I've decided to take the plunge and join The Classics Club. Fifty classic novels (at least) to be read over five years. Just looking at that sentence fills me with adrenaline—equal parts fear and excitement about committing myself to such a daunting (but, hopefully, rewarding) task.

Brainstorming my book list and writing this post, I couldn't help but think, "Oh, great, Shaina. As if you didn't already have enough piles of reading to do and/or feel bad about not doing." But then I remember that these are stories and essays I want to get around to at some point or another, and what better way to make that happen than to give myself a time frame in which to do it?

I tried to put together a good mix, including diverse content and authors (still a woeful ratio of authors of color/female authors to white dudes, but what can you do?). Some are teeny, some are whoppers. The club considers these to be "living lists," so it's possible some of these could change before I'm through.

As I read and review, I'll be updating each book with a link to its own post.
So, here we go. 50 books by November 20, 2019. (God help me.)

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (completed 8/11/15)

2. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

3. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

4. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

6. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

7. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

8. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

9. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey (completed 09/09/15)

10. A Separate Peace, John Knowles

11. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

12. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

13. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (completed 2/11/15)

14. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

15. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

16. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (completed 8/31/15)

17. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

18. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

19. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

20. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

21. The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

22. Walden, Henry David Thoreau

23. Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin

24. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

25. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

26. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

27. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

28. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

29. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck (completed 1/31/15)

30. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

31. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott (completed 12/26/14)

32. The Monk, Matthew Gregory Lewis

33. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

34.  The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

35. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

36. The Iliad, Homer

37. Macbeth, William Shakespeare

38. The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather

39. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

40. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

41. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

42. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

43. Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

44. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

45. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë

46. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

47. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft

48. The Trial, Franz Kafka

49. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

50. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon