The Classics: well, some of them, at least

I'm joining the Classics Club, hosted by Jillian at A Room of One's Own, and participating in this challenge: I'll read 50 classics, chosen by me, in no particular order, within 5 years, and blog about each one here.

The ones listed in purple are books I've read before, but not for 20 to 30 years. The exceptions are The English Patient and The Bell Jar, both of which I read about 15 years ago. I've tried to mix eras and genders. Some books are not technically classic in and of themselves, such as The Portable Dorothy Parker, but are collections of work by an author I consider part of the canon. I also wanted to get plenty of poetry in there, as I tend not to read much poetry unless nudged. So here is my list, to be completed by March 10, 2017. I'll reward myself with a trip to Hawaii! Well, maybe not. I think I'll choose to visit a literary monument of some sort, but I haven't yet decided. Maybe City Lights Bookstore? The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum? Time will tell.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
3. Persuasion, Jane Austen
4. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
5. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
6. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
7. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
8. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
9. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaniel West
10. Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
11. The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
12. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
13. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
14. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
15. Women In Love, D.H. Lawrence
16. Out of Africa, Isak Dineson
17. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
18. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
19. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
20. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
21. Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
22. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
23. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
24. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
25. The March, E.L. Doctorow
26. The Enormous Room, E.E. Cummings
27. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
28. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
29. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
30. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
31. The Doctor Stories, William Carlos Williams
32. Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens
33. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
34. The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
35. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
36. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
37. Howl, Alan Ginsberg
38. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
39. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
40. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
41. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
42. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
43. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
44. My Antonia, Willa Cather
45. O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather
46. The Poems of Emily Dickinson
47. Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter
48. The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, Eudora Welty
49. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
50. The Portable Dorothy Parker