Sam Reads Classics

For Christmas 2011, I recieved a Kobo (eReader) from my parents.  It was preloaded with 100 written works.  I made it my goal to read all 100.

As someone who managed to survive high school English by complete luck, this is a daunting challenge.  As much as I love reading, I have never been one to read classical pieces.  Frankly, most of them go right over my head.

Check out the titles below and join along on my mission to tackle some pieces of writing history!
Progress: 2/100

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Aesop's Fables - Aesop
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Arabian Nights Entertainment - Andrew Lang
Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne
The Art of War - Sun Tzu

Beowulf

Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
Book of Nonsense - Edward Lear

The Call of the Wild - Jack London

The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Max & Friedrich Engels
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas De Quincey
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cyrano De Bergerac - Edmond Rostand

Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe

Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Dubliners - James Joyce

Emma - Jane Austen
English Fairy Tales - Joseph Jacobs

Four Arthurian Romances - Chretien DeTroyes
Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Grimm's Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle

The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Illiad - Homer
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Irish Fairy Tales - James Stephens
The Island of Doctor Moreau - H. G. Wells

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Japanese Fairy Tales - Yei Theodora Ozaki
The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling

The Lady of The Lake - Sir Walter Scott
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Man Who Knew Too Much - G.K. Chesterton
Mansfeild Park - Jane Austen
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 - Andrew Lang

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

The Odyssey of Homer - Homer, et al.
Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau
On the Origin Of Species - Charels Darwin

Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded - Samuel Richardson
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Peter Pan - James M. Barrie
The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Prince - Nicolo Machiavelli
The Prince and The Pauper - Mark Twain
The Princess and the Goblin - George MacDonald
Prufrock and Other Observations - T. S. Eliot

The Republic - Plato
The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult - M. Joseph Bedier

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie
The Secret Agent - Jospeh Conrad
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Siddhartha: The Prince Who Became Buddha - Herman Hesse
The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. Du Bois
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [currently reading]
Tales From Shakespeare - Charles & Mary Lamb
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Through The Looking-Glass - Charles Dodgson, et al.
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea - Jules Verne
Twenty Years After - Alexandre Dumas

Ulysses - James Joyce
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
White Fang - Jack London
The Works of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allen Poe

1 comment:

  1. Hey Sam - Good luck reading the classics!

    I started a similar challenge myself in college. It began when my Oceanography Professor dismissed the class mid-lecture after discovering that most of the students had never read more than one or two of the classics. He told us to get down to the library and to not come back to his course until we had at least started reading one classical work.

    Being someone who rarely makes good decisions when I am forced into doing something, I grabbed "Moby Dick" - perhaps the most complex work ever written!

    Anyway, I encourage you to keep going! I have learned more from reading the classics than from any of my college courses. BTW - Here's the secret to college and to work: "Find out what your professors or employers want and give them that!" You might not always agree, but you'll find out how much easier things become. Of course, never compromise on your integrity or values.

    All the best with your nursing studies and I will keep an eye out looking for Bigfoot here in Northern California for you.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for your comment! I absolutely love reading them and responding!