On Friday, the administrators of the Classics Club challenge are going to post a random number from one to twenty. Those of us enrolled in the Classics Club Challenge( reading fifty classics of our choosing within five years) have been asked to list twenty of the books left on our to-read list. We are then challenged to read that number on our list which matches the random number posted on Friday.
Here below are my twenty possibilities!
- The Aeneid, Virgil
- The Histories, Herodotus
- The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
- One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
- The Prince, Machiavelli
- The Seven-Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
- War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
- The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
- The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss
- Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
- The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
- Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
- The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller
- Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy
I’m working on one of these presently, so perhaps I’ll get wildly lucky and get it. I am doing well on my challenge, staying right on target: I’m hovering at the 50% mark with two and a half years left.
Reading Freely 
Fascinating challenge and list. Good luck. I might look into joining the challenge group. Very intriguing concept!
Read 1……. Own 7. Will read some….. relatively soon…. [lol]
@Tim I've found it helpful as both an inspiration and a reminder. I'm looking forward to what lies ahead.
@Cyberkitten: I omitted a lot of English and American lit from this list since I'll be focusing on those in April and July respectively…otherwise you would recognize a lot more! The biggest obstacles for me will be Moby-Dick and the Russians…those are all enormous.
I have 2x 10 groups coming up (which contain a few classics) and then a batch of 10 classics which will be quite a challenge for me I think. In the next 12 months I imagine my 'bag' of classics will be greatly enlarged!
Henry Adams sounds interesting. Good luck!
Thanks! I'll need it. Quite the wordsmith, Henry is..