Cavalcade of Classics, Round Two

Welcome to Round Two 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 time—my second time participating after my first list expired—consists of 50 titles. Some of these are rollovers from my list from Round One, but many of them are new.

The first 18 are from Ancient times. My daughter is studying the Ancients through the Classics, so I’m prioritizing the Ancient literature from my list to read along with or ahead of her. I hope to finish these 18 by December 31, 2019.

Unlike with Round One, I’m going to let myself listen to some of these on audio. If it seems like I’m missing something that way, I’ll revisit that rule, but if it works okay, I think that will be a good way to “read” some more books on the list.

If I finish all of these titles before the September 30, 2023, end date, I’ll make a Round Three list. With the backlog of books on my TBR, making a Round Three list should be easy.

Start Date: October 1, 2018

Goal date for the first 18 titles: December 31, 2019 (Looks like I missed that one by a lot…)

End Date: September 30, 2023

Classics List:

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh (read October 2018)
2. The Odyssey by Homer (Emily Wilson trans.) (finished October 2019)
3. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (finished January 2020)
4. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
5. Agamemnon by Aeschylus
6. The Analects by Confucius
7. The Birds by Aristophanes
8. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucycides
9. The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
10. Ramayana (currently reading November 2018; changed version January 2019)
11. Aeneid by Virgil
12. The Gallic War by Caesar
13. Cicero’s First Oration Against Catiline
14. The Early History of Rome by Livy (Book I)
15. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (Possible companion read with I, Claudius by Robert Graves)
16. The Letters of Pliny the Younger (at least a few of them)
17. Parallel Lives by Plutarch
18. Confessions by Augustine of Hippo
19. Maurice by E.M. Forster
20. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
21. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (read January 2019)
22. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
23. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (read October 2018; audio)
24. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (read October 2018; audio)
25. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (read November 2020)
26. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (re-read)
27. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
28. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
29. A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays by Voltaire
30. The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
31. Utopia by Thomas More
32. Villette by Charlotte Brontë
33. The Gate by Natsume Sōseki
34. The Village by Marghanita Laski
35. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
36. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
37. Noli Me Tángere by José Rizal
38. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
39. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (read December 2018)
40. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
41. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
42. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (read October 2018, audio)
43. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
44. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh (read October 2020, audio)
45. The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
46. Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau (alongside Thoreau as Spiritual Guide: A Companion to Walden for Personal Reflection and Group Discussion by Barry M. Andrew)
47. The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig
48. The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
49. The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
50. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton (read October 2020)