I decided to give the Classics Club a go.

I made a list of 50 + classics that I intend to read in the next 5 years. In my case, this will be by January 2023. The exact rules are explained on the Classics Club page. My list is slightly random, in that it includes a random collection of books that I know I should read at some point and a bundle of books (that I think of as classics or necessary reading) that I have –or have access to– that I haven’t read yet. Some of the titles I intend to read in Polish – for those, I have provided the English title in brackets.

Am I excited? Yes

Is it ambitious? Ridiculously so.

Am I slightly intimidated by the titles on the list? Obviously…

Have I included all the things I want to read on it? Not by any means.

Let’s go!

1. Herodot, Dzieje [Herodotus The Histories]
2. Homer, The Illiad
3. Homer, The Odyssey
4. Plutarch, Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Lives
5. Plato, Gorgias
6. Plato, Phaedrus
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses
8. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
9. The Prose Edda/ The Poetic Edda
10. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
11. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
12. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan
13. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (re-read)
14. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random.
15. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
16. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
17. Honoré Balzac, Old Goriot
18. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal
19. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
20. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge
21. Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
22. Charlotte Brontë, Villette
23. Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
24. Mikołaj Gogol, Martwe Dusze [Nikolai Gogol The Dead Souls]
25. Simone de Beauvoir, Mandaryni [Les Mandarins]
26. Leo Tolstoy, Confession
27. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
28. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
29. Bolesław Leśmian, Poezje Wybrane [Selected Poetry
30. Czesław Miłosz, Zniewolony Umysł [Captive Mind]
31. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
32. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
33. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
34. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima
35. Henry James, The Bostonians
36. Henry James, What Maisie Knew
37. Joseph Heller, Catch -22
38. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
39. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays
40. David Hume, Selected Essays
41. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë
42. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
43. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations
44. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
45. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
46. Günter Grass, Blaszany Bębenek [The Tin Drum]
47. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
48. F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
49. Gustave Flaubert,  Madame Bovary
50. Władysław Reymont, Chłopi [The Peasants]
51. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
52. Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française
53. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
54. Joseph Conrad, [Notatnik Osobisty] A Personal Record
55. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line
56. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (re-read)
57. Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Image credit: my own…