top ten classics i want to read

Tuesday, July 1, 2014 |
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, where we all get to exercise our OCD tendencies and come up with bookish lists.  If you’d like to play along, check out this post.

top ten tuesday

It was difficult for me to be honest with this week’s top ten list.  There’s an urge (I don’t know if it’s societal, familial, or a leftover from the snobbery of academia) to make myself seem smarter, better informed, more ‘intellectual’ than I actually am.  For instance, my first version of this list included Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  But as I was revising, I kept thinking, “There’s a reason I’ve never read that book, despite being a Spanish major in college.  I never wanted to read it.”  And I suppose I still don’t.  Lest you be completely scandalized, I did read some of de Cervantes’ short stories (aka I’m not completely ignorant).  Still, it took a few tries to make this an honest list, one that contains books I really am excited to read… at some point in the future.

Top Ten Classics I Want to Read


1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
4. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley


6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
8. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
9. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
10. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

What books would make your list of classics to read in adulthood?

7 comments:

Liviania said...

I've wanted to read Don Quixote due to the ballet.

I've read two of the books on your list, and watched the movie of one. I think this would be a hard list for me because it's hard to admit the gap in my literary knowledge! English majors like to pretend we've read it all.

Anonymous said...

Great list.

You should definitely get to Brave New World when you can! I think you'd like it and it's basically part of the framework for Uglies. AND you can make obscure references about soma for the rest of your life after you read it.

(Less sure about Their Eyes Were Watching God and Things Fall Apart. Not favorites.)

Jenny @ Reading the End said...

Aw, I loved Their Eyes Were Watching God! I loved it even though it contains a flood and I don't read about floods. And The Handmaid's Tale is fanTASTic, another one for you to really really look forward to.

(Brave New World disappointed me though.)

KC said...

I haven't read any of these either, but they are on my list, and I've heard fabulous things about them!

Tales of Whimsy said...

So with you on #1.

Melissa (Avid Reader) said...

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Handmaid's Tale are both incredible!

kayerj said...

The only one on your list that I have read is Passage to India. So many good classics to read!

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