50 books

Happy New Year.

Personally, I'm not much a New Year's resolution girl. There are plenty of things I'd like to accomplish this year, and (I'm sure) dozens of things that I should set out to accomplish. Maybe I should resolve to clean the kitchen every night (blah) or the fabulously-typical "exercising more."

However.

After a wonderful, impromptu date night with Vincent on Monday, we wandered through a Barns & Nobel to walk off dinner. On the way to the graphic novel/comic section that's our regular first stop, we passed the "classic books" section - all those books that you really feel like you should have read, but haven't.

Or at least, I haven't.

Now, I had a pretty thorough "great books" eduction through the Torrey program at Biola. I've read all the Bible, Plato, Dante, lots of philosophers, and even some Tolstoy. But I haven't read Jane Eyre. Or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

So, that's my plan for this year. 50 "Classic" books that I've never read. Since it's my list, I weeded out some things I knew I'm not a fan of (sorry Dickens) and I'm sticking primarily to English novels (or at least, novels first written in English - with the exception, I think, of Phantom of the Opera...I'll let a little French in). No Tolstoy, no Dostoevsky, no Hugo (which is good, because I don't know that I could get through Crime & Punishment). I know they're classics too.....oh well.

So, here's my list. My goal is to post something (A review? Can one really "review" a classic anymore?) after I finish each. I don't know that I'll finish in a year. But maybe, I've already found my resolution for 2012.

• ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne
• ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain
• ''The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton
• ''Agnes Grey" by Anne Brontë
• ''Arabian Nights" by Anonymous
• ''Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne
• ''Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
• ''The Call of Wild" by Jack London
• ''The Cather and Rye" by JD Salinger
• ''Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K Dick
• ''Emma " by Jane Austen
• ''The Enchanted Castle" by Edith Nesbit
• ''Five Children and It" by Edith Nesbit
• ''Frankenstein " by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• ''Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift
• ''The House of Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• ''The Inheritance" by Louisa May Allcott
• ''The Invisible Man " by H. G. Wells
• ''Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë
• ''Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne
• ''The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling
• ''Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence
• ''The Last of Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper
• ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
• ''Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott
• ''Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen
• ''Middlemarch " by George Eliot
• ''Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville
• ''My Brother Sam is Dead" by James And Chris Collier
• ''Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens
• ''Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen
• ''Persuasion" by Jane Austen
• ''The Phantom of Opera" by Gaston Leroux
• ''The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
• ''The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan
• ''The Prince and Pauper" by Mark Twain
• ''The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane
• ''The Return of Native" by Thomas Hardy
• ''Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe
• ''The Scarlet Pimpernel" by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
• ''Sense and Sensibility " by Jane Austen
• ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles " by Thomas Hardy
• ''The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells
• ''Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson
• ''Vanity Fair" by William Makepeace Thackeray
• ''The War of Worlds" by H. G. Wells
• ''The Way We Live Now" by Anthony Trollope
• ''White Fang" by Jack London
• ''The Wonderful Wizard of OZ" by L.Frank Baum
• ''Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë