Classics Club

The Classics Club is a virtual book club created to inspire people to read and blog about classic books. To join, you have to pledge that you’ll read 50+ classics in 5 years or less and post reviews on your blog. This page is my pledge and a means for me to track my progress.

I plan to read and review the following 50 books in 5 years (from 1st Jan 2026 to 31 Dec 2030):

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. The Iliad – Homer
3. The Odyssey – Homer
4. The Upanishads
5. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
6. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles
7. Lysistrata – Aristophanes
8. Arthashastra – Kautilya (Chanakya)
9. Beowulf
10. Njal’s Saga (The Saga of Burnt Njal)
11. The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Essays – Michel de Montaigne
13. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
14. Othello (or) Macbeth – William Shakespeare
15. A Book of Five Rings (Go Rin no Sho) – Miyamoto Musashi
16. Meditations on First Philosophy – Rene Descartes
17. The Misanthrope – Molière
18. Any novel by Jane Austen
19. Dracula – Bram Stoker
20. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
21. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
22. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol – Vol 1
23. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol – Vol 2
24. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
25. Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville
26. White Nights – Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
28. The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
29. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
30. Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
31. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
32. The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy
33. The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
34. Demian – Hermann Hesse
35. Mrs.Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
36. Ulysses – James Joyce
37. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
38. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
39. 1984 – George Orwell
40. Ponniyin Selvan – Kalki Krishnamurthy
41. Nausea (or) The Wall – Jean-Paul Sartre
42. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
43. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
44. The Fall (or) The Stranger – Albert Camus
45. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
46. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
47. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
48. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
49. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
50. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Here are some more options if I want to swap any book from the above list, or if I finish the 50 and want more classics:

• Aesop’s Fables
• Panchatantra
• Hitopadesha
• The Aeneid – Virgil
• The Amores – Ovid
• The Satyricon – Petronius
• War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg 
• Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
• The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Goethe
• Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
• Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
• Byomkesh Bakshi – Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay
• Gitanjali – Rabindranath Tagore
• Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
• No Longer Human – Osamu Dazai
• Kadal Pura – Sandilyan
• A Novel by Agatha Christie
• Goodbye, Mr.Chips – James Hilton

I gathered most of the above books from Great Books and Classics and recommend checking out the site. They are listed in the chronological order of the authors.