When I see a beautiful edition of a classic novel that I want to add to my collection, I can’t help myself. The problem is that I am prone to buying doubles, triples, and even quadruples of my favourite novels.
Please help me, I have six copies of Pride and Prejudice!
As a potential solution to curb my little book problem, I have set myself a fairly long list of classic novels that I want to read over the next couple of years.
Quite strategically, I own a vast majority of these novels already and have read some of them before too, whether at university, high school or just for leisure. I am setting myself a very strict “no new books” challenge until I finish reading this list. I can only buy books that are on this list, otherwise I need to borrow them.
I would love for you to join me, just drop me an email if there is a particular novel on the list that you’ve been meaning to read and haven’t gotten around to yet. We can read in tandem and discuss and hypothesise together along the way.
- The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
- Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie
- The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe – C.S Lewis
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- Matilda – Roald Dahl
- The Catcher in the Rye – J.D Salinger
- The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies – Hilary Mantel
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
- The Madwoman in the Attic – Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
- Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
- Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
- In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
- Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Maud Montgomery
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- The Awakening – Kate Chopin
- Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
- The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
- A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle
- Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- The Power of One – Bryce Courtenay
- The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
- On The Road – Jack Kerouac
- Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie
- Alice in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
- For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone – J.K.Rowling
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
- Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – Patrick Süskind
- The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
- Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
- Carrie – Stephen King
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
- Utopia – Sir Thomas More
- The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
- Beloved – Toni Morrison
- A Room With A View – E.M. Forster
- Emma – Jane Austen
- The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough
- The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
- Mary Poppins – P.L.Travers
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- Atonement – Ian McEwan
- Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
- The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
- The Celestine Prophecy – James Redfield
- Wild Swans – Jung Chang
- Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
- Robin Hood – Howard Pyle
- Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales – Angela Carter
