The Classics Club is a virtual book club created to inspire people to read and blog about classic books. To join, you have to pledge that you’ll read 50+ classics in 5 years or less and post reviews on your blog. This page is my pledge and a means for me to track my progress.

Since I’ll be reading a classic short story and a classic poem daily as part of my 1000 days media diet plan, I’m including short story anthologies and poetry collections in my list.

I plan to read and review the following 100 books in 5 years (from 1st Jan 2020 to 31st Dec 2024):

Short Story Collections/Anthologies:

1. Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant
2. Short Stories by Anton Chekhov (13 Volumes – Translated by Constance Garnett)
3. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol (2 Volumes)
4. Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
5. The Complete Stories – Edgar Allen Poe
6. Tales of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl
7. Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. The Country of the Blind and Other Stories – H.G. Wells
9. The Garden Party and Other Stories – Katherine Mansfield
10. The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
11. Malgudi Days – R.K. Narayan
12. Nine Stories – J D Saligner
13. The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories – Franz Kafka
14. The Aleph and Other Stories – Jorge Luis Borges
15. Tales of Ordinary Madness – Charles Bukowski
16. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
17. The Found And The Lost – Ursula K. Le Guin *
18. A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces *
19. The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told – Arunava Sinha (Translator) *
20. The Tamil Story – Subashree Krishnaswamy (Translator) *
21. Manto: Selected Stories – Aatish Taseer (Translator)
22. Great Stories By Nobel Prize Winners
23. Short Stories of Washington Irving
24. Short Stories of Herman Melville
25. Selected Stories by O. Henry
26. Selected Stories by Oscar Wilde
27. Selected Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Selected Stories by Leo Tolstoy
29. Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling
30. Selected Stories by Charles Dickens
31. Selected Stories by James Joyce
32. Selected Stories Jack London
33. Selected Stories by D. H. Lawrence
34. Selected Stories Joseph Conrad
35. Selected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
36. Selected Stories by Saki
37. Selected Stories by Bram Stoker
38. Selected Stories by W. W. Jacobs
39. Selected Stories Honoré de Balzac
40. Selected Stories by Henry James

* Most of the stories in these collections fall under the ‘Classics’ category and a few don’t.

Fables and Folktales:

1. Panchatantra
2. Aesop’s Fables
3. Fables of La Fontaine
4. Tales from the 1001 Nights
5. Sukasaptati (Seventy tales of the parrot)

Poetry Collections:

1. Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
2. Shakespeare’s Sonnets – William Shakespeare
3. Poems of Christina Rossetti
4. The Pleasures of the Damned – Charles Bukowski
5. Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
6. The Captain’s Verses – Pablo Neruda
7. Poems of John Donne
8. Sonnets from the Portuguese – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
9. The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems – Alexander Pope
10. The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Others (Novels, Epics, Essays, Discourses, Plays, etc.):

I gathered most of these books from Great Books and Classics. They are listed in the chronological order of the authors.

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. The Iliad – Homer
3. The Odyssey – Homer
4. The Upanishads
5. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
6. Lysistrata – Aristophanes
7. Arthashastra – Kautilya (Chanakya)
8. Beowulf
9. Njal’s Saga (The Saga of Burnt Njal)
10. Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
11. Essays – Michel de Montaigne
12. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
13. Macbeth – William Shakespeare
14. A Book of Five Rings (Go Rin no Sho) – Miyamoto Musashi
15. Meditations on First Philosophy – Rene Descartes
16. The Misanthrope – Molière
17. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
18. Dracula – Bram Stoker
19. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
20. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
21. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
22. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
23. Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville
24. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
25. A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
26. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
27. The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
28. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
29. Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
30. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
31. Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
32. The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy
33. The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
34. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
35. Demian – Hermann Hesse
36. Mrs.Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
37. Ulysses – James Joyce
38. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
39. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
40. Ponniyin Selvan – Kalki Krishnamurthy
41. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
42. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
43. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
44. The Stranger – Albert Camus
45. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
46. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
47. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
48. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
49. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
50. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie