100 Classics Challenge

One Hundred Classics – a Three-Year Reading Journey

A steady walk through the books that built the canon, grouped by year, season, and theme. Titles marked ✓ are ones I’ve finished.

Year 1 — Foundations & Favourites

Jan–Mar – British Foundations

  1. ✓ Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  2. ✓ Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
  3. ✓ Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
  4. ✓ Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
  5. ✓ A Room with a View – E.M. Forster
  6. ✓ The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  7. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
  8. Middlemarch – George Eliot

Apr–Jun – American Voices

  1. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  3. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  4. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
  5. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
  6. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
  7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
  8. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

Jul–Sep – European Classics

  1. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
  2. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  3. The Stranger – Albert Camus
  4. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
  5. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo (Abridged)
  6. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes (Abridged)
  7. Candide – Voltaire
  8. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Oct–Dec – Gothic & Reflection

  1. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
  2. Dracula – Bram Stoker
  3. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
  4. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  5. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
  6. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
  7. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
  8. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

Year 2 — Depth & Diversity

Jan–Mar – Russian & Eastern European

  1. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Spread over 3 months)
  2. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  3. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
  4. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  5. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
  6. Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
  7. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  8. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Apr–Jun – French & Existential

  1. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
  2. Les Fleurs du Mal – Charles Baudelaire (Poetry)
  3. The Plague – Albert Camus
  4. The Trial – Franz Kafka
  5. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust (Vol 1: Swann’s Way)
  6. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
  7. Germinal – Émile Zola
  8. The Red and the Black – Stendhal

Jul–Sep – World Voices

  1. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
  2. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  3. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu (Abridged)
  4. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
  5. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
  6. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  7. Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  8. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

Oct–Dec – Modernism & Reflection

  1. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
  2. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
  3. 1984 – George Orwell
  4. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  5. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
  6. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
  7. Ulysses – James Joyce
  8. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Year 3 — Masterworks & Personal Discovery

Jan–Mar – Epics & Myth

  1. The Odyssey – Homer (Modern translation)
  2. The Iliad – Homer (Modern translation)
  3. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri (Abridged)
  4. Paradise Lost – John Milton
  5. The Aeneid – Virgil (Modern translation)
  6. The Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous (Modern translation)
  7. Beowulf – Anonymous (Modern translation)
  8. Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Apr–Jun – Philosophy & Reflection

  1. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
  2. The Republic – Plato (Modern abridgement)
  3. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
  4. The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
  5. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
  6. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
  7. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
  8. Essays – Michel de Montaigne (Selected)

Jul–Sep – Women’s Voices & Global Classics

  1. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
  2. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
  3. Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
  4. My Ántonia – Willa Cather
  5. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
  6. Beloved – Toni Morrison
  7. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
  8. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

Oct–Dec – Legacy & Modern Impact

  1. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
  2. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
  3. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
  4. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
  5. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
  6. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
  7. The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
  8. The Outsider – S.E. Hinton
  9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
  10. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
  11. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
  12. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera