Considering my struggles to finish the book challenge I have already started it can be questioned whether I really need to participate in another reading challenge. However The Classics Club, consisting of members who all aim to read and blog about 50 classics within 5 years, seemed too fun to miss.
In my own list I have prioritized books that I own (18), especially those I haven’t read (5) or haven’t finished (8). Nordic authors feature heavily (20). I have tried to avoid rereads (thus no Jane Austen) but have included a few novels I haven’t read since I was a teenager (3) and a few I have read recently but wanted an excuse to read again (The Pillow Book, Brothers Lionheart and Gaudy Night). Overall I have tried to find a good balance between books I want to read and books I want to have read.
Book list
1 de Beauvoir, Simone: The Second Sex
2 Bellman, Carl Michael: Fredmans epistlar (Fredman’s epistles)
3 Boye, Karin: Kallocain
4 Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita
5 Carter, Angela: Night at the Circus
6 Cather, Willa: My Antonia
7 Alighieri, Dante: Vita nuova
8 Eliot, George: Silas Marner
9 Eliot, George: Middlemarch
10 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
11 Fogelström, Per Anders: Mina drömmars stad (City of My Dreams)
12 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Faust
13 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The House of the Seven Gables
14 Ibsen, Henrik: Peer Gynt
15 Jansson, Tove: Sent i november (Moominvalley in November)
16 Jansson, Tove: Pappan och Havet (Moominpappa at Sea)
17 Kushner, Tony: Angels in America
18 Lagerlöf, Selma: Gösta Berlings saga (Gösta Berling’s Saga)
19 Lagerlöf, Selma: Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils)
20 Lindgren, Astrid: Bröderna Lejonhjärta (The Brothers Lionheart)
21 Linna, Väinö: Okänd soldat (The Unknown Soldier)
22 Lönnrot, Elias: Kalevala
23 Moberg, Vilhelm: Utvandrarna (The Emigrants)
24 Moberg, Vilhelm: Din stund på jorden (A Time on Earth)
25 Morrison, Toni: Beloved
26 Plath, Sylvia: Ariel
27 Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
28 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea
29 Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children
30 de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine: The Little Prince
31 de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine: Wind, Sand and Stars
32 Sayers, Dorothy: Gaudy Night
33 Scott, Robert Falcon: Scott’s last expedition
34 Sei Shōnagon: The Pillow Book
35 Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
36 Sturlasson, Snorre: Heimskringla
37 Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
38 Thorvall, Kerstin: Det mest förbjudna
39 Tikkanen, Märta: Arnaía kastad i havet
40 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
41 Tunström, Göran: Juloratoriet (The Christmas Oratorio )
42 Undset, Sigrid: Kransen (The Wreath, Kristin Lavransdatter triology, part one)
43 Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
44 Den poetiska Eddan (Poetic Edda)
Anthologies etc.
45 Kafka, Franz: Metamorphosis and other stories
46 Lie, Jonas: Fortellinger i utvalg (Selected stories)
47 Mansfield, Katherine: Short story collection
48 Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of spades and other stories
49 Rumi: Selected poems
50 Selected Bible books: Psalms, Revelation
Goal date
20th of October 2022.
Bonus classics
Andersson, Dan: Visor och ballader (Songs and ballads )
Cooper, Susan: Over Sea, Under Stone
Durrell, Gerald: My Family and Other Animals
Ende, Michael: Momo
Ingstad, Helge: Øst for den store bre (East of the Great Glacier)
Khvoshchinskaya, Nadezhda: The Boarding-School Girl
Khvoshchinskaya, Sofia: City Folk and Country Folk
Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Left Hand of Darkness
Melville,Herman: Moby Dick
Neruda, Pablo: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Nordström, Ester Blenda: En piga bland pigor (A maid among maids)
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine: Night Flight
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine: Flight to Arras
Verne, Jules: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Wägner, Elin: Pennskaftet
Origins of the books I will be reading as part of the challenge (for some of the older authors this was not trivial to determine and some of those were therefore rather arbitrarily assigned a country). There clearly will be some blank spots in my reading also after this challenge.
I read that in a book 
It’s so awesome that you’ve joined the Classics Club!! I was so close to adding Wide Sargasso Sea to my list – curious to see your thoughts on it! I’ve also read The Colour Purple and Beloved, and be prepared to tear up. Good luck 😀
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I already own Wide Sargasso Sea and started on it a few years but despite liking it I somehow got distracted and never finished it. I look forward to doing so now.
I always tear up when I read sad things, I’ll try not to read them on a public transport then…
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That happens to me so many times! I love a book and for some reason get distracted and never go back to it. So strange lol.
Yes, don’t read on transport 🙂
Good luck!! 😀
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I’m curious: Why the emphasis on Nordic authors? And which of them do you recommend the most?
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Well, I’m Swedish so the Nordic classics are closest to me and I feel that they deserve some more coverage.
The ones on my Classics Club reading list mostly marks gaps in my reading and are not necessarily the best starting points. Are you interested in any specific type of literature? Knowing what you generally like would help making my recommendations more accurate. As general recommendations from my list I guess I’d go for Fogelström’s City of My Dreams which is an old favourite that I added to my list because I wanted to reread it. Otherwise I can recommend Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (not on my list but one of my favourites), but it is perhaps not so seasonal.
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That makes perfect sense! Someone recently asked me what sort of books I like, and I could only think “anything that is excellent”. Every novel worth reading seems to peel back a layer on the mystery of human life, so I just want to read anything that does that well. I’ll add those two books to my list of books to read!
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I love your international list for The Classics Club. #4 is awesome, but better with an edition that has lots of notes, to really understand the meaning of the book.
My list is here: https://wordsandpeace.com/2016/01/01/the-classics-club-2016-2020/
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Good advice, that’s one of the books on the list for which I don’t already own an edition, so I will definitely look for ones with notes.
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