Note, I realised my original list was short on books (so much for trusting AI). So I’ve used another AI (Claude) to amend the list and add another 30 books to it. I doubt I’ll do this is three years, as I’m already behind (even after giving myself a head start).

Oh Lordy, the things I dream up for myself at times! How on earth will I go from only reading the occasional biography and autobiography (interspersed with the latest self-help book) to reading novels deemed to be classics. You see ‘dear reader’ I’ve been very neglectful of my literary education. In fact, I’ve been a lazy reader and have not been challenging myself. But it wasn’t always that way. I used to consume books, always had one on the go. I wasn’t a ‘take the book with you everywhere’ type of reader, more like, it’s on the nightstand and I’ll pick it up and read it when I have some downtime. I’m blaming my midlife lack of intellectual curiosity on social media and the internet in general. I’ve been well and truly down the social media rabbit hole and can doom scroll with the best of them.

For a while now I’ve wanted to get back into reading, but modern fiction was not holding my attention for some reason. I was browsing the web recently when I saw an article about some of the top classic books. As I was reading the article, I was beginning to feel some serious FOMO due to the number of books I’d not read. And a crazy thought entered into my head – why don’t I try and read 100 of the best books published? I immediately realised creating a list of the best books was going to involve some research and would be open to argument and conjecture. Despite this, I set about Googling away, and after maybe reading three or so lists, I realised the lists while having a lot of books in common varied enough for me to start getting confused. So I turned to Chad (my name for ChatGPT) and told Chad what I wanted to achieve. Let’s just say the irony of asking Chad to do this was not lost on me. But within minutes not only did I have a list, but it was divided up into months, years, ‘voices’ and genres. Chad had decided to ‘ease me in’ with some British classics. I wasn’t about to argue with Chad’s choices. They looked pretty good to me, and I wasn’t keen on spending time debating it with others or doing more research. The list (which I’ve published below) is going to give me some challenges for sure, but I also hope that once the list is done, I’ll have reset my brain and detoxed from social media. Plus there’s the bragging rights that I have read all of these books. And while I acknowledge I’m doing this out of a bit of snobbery (I was looking down on my own reading), I’m more interested in what it might do to my own writing.

For some time now, I’ve had a novel in me, trying to get out. But it’s stuck. And I figured, if I don’t write it, someone else will and I’ll be mad at myself for not getting it out of me. But after many attempts at writing chapters, I realised I probably needed to either go and do a course in writing, or immerse myself in the writing of some of the world’s best novelists. Not keen to do a course, I’ve chosen the later. So let’s get onto the list!

Now, I should add, that while this reading challenge commences in January 2026, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to get a jump on things. So I downloaded Pride and Prejudice onto my phone and got reading. Despite being a fan of the 1995 mini series, I’d never read the book. I’d read page one many times, and could not get into it. I’m pleased to report that I have now finally read Pride and Prejudice. I tripped over the words a lot, and often got impatient as I knew what was coming next. It took me 14 hours and 4 minutes to read the book using the Libby app on my phone. I started on October 25th and picked up the book 28 times, finishing it on Friday the 14th of November.

Reading a book on my phone I soon realised was probably not ideal, and as I had a birthday during this time, I suggested to my partner that perhaps a Kobo would be a good present. And so we dispatched ourselves to the nearest Harvey Norman and procured a black and white Kobo (rather than coloured), as the research indicated it would be easier to read, and after a brief glance at the two options, I concurred that yes, black and white was the way to go. I’ve now downloaded my second book, Jane Eyre, onto my Kobo, and as I write this, I’m now 38% of the way through Jane Eyre. I’m finding it much easier to read, part of that will be due to the Kobo, but I also realised after page one that I was much preferring the writing style. Ok, so let’s move on to the list.

The List of 100 Classic Books Prepared by ChatGPT and Claude

One Hundred Classics – a Three-Year Reading Journey

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

9. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
11. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
12. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
13. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
14. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
15. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
16. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

Jul–Sep – European Classics

17. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
18. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
19. The Stranger – Albert Camus
20. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
21. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo (Abridged)
22. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes (Abridged)
23. Candide – Voltaire
24. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Oct–Dec – Gothic & Reflection

25. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
26. Dracula – Bram Stoker
27. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
28. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
29. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
30. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
31. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
32. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

Year 2 — Depth & Diversity

Jan–Mar – Russian & Eastern European

33. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Spread over 3 months)
34. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
35. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
36. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
37. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
38. Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
39. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
40. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Apr–Jun – French & Existential

41. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
42. Les Fleurs du Mal – Charles Baudelaire (Poetry)
43. The Plague – Albert Camus
44. The Trial – Franz Kafka
45. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust (Vol 1: Swann’s Way)
46. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
47. Germinal – Émile Zola
48. The Red and the Black – Stendhal

Jul–Sep – World Voices

49. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
50. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
51. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu (Abridged)
52. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
53. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
54. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
55. Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
56. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

Oct–Dec – Modernism & Reflection

57. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
58. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
59. 1984 – George Orwell
60. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
61. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
62. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
63. Ulysses – James Joyce
64. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Year 3 — Masterworks & Personal Discovery

Jan–Mar – Epics & Myth

65. The Odyssey – Homer (Modern translation)
66. The Iliad – Homer (Modern translation)
67. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri (Abridged)
68. Paradise Lost – John Milton
69. The Aeneid – Virgil (Modern translation)
70. The Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous (Modern translation)
71. Beowulf – Anonymous (Modern translation)
72. Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Apr–Jun – Philosophy & Reflection

73. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
74. The Republic – Plato (Modern abridgement)
75. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
76. The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
77. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
78. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
79. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
80. Essays – Michel de Montaigne (Selected)

Jul–Sep – Women’s Voices & Global Classics

81. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
82. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
83. Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
84. My Ántonia – Willa Cather
85. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
86. Beloved – Toni Morrison
87. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
88. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

Oct–Dec – Legacy & Modern Impact

89. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
90. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
91. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
92. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
93. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
94. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
95. The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
96. The Outsider – S.E. Hinton
97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
98. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
99. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
100. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

Conclusion

There are books on this list that I do not relish reading. I’ve tried in the past to read them, and just couldn’t do it. 1984 is one such book. It just scared and freaked me out too much. And yes, I know, that’s the goal of the book. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve tried to read it. War and Peace, jeepers, ChatGPT did give me the chance to exclude it, but I thought, what the heck, why not? I may live to regret that decision, assuming I get that far into the list.

So 1.3 books down! Wish me luck.