Since 2015, I’ve been participating in the “Classics Club” challenge, in which readers take on the task of reading 50 classics in five years. I posted my first list in September 2015 and completed it in 2020. I shared some thoughts about my favorite from the original list here. In January 2021, I started a second Classics Club list, which I call “The Classics Club Strikes Back” as a nod to The Empire Strikes Back.
FULL LIST
Classic, Medieval, and Renaissance
The Confessions, St. Augustine. Trans. Anthony Esolen. (3/4/2026.)
Purgatorio, Dante. Trans. Anthony Esolen (3/27/2023)
Paradiso, Dante. Trans. Anthony Esolen. (6/6/2023)
Paradise Lost, Milton (3/28/2026)
On the Nature of Things, Lucretius, trans. Anthony Esolen
World Lit
The Shahnameh, Ferdowsi
European Literature
Ida Elizabeth, Sigrid Unset
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alekandr Solzhenitsyn (9/12/2021)
Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy (10/19/2021)
Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy
Mephisto, Klaus Mann (10/2/2021)
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka. (11/01/2021)
British Literature
Rebecca, Daphne de Maurier
My Cousin Rachel, Daphne de Maurier
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell (4/23/2021)
*Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll. (1/3/2021)
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
Northanger Abby, Jane Austen (10/11/2021)
Persuasion, Jane Austen (09/06/2022)
Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling (4/16/2021)
Watership Down, Richard Adams (11/19/2021)
Animal Farm, George Orwell (12/16/2024)
American Literature
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
My Antonia, Willa Cather (2/6/2023)
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
All the Little Live Things, Wallace Stegner
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (11/02/2021)
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (6/20/2021)
The Moon is Down, John Steinbeck (8/31/2021)
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (6/19/2021)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok (8/1/2023)
Davida’s Harp, Chaim Potok (3/19/2021)
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin (2/12/2023)
Southern Literature
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (3/15/2022)
The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash
Cold Sassy Tree, Olivia Ann Burns. (2/24/2021)
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren (12/18/2024)
Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O’Connor (2/12/2024)
*The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines (1/12/2021)
A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest J. Gaines (5/6/2021)
Traveller, Richard Adams (4/26/2021)
The Old Man and the Boy, Robert Ruark (1/10/2021)
Classic SF
Dune, Frank Herbert (6/21/2024)
Neuromancer, William Gibson (10/26/2023)
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner (10/10/2023)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams (8/18/2022)
The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells (07/20/2020)
Reading Freely 
This is very cool!
This is very cool!
This is an interesting challenge, I may have to partake if/when I ever get my president goal done!
One nice thing about it is that it's a community challenge — and not just because a mass of people have agreed to do it, but because they keep their blog active, and encourage people to stay active and meet other classics readers. It adds motivation, I think. Also, people are constantly finishing challenges, or just starting it, so there's always new faces. Of course, a lot of people fall off the bus completely!