In August 2019 I signed up with the Classics Club to read 50 classic books of my choice within 5 years, and I achieved this in May 2023. I haven’t blogged about all the books because I find that writing about the books takes up too much time that could otherwise be spent reading, and I average three books per week, so I am just not prepared to spend the required amount of time blogging. I do usually blog about the books I read for the quarterly Classics Club Spin events as that is part of the challenge, but otherwise it’s pretty random! The 50 books I read for my “first 50” challenge, in order of reading, are as follows:
| The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot |
| Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift |
| The Best Short Stories – Rudyard Kipling |
| The Shiralee – D’Arcy Niland |
| The Good Shepherd – CS Forester |
| The Best Short Stories – Jack London |
| Tales from the Thousand and One Nights |
| Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen |
| Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens |
| Tiburon – Kylie Tennant |
| Walkabout – Charles & Elsa Chauvel |
| Dr Zhivago – Boris Pasternak |
| War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy |
| Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier |
| Pavilion of Women – Pearl S Buck |
| Jane and Prudence – Barbara Pym |
| The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea – Randolph Stow |
| Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne |
| Meditations – Marcus Aurelius |
| The Yellow Joss & Other Tales – Ion L Idriess |
| The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead |
| Beyond the Black Stump – Nevil Shute |
| Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe |
| The Englishwoman in America – Isabella Bird |
| The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling – Henry Fielding |
| Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe |
| To the Islands – Randolph Stow |
| Beowulf – Unknown |
| Notre-Dame of Paris – Victor Hugo |
| The Art of War – Sun Tzu |
| Of Human Bondage – W Somerset Maugham |
| The Trumpet-Major – Thomas Hardy |
| Man Tracks – Ion L Idriess |
| The 39 Steps – John Buchan |
| A Passage to India – EM Forster |
| North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell |
| Coonardoo – Katharine Susannah Prichard |
| The Last of the Mohicans – J Fenimore Cooper |
| The Iliad – Homer |
| The Beckoning Shore – EV Timms |
| The Swiss Family Robinson – Johann David Wyss |
| The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte |
| The Birds & Other Stories – Daphne du Maurier |
| A Damsel in Distress – PG Wodehouse |
| Adam Bede – George Eliot |
| The Watch Tower – Elizabeth Harrower |
| The Well Dressed Explorer -Thea Astley |
| Lorna Doone – RD Blackmore |
| Childhood, Boyhood, Youth – Leo Tolstoy |
| Miss Mackenzie – Anthony Trollope |
I have now made a new list to be completed over the next five years, as follows:
| On the Wool Track (Australian) – CEW Bean 1910 |
| Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte 1847 |
| The Professor – Charlotte Bronte 1857 |
| Shirley – Charlotte Bronte 1849 |
| The Promise – Pearl S Buck 1944 |
| The Poetical Works of Robert Burns – Robert Burns 1859 |
| The Story of the Stone V2 – The Crab-Flower Club – Cao Xueqin 1791 |
| The Story of the Stone V3 – The Warning Voice – Cao Xueqin 1791 |
| The Story of the Stone V4 – The Debt of Tears – Cao Xueqin & Gao E 1791 |
| The Story of the Stone V5 – The Dreamer Wakes – Cao Xueqin & Gao E 1791 |
| Don Quixote – Cervantes 1605 |
| The Box-Car Children – Gertrude Chandler Warner 1924 |
| The Leopard – Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 |
| Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens 1844 |
| Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens 1841 |
| Stories and Sketches – Charles Dickens & others 1830-55 |
| Christmas Stories – Charles Dickens & others 1850-67 |
| The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 1844 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 1844 |
| Daniel Deronda – George Eliot 1876 |
| Mountain Madness – Winifred Fortescue 1943 |
| Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell 1848 |
| My Apprenticeship – Maxim Gorky 1916 |
| I, Claudius – Robert Graves 1934 |
| Claudius the God – Robert Graves 1934 |
| The Quiet American – Graham Greene 1955 |
| King Solomon’s Mines – H Rider Haggard 1885 |
| Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 1862 |
| The Art of Seeing – Aldous Huxley 1943 |
| The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James 1881 |
| Hereward the Wake – Charles Kingsley 1865 |
| The Pea-Pickers (Australian) – Eve Langley 1942 |
| Seven Pillars of Wisdom – TE Lawrence 1922 |
| Palace Walk – Naguib Mahfouz 1956 |
| Sugar Street – Naguib Mahfouz 1957 |
| An Outback Marriage (Australian) – AB (Banjo) Paterson 1906 |
| Intimate Strangers (Australian) – Katharine Susannah Prichard 1937 |
| The Pioneers (Australian) – Katharine Susannah Prichard 1915 |
| Old Mortality – Walter Scott 1816 |
| Ivanhoe – Walter Scott 1819 |
| The Honey Flow (Australian) – Kylie Tennant 1956 |
| The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories – Leo Tolstoy 1912 |
| The Warden – Anthony Trollope 1855 |
| The Small House at Allington – Anthony Trollope 1864 |
| The Narrative of Sojourner Truth – Sojourner Truth 1850 |
| Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev 1862 |
| The Mysterious Stranger – Mark Twain 1916 |
| Tono Bungay – HG Wells 1910 |
| Joan and Peter – HG Wells 1918 |
| Piccadilly Jim – PG Wodehouse 1916 |
Me, My Shelf and I 
Congratulations on completing your first list! Lots of interesting-looking books in your second list – I enjoyed Palace Walk, The Warden and King Solomon’s Mines among others. Good luck!
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Thanks – have just read Palace Walk, and have a copy of Sugar Street (the 3rd in the trilogy), but can’t decide whether I really want to get hold of the middle one.
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Love all the Aussie books on your second list 🙂
I’ve just finished Kylie Tennant’s The Battler’s – I highly recommend it for your third list!
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Thanks – I got The Pea Pickers as my spin this time! Have been meaning to read it for ages, so will finally get around to it. Most of the books on my list are ones I have picked up from street libraries/charity shops, or have had on my shelves forever. I do have a few ebooks but much prefer hard copies, hence only a few Aussies.
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The Pea Pickers is a pretty intense read – so good luck! I wrote a couple of posts about it a couple of years ago if you find it hard going – they might help. I enjoyed it a lot & I still think about it, but I did have to work at it.
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