Cavalcade of Classics

Update: The reading period for this list expired on December 31, 2017. Join me for Cavalcade of Classics, Round Two, which rolled out on October 1, 2018!

As part of The Classics Club, I’ve challenged myself to read 89 classics in five years. I’ve named my challenge the Cavalcade of Classics because I like alliteration and because I think the word “cavalcade” is highly underused these days.

My book lists are drawn mainly from The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, with some modifications. I’m sure there will be more modifications as time goes on. I’m planning to read many of them according to the trivium (in Classical education, the trivium refers to grammar, logic, and rhetoric, three divisions of study that lay the foundation for all other learning) as described in Bauer’s book. I doubt I’ll follow this method strictly for every book, but I do plan to use it a fair amount, especially for the more complicated books.

For more background about how I put together this challenge, see Cavalcade of Classics Kick-off.

If you’re interested in reading some or all of these books and would like to join me for an electronic discussion à la the rhetoric stage of the trivium, let me know and I’m happy to pin a completion date on any of these and set up to have a virtual book club. Not sure how that would look at this point, but if the interest arises, I’m sure we’ll figure out the logistics.

The details of the challenge:

Start Date: January 1, 2013

End Date: December 31, 2017

There are 89 books on the list, so I need to average 1.48 books a month to finish by the end of 2017. (Update, May 2016: I am nowhere near this average. I might need to modify my classics list.)

As I finish each book, I’ll cross-post a review on Goodreads and on this blog, and I’ll update this page with a link to the review. Meet me back here in a few months and see how far I’ve gotten. I hope that I will be pleasantly surprised.

Literature:

1. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan – Completed February 2013
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe  – Completed June 2013
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – Completed April 2013
4. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens – Completed July 2014, The Classics Club Spin #6
5. Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë – Completed November 2014
6. Villette by Charlotte Brontë – Hope to read before 12/31/2017
7. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
8. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe– Completed December 2015, The Classics Club Spin #9
9. Middlemarch by George Eliot – Completed June 2014
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
13. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
14. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde – Completed March 2014
15. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane – Hope to read before 12/31/2017
16. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
17. Kim by Rudyard Kipling – Completed February 2015
18. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (Re-read)
19. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
20. Ulysses by James Joyce – Completed December 2013
21. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – Re-read, completed January 2014
22. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
23. The Castle by Franz Kafka
24. Native Son by Richard Wright
25. The Stranger by Albert Camus
26. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
27. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
28. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
29. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
30. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
31. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
32. Possession by A.S. Byatt

Memoir:

1. The Confessions by Augustine of Hippo – Hope to read before 12/31/2017
2. The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe (partial re-read)
3. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
4. The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself by Teresa of Avila
5. Meditations by Rene Descartes
6. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan
7. The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration by Mary Rowlandson
8. Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
9. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benkamin Franklin
10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (partial re-read) – Hope to read before 12/31/2017
11. Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup – Hope to read before 12/31/2017
12. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
13. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
14. Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
15. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas Ghandi
16. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein – Completed February 2014
17. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
18. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life by C.S. Lewis – Completed March 2014, The Classics Club Spin #5
19. The Autobiography of Macolm X by Malcolm X
20. Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
21. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
22. Born Again by Charles W. Colson
23. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by Richard Rodriguez
24. The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
25. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs by Elie Wiesel

History:

1. The Histories by Herodotus – Currently Reading, March 2015
2. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
3. The Republic by Plato – Classics Spin #8, Completed December 2014
4. Symposium by Plato – Completed January 2015
5. Parallel Lives by Plutarch
6. City of God by Augustine of Hippo – Completed January 2014
7. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
8. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
9. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
10. Two Treatises of Government by John Locke – Completed April 2014
11. The History of England, Volume V by David Hume – completed November 2013
12. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
13. Common Sense by Thomas Paine
14. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
15. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
16. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
17. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
18. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burkhardt
19. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
20. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
21. Queen Victoria by Lytton Stachey
22. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
23. The New England Mind by Perry Miller
24. The Great Crash by John Kenneth Galbraith
25. The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
26. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
27. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese
28. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
29. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
30. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson
31. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
32. The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

Additional Classics I Wish to Read (But Which I’m Not Ready to Add to the List Because There Are Already So Many There):

• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (Re-read)
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Re-Read)
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
• North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Re-read)
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Howard’s End by E.M. Forster
• The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• The Village by Marghanita Laski
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Re-read)
• 1984 by George Orwell (Re-read)
• Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
• Night by Elie Wiesel