Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

I love lists and I went on a classics kick when I started goodreads but now I’m all over the place in my reading. There are so many classics I think I should have read by now: maybe a list will help me focus? I’m 51 and a half. This shouldn’t be too hard. I’m not going to break it down by decade or anything because those kinds of restrictions will make it less realistic for me to stick with. I Will start by adding those on the roster for 2026 aty and continue from there.

This is my list, a compilation of new and old classics I’d like to read.
✅ will appear next to books I’ve read. I will start this in 2026, or December 2025, depending in how my reading goes.

1 Pnin
2 Bleak House
3 Roughing It in the Bush
4 Doctor Zhivago
5 Middlemarch
6 The Picture of Dorian Gray
7 The Count of Monte Cristo
8 Les Miserables
9 Far From the Madding Crowd
10 Agnes Grey

11 Ethan Frome
12 The Glimpses of the Moon
13 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
14 Emma
15 Finnegans Wake
16 Great Expectations
17 The Wings of the Dove
18 Ray Bradbury
19 Eugene Onegin
20 Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

21 Who Has Seen the Wind
22 The Fire-Dwellers
23Lost in the Barrens
24 Life and Fate
25 Titus Groan
26 No Name
27 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
28 Rebecca
29 A Sicilian Romance
30 The Mandarins

31 Resurrection
32 Heart of a Dog
33 Orlando
34 Typhoon
35 The Waves
36 Sidharta
37 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
38 Sense and Sensibility
39 Lonesome Dove
40 The Golden Bowl

41 Things Fall Apart
42 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
43 The Blind Assassin
44 The Tin Flute
45 Where Nests the Water Hen

Leaving the final 15 for now. Maybe after thirty years of avoiding Margaret Atwood, I’ll want to read more of her, or someone else I haven’t discovered yet. Maybe someone will tell me that such-and-such a book needs to be added!
46
47
48
49
50

Tracking the reading of in-danger-of-being-forgotten female nature writers here. I might abandon this if the writing is too tedious to be enjoyable. I read Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay last year and decided I need to read LdKL’s writing at least a little bit.

To Whom the Wilderness Speaks
Research Is a Passion With Me: The Autobiography of a Bird Lover
Summer in a Bog

MJ wrote: "I love lists and I went on a classics kick when I started goodreads but now I’m all over the place in my reading. There are so many classics I think I should have read by now: maybe a list will hel..."

Where did you find the 60 before 60 list? Or is it original to you?

Dixie wrote: "MJ wrote: "I love lists and I went on a classics kick when I started goodreads but now I’m all over the place in my reading. There are so many classics I think I should have read by now: maybe a li..."

Oh, this is my personal list. There are so many classics I have not read that I figure it’s time I compile them and start getting them read. Inspired totally by our mod, Emily, who mentioned her 40 before 40 list in another thread. I’ve got 8.5 years to go before 60. That’s a good chunk of time to do this!

MJ wrote: "Dixie wrote: "MJ wrote: "I love lists and I went on a classics kick when I started goodreads but now I’m all over the place in my reading. There are so many classics I think I should have read by n..."

Very cool idea!