Unaccountably, it’s 2026, and what’s more, it’s February already. This means my plan to track my degree experience fifty years later has gone awry somewhat, as I haven’t finished 1974-75. But I will press on with that, and move on to 75-76 in forthcoming posts. Before that, however, I need to share an announcement about a project I am keen to get started on: 50 Classics.
The definition of a classic is a very slippery thing. But I suppose if a novel makes it into series such as Penguin Classics, or Modern Classics, or Oxford World’s Classics, or the NYRB Classics, it’s a reasonable assumption that it counts. It’s also safe to label a Nobel Prize winner as a classic author, it seems to me. I’m musing about the nature of classic fiction because I saw a link on Jacquiwine’s blog about the Classics Club, which involves listing 50 classics, however defined, to be read and written about over the next few years. It’s a kind of reading challenge, I suppose. The first step is to list the books, but before I do so, I’m going to outline some principles behind my thinking. First, these will all be books new to me. I’ve read a lot of classic literature, but there’s so much more to explore, so I will be discovering these books for the first time. Second, I want to read some books originally written in languages other than English. For years, I was rather snobbish about reading literature in translation, but I realised that avoiding English versions of foreign classics deprived me of much potential enjoyment. Third, I want to have a balance of the sexes, and fourth, I want to range as widely as possible historically. Here’s the list, then, in no particular order. I won’t be working through this in any logical way, just reading whatever book seems most attractive at any given moment:
- Anon, trans. Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Homer, trans Emily Wilson, The Odyssey
- Henry James, The Golden Bowl
- Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes
- Molly Panter-Downes, One Fine Day
- Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
- Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
- Murasaki Shikubu, trans. Royall Tyler, The Tale of Genji
- Anthony Powell, A Dance To The Music Of Time
- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
- William Thackeray, Vanity Fair
- A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower
- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
- Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft, The Books of Jacob
- Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
- Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
- Goliarda Sapienza, trans. Anne Milano Appel, The Art of Joy
- Anna Gavalda, trans. Alison Anderson, Hunting and Gathering
- Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise
- Wilkie Collins, Armadale
- Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
- Bapsi Sidwha, The Crow Eaters
- Anon, Orkneyinga Saga
- Honoré de Balzac trans. Clara Bell, Eugénie Grandet
- Italo Svevo, trans. William Weaver, The Confessions of Zeno
- Lloyd Fernando, Scorpion Orchid
- J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip
- Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist
- Thomas Mann, trans. Mike Mitchell, Buddenbrooks
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. David Magarshack, Brothers Karamazov
- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
- Magda Szabo, trans. Len Rix, The Fawn
- Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
- Anita Brookner, A Friend From England
- Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
- Orhan Pamuk trans. Ekin Oklap, Strangeness in my Mind
- Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God
- Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess
- Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
- Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- Saul Bellow, Herzog
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
- Alain René-Lesage, trans. Tobias Smollett, Gil Blas
- Marcel Proust trans. Gerard Hopkins, Jean Santeuil
- Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
- George Gissing, New Grub Street
- Winifred Holtby, South Riding
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
I need to think about an end point for the project, and I think three years is about right, so I’m going to nominate December 31, 2028 as my finishing post. We’ll see…
Fifty Classics by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.