A funny thing happened on the way to my English degree…
Once upon a time, I went to college, planning to become an English teacher. Five years later, I graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences and the realization that I hadn’t read an awful lot of things considered Classics-with-a-Capital-C. That was mumblemumble years ago.
More recently, I stumbled across the Classics Club blog, and I do love a Reading Challenge. So, here are my 50 books to read between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2023. Some of them are books I’ve read but would like to revisit, some are books I read snippets of in a Comparative Literature class, and some are books that are entirely new to me. I’ll be using this page as a master list to link to blog posts as I go.
I actually have a much longer list that I am drawing titles from, and I have been (and will continue to be) making substitutions as I go. Titles removed from this list go back onto the master list for a future batch of 50.
- The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Eumenides, and Libation Bearers by Aeschylus (translated by Sarah Ruden)
- Complete Fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen
- Confessions by Augustine (translated by Sarah Ruden)
- Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney)
- The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
- The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
- Villette by Charlotte Brontë
- The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garard
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (translated by Dorothy Sayers)
- The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
- Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
- Through the Magic Door by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding
- Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Histories by Herodotus (translated by Pamela Mensch)
- The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
- Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Martin Hammond)
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Metamorphoses by Ovid (translated by A.D. Melville)
- The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan (translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant)
- Symposium by Plato (translated by Christopher Gill)
- Pamela by Samuel Richardson
- The Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
- Devil’s Pool by George Sand
- Poems by Sappho (translated by Diane Rayor)
- Letters from a Stoic by Seneca (translated by Robin Campbell)
- Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles (translated by Frank Nisetich)
- The Aeneid by Virgil translated by Sarah Ruden
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Nana by Émile Zola translated by Douglas Parmee
Read:
- Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett (March 8, 2019)
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Marie Borroff (December 28, 2019)
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (January 29, 2020)
- Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (December 29, 2020)
- Tales from Shakespeare by Charles & Mary Lamb (December 31, 2020)
- Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (June 21, 2021)
- The Iliad by Homer, translated by Caroline Alexander (February 1, 2022)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (December 2, 2022)
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (December 27, 2022)
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (January 20, 2023)