Joining the Classics Club

Learn more about the Classics Club

Well, hello! After several years of watching from the sidelines, I've decided to join the Classics Club, an ongoing challenge for bloggers to read at least 50 classics of their own choosing within five years and write about each book they finish. I have been longing to rejoin the book blogging world, but I've been unsure of where to begin. I realized it would be far easier to hop back in with a clear-cut goal that includes an end date and a level of accountability to the club, if not to myself. I'm looking forward to working on it.

Another reason I am joining is because the challenge will help me with one of my other goals: reading more novels. My reading habits naturally lean toward non-fiction with titles like The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment that really hook me. In order to read a balanced amount of fiction/non-fiction, I have to put a little effort in. A couple of years ago I separated my “To Read” list by fiction and non-fiction through shelves on Goodreads. Currently, there are 674 books tagged “tbr-nonfiction” and 303 tagged “tbr-fiction.” Although the tags make it easier to find titles, I still feel frustrated by how much time it can take to settle on one to find at the library. And then, because I read so much—I read 220 books last year and I’m reading at the same volume this year—the search-find-read cycle repeats in an endless loop. I figure the less time I spend on finding books to read, the more time I can spend writing about the books I read.

The books listed below were already on my "tbr-fiction" list (or, with a couple exceptions like the Brontë books, should have been). Most of them could be called queer classics. There are also six non-fiction titles I've been meaning to read and probably wouldn't get around to for a while if they weren't included on the list.

The Classics Club requires you to choose a finish date within five years of starting. My goal finish date is January 1, 2022.

1. Maurice by EM Forster
2. Faggots by Larry Kramer
3. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
4. The Pure and the Impure by Colette
5. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
6. Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
7. Blue Heaven by Joe Keenan
8. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
9. Regeneration by Pat Barker
10. The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy
11. The Odyssey by Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)
12. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
13. Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
14. Don Quixote by Kathy Acker
15. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
16. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
17. Journey to the End of the Night by Céline
18. Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
19. When Fox is a Thousand by Larissa Lai
20. La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc
21. The Time of Man by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
22. Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble
23. The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute
24. Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin
25. Women Lovers, or The Third Woman by Natalie Clifford Barney
26. Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks
27. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton
28. Two Women of London by Emma Tennant
29. Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen
30. This Child’s Gonna Live by Sarah E. Wright
31. The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
32. Ernesto by Umberto Saba
33. The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks
34. Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
35. Border Country by Raymond Williams
36. The Green Carnation by Robert Smythe Hichens
37. The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
38. Abeng by Michelle Cliff
39. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley
40. Kipps by HG Wells
41. The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
42. The Crux by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
43. A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell
44. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
45. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah
46. Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves
47. Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis
48. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
49. Wuthering Heights by by Emily Brontë
50. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles 
51. Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner 
52. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
53. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
54. Changing Places by David Lodge
55. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar
56. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz
57. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare
58. Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
59. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David B. Feinberg
60. Genet by Edmund White