Classic Literature Reading Challenge: Gearing up for 2026

I remember first signing up for this challenge a good decade ago in an attempt to get familiar with more classic literature books. My Classics TBR followed me around from one blog to another, and now it’s time to re-post it here with a few exciting additions and a new deadline to look forward to.

There are many different reading challenges for avid readers to discover and enjoy. Quite a few of them focus on rediscovering the good old classic literature. The one I’d like to commit to again is The Classics Club, which encourages you to set an ambitious long-term goal. The last time I participated in the challenge, I was aiming at reading 150 classics in the span of 5 years.

I’m ready to take on a new challenge in the coming new year 2026 and beyond, especially now that my sister and I are actively building our home library and filling our shelves with a plethora of works of Ukrainian, as well as classic literature in translation. And this time I’ll start with a humble one hundred books (maybe, a little more) to read in the next five years.

My Classic Literature Challenge: Books to read

TBR: 111 books

Challenge end date: January 2031

1. Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart
2. Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
3. Austen, Jane: Sense and Sensibility
4. Bronte, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
5. Bronte, Charlotte: Villette
6. Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
7. Burney, Frances: Evelina
8. Cather, Willa: My Antonia
9. Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White
10. Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
11. de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote
12. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
13. Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield
14. Dickens, Charles: Tale of Two Cities
15. Dickens, Charles: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
16. Dreiser, Theodore: American Tragedy
17. Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
18. Dreiser, Theodore: The Financier
19. Dreiser, Theodore: The Titan
20. Dreiser, Theodore: The Stoic
21. Du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca
22. Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
23. Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose
24. Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent
25. Eliot, George: Middlemarch
26. Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying
27. Faulks, Sebastian: Birdsong
28. Fitzgerald, F. Scott: This Side of Paradise
29. Foer, Jonathan Safran: Everything is Illuminated
30. Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
31. Forster, E.M.: Passage to India
32. Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
33. Goethe, Johann: Faust
34. Gogol, Nikolay: Dead Souls
35. Haggard, Henry Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
36. Hansberry, Lorraine: A Raisin in the Sun
37. Hardy, Thomas: Far From the Madding Crowd
38. Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure 
39. Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge 
40. Heller, Joseph: Catch-22
41. Hemingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls
42. Hemingway, Ernest: The Garden of Eden
43. Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast 
44. Hemingway, Ernest: To Have and Have Not 
45. Hemingway, Ernest: Across the River and into the Trees 
46. Hugo, Victor: Les Miserables
47. Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
48. Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
49. Irving, John: A Prayer for Owen Meany
50. Irving, John The World According to Garp
51. Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day
52. James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
53. Joyce, James: Ulysses
54. Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 
55. Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake 
56. Kafka, Franz: The Castle
57. Kawabata, Yasunari: Thousand Cranes
58. Kingsolver, Barbara: The Poisonwood Bible
59. Knowles, John: A Separate Peace
60. Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
61. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: Love in the Time of Cholera
62. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
63. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: The General in His Labyrinth
64. Maupassant, Guy de: Bel-Ami
65. McCullers, Carson: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
66. Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
67. Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman
68. Milton, John: Paradise Lost
69. Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon
70. Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye
71. Nesbit, E: The Enchanted Castle
72. O, Brien: Tim: The Things They Carried
73. Pamuk, Orhan: My Name is Red
74. Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago
75. Pepys, Samuel: Diary of Samuel Pepys
76. Plath, Sylvia: Ariel
77. Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
78. Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged
79. Rand, Ayn: The Fountainhead
80. Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa
81. Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children
82. Rushdie, Salman: The Satanic Verses
83. Sand, George: Consuelo
84. Steinbeck, John: America and Americans
85. Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row
86. Steinbeck, John: East of Eden
87. Steinbeck, John: Sweet Thursday
88. Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath
89. Steinbeck, John: The Pastures of Heaven
90. Steinbeck, John: The Pearl
91. Steinbeck, John: The Red Pony
92. Steinbeck, John: The Winter of Our Discontent
93. Steinbeck, John: Tortilla Flat
94. Steinbeck, John: Travels with Charley in Search of America
95. Stendhal: The Red and the Black
96. Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma
97. Stendhal: Armance
98. Sterne, Laurence: Tristam Shandy
99. Stoker, Bram: Dracula
100. Tan, Amy: The Joy Luck Club
101. Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
102. Verne, Jules: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
103. Verne, Jules: Journey to the Center of the Earth
104. Verne, Jules: From the Earth to the Moon
105. Verne, Jules: Five Weeks in a Balloon
106. Watson, Winifred: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
107. Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited
108. Wells, H.G.: The Food of the Gods
109. Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
110. Wright, Richard: Native Son
111. Zola, Emile: Germinal

What’s next?

I’ll be working my way through this classic literature list and writting book reviews along the way. The list is pretty much identical to my old challenge, after all these are the books that I’ve wanted to read for the longest time. So, I’m really excited to give this another try!