I recently completed my second Classics Club list (which I wrote about last week) and am now ready to post a new one. For any of you who are not familiar with the Classics Club, the idea is to make a list of at least fifty classics and read them within a five year time period. In reality, both my first and second lists took longer than that, but five years is the aim!

As I’ve already included a lot of the better known classics on my first two lists, I’ve had to search slightly harder for books to put on this one and a lot of these are lesser known titles by classic authors. You may be questioning whether some of them are really classics, but the rules of the Classics Club allow us to define classics in any way we choose, as long as the book is at least twenty-five years old. I’ve mostly avoided re-reads apart from the two Shakespeare plays – I chose those two because I have some modern retellings on the TBR and thought it would be interesting to re-read the original play first.

Here’s my list of 50 books with an estimated finish date of 16th January 2031:

1. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
2. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
3. Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
4. The Evil Genius by Wilkie Collins
5. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
6. The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
7. The Women’s War by Alexandre Dumas
8. Iron Gustav by Hans Fallada
9. The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell
10. A Harp in Lowndes Square by Rachel Ferguson
11. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
12. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
13. The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy
14. The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
15. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
16. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
17. The Bamboo Blonde by Dorothy B. Hughes
18. The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
19. Day of the Arrow by Philip Loraine
20. The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
21. The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery
22. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
23. Lord Tony’s Wife by Baroness Orczy
24. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
25. No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym
26. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
27. The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart
28. The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
29. The Hearth and Eagle by Anya Seton
30. Othello by William Shakespeare
31. King Lear by William Shakespeare
32. The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff
33. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
34. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
35. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
36. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson
37. My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart
38. Judith by Noel Streatfeild
39. The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff
40. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
41. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
42. The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope
43. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
44. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
45. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
46. The Rose and the Yew Tree by Mary Westmacott
47. A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde
48. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
49. Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham
50. La Curée by Émile Zola

I’m looking forward to getting started with this, but I do have a question for those of you who are Classics Club members. I’m sure I’ll want to read other classics that I haven’t included here, so what do you usually do in that situation? Do you replace one of the titles on your list or do you just read it in addition to the listed titles? With my previous lists, I’ve swapped out a few books but have mainly just read lots of extra ones that weren’t listed. How much swapping do the rest of you tend to do? Maybe that’s why I never seem to finish within five years!

Have you read any of these books? What should I read first?