My first year in The Classics Club

I’m having an anniversary! It is one year (and two days) since I joined The Classics Club and claimed that I would read the 50 classics on my list within five years.

Since then I have read 14 of the 50 books on my list and found some new favourites. The Classics Club is also a great community and I have encountered several interesting blogs and had many interesting discussions thanks to it, so if you enjoy classics I recommend it. You choose your list yourself so the only demand is that you should list at least 50 classics and aim to finish them in maximum five years.

I have enjoyed most of the fourteen books I have read from the list so far, but three of them stand out from the rest. As an anniversary is a perfect excuse to highlight some favourites, that’s what I’m going to do.

Perhaps the most surprising book to me on my “top three most memorable classics club reads so far”-list, was Wind, sand and stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I was not at all convinced by his much more famous novel, The Little Prince, but I loved this memoir, which perfectly captures the beauty and danger of the early days of air traffic.

The second one on my list was also unexpected. I knew that I wanted to have read The Poetic Edda, but did not expect to enjoy actually reading it as much as I did. It was a lot more readable than I had expected and includes some great stories, many of which I recognized.

The last one on my list was not unexpected at all. I added The Brothers Lionheart to my list because I already knew that I loved it, and wanted to reread it, and get an excuse to tell everyone else of its greatness…

All the books read for the Classics Club
Carter, Angela: Night at the Circus
Alighieri, Dante: Vita nuova
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
Kafka, Franz: Metamorphosis and other stories
Lagerlöf, Selma: Gösta Berlings saga (Gösta Berling’s Saga)
Lindgren, Astrid: Bröderna Lejonhjärta (The Brothers Lionheart)
Moberg, Vilhelm: Din stund på jorden (A Time on Earth)
Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades and other stories
Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine: The Little Prince
de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine: Wind, Sand and Stars
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
Den Poetiska Eddan (Poetic Edda)