New Year, New Book Challenges

So 2012 is nearly over and it's time to reflect on the year. I've really enjoyed having these challenges/read-a-longs to nudge me into reading things I wouldn't ordinarily read. Or maybe get around to that pile. I set out to read a bit more and surprised myself by doing just that. I signed up for Goodreads' Reading Challenge to read 30 books and managed to read 42! I also successfully climbed Pike's Peak for the 2012 Mt TBR Reading Challenge but couldn't quite move on to Mt Vancouver. So of course for this year's challenge I signed up for the Mt Blanc level of 24 books, just to challenge myself further. I don't have a list for that... yet.

I also vowed to spread my reading wings out a little and read some classics. The Classics Club challenge is perfect for that, because you can set up a list to tackle, but you have five years to finish. I spent some time thinking about these. Some are ones I've always meant to read and some I've always felt bad about not reading... it'll be interesting to see how far I get into this challenge. I'm already signed up for Unputdownables' Persuasion Read-a-long to start me off.

So here is my list:

1    Bram Stoker - Dracula
2    Henry James - Portrait of a Lady
3    Edith Wharton - House of Mirth
4    Edith Wharton - Age of Innocence
5    Edith Wharton - The Buccaneers
6    Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
7    Charlotte Brontë - Villette
8    Edmund Spenser - The Faerie Queene
9    Virgil - Aeneid
10    Homer - The Iliad
11    Homer - The Odyssey
12    Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
13    Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses
14    Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
15    Charles Dickens - Bleak House
16    Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
17    Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone
18    Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
19    Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
20    Jane Austen - Mansfield Park
21    Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
22    Jane Austen - Persuasion
23    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Complete Sherlock Holmes
24    Sir Thomas Malory - Morte D’Arthur
25    JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit
26    Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters
27    Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
28    Daphne Du Maurier - Rebecca
29    L. Frank Baum - Wonderful Wizard of Oz
30    Lewis Carroll - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
31    Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass
32    TH White - Sword in the Stone
33    Flappers and Philosophers - F Scott Fitzgerald
34    William Butler Yeats - Complete Poems
35    Alfred Lord Tennyson - Idylls of the King
36    Chretien de Troyes - Arthurian Romances
37    Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
38    Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
39    Thomas Hardy - Return of the Native
40    HG Wells - Invisible Man
41    John Milton - Paradise Lost
42    Arabian Nights
43    Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray
44    Herodotus - Histories
45    Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
46    Hesiod – Works and Days and Theogeny
47    Emily Dickinson - Complete Poems
48    Edgar Rice Burroughs - John Carter of Mars
49    Anthony Hope - The Prisoner of Zenda
50    Anthony Hope - Rupert of Hentzau
51    Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
52    Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

Goal for completion date: January 2018

Bolded books have been finished.