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison
• Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
• East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
• The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves
• The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
• Silas Marner, by George Eliot
• Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot
• Romola, by George Eliot
• The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
• The Song of the Lark, by Willa Cather
• Everything that Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O’Connor
• Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty (re-read)
• The Iliad, by Homer
• The Odyssey, by Homer
• Three Men on the Bummel, by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte
• Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte
• Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte (re-read)
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte (re-read)
• The Floating Admiral, by the Members of the Detection Club
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
• The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
• Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
• The Priory, by Dorothy Whipple
• The Village, by Marghanita Laski

And there it is!  Only time will tell whether this attempt goes any better than the last.  If only I could figure out where my roadblocks were for the past five years – it’s not like I haven’t read 100 books, or a bunch of classics.  Maybe I just picked the wrong one.  So – anyway – here goes nothin’.

Do you participate in reading challenges?  Which ones?  (Like I need more…)