Cavalcade of Classics Redux!

Welcome to the 2026 revival of my Cavalcade of Classics!

The Classics Club hosts a challenge in which members curate and read from a list of at least 50 Classics. The titles are each member’s own choice, and the definition of “Classic” is up to each member’s own discretion. Each member chooses a date up to five years in the future by which they will aim to read and write about each of their titles. And that’s all there is to it.

My list this third time around consists of 50 titles. Some of these are rollovers from my list from Round One and Round Two, but most of them are new.

The biggest BIG BOOK on this list is the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I’m doing as a Litsy Buddy Read and hope to finish by 31 December 2026. The rest I’m just hoping to finish by the end of 2030.

Start Date: 1 January 2026

End Date: 31 December 2030

Classics List:

1. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (currently reading as of January 1, 2026)
2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust
3. The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
4. Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust
5. The Prisoner by Marcel Proust
6. The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
7. Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust
8. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
9. The Iliad by Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
13. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
14. Discourses by Epictetus
15. Confessions by Augustine of Hippo
16. The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
17. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
18. The Analects by Confucius
19. Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin
20. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
21. Utopia by Thomas More
22. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
23. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
24. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
25. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
26. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
27. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
28. The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
29. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
30. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
31. The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
32. Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
33. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
34. Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
35. The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
36. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
37. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
38. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
39. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
40. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
41. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
43. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
44. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
45. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
46. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
47. The Village by Marghanita Laski
48. Maurice by E.M. Forster
49. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
50. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing