Classics I want to read

I had this simple idea for a blog post, and it grew more and more complicated as I was outlining my thoughts. There are a lot of classic books out there, and while the ultimate goal is to read as many as possible, the short term goal is to read the ones I really want to first. So, I was going through my bookshelf, my to-read and read shelves on Goodreads, and my e-book library for the classic books I want to read. It sounded easy enough, until I ran into a few books that I am still unsure if they count as a classic book.

And the genre modern classic makes things even more complicated. I excluded from my list books I considered modern classics, although I suppose they are classics I want to read. I consider Holes by Louis Sachar a modern classic. But it kind of looks funny with all the other books on the list because it is so relatively recent a publication.

I wrote my list of classics I want to read before I wrote the list of classics I have read, but I'll start with the shorter list of classics I've read:

• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

These are in no order. I loved all of them except The Scarlet Letter. I'm willing to give it a re-read and I have no shame in using SparkNotes. Also my copy is kind of pretty and I wish I could like the content as much as I do the cover. 

Now the classics I have yet to read and would like to:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Emma by Jane Austen
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Again, no order. There are a few, I admit, that I want to read because every other high school student in the world had to read it but I didn't, The Great Gatsby being the best example. Doing that might lead to disappointment, though, because I read The Scarlet Letter for that reason. I might have appreciated more if I had read it and discussed it with a class, maybe. 

In English class we did look at Frankenstein and Oliver Twist, but we never went beyond reading excerpts and watching clips. We read a lot of Macbeth, but I am not putting it in the classics I've read because we skipped over a whole lot of reading and instead acted the parts out. I'm also not putting it in the classics I want to read because we studied Macbeth for probably three entire months of the school year and I am still burned out. That goes for Julius Caesar, aswell. I'm just not into Willy Wiggledagger (William Shakespeare, get it?) like I should be. 

One of my challenges this year is to read a classic a month, and that list is definitely over twelve items long. It's hard to say which ones I want to read this year. Well, I want to read all of them as soon as I can, but I read too slowly and usually one book at a time, so a year isn't a long enough time to do that.

Some classics and classic authors I am very aware of but am in no hurry to read are:

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Homer
• any other Dickens besides Oliver Twist
• Victor Hugo
• John Steinbeck
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Ernest Hemingway
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Oscar Wilde
• Kurt Vonnegut

Like I said though, the ultimate goal is to be lying in my death bed, smiling and glad I read as many classics as I could. The classics I'm in no hurry to read are not books I don't want to read ever, they're just not ones I want to get to so quickly as the others.

If this post weren't so long already, I'd go into modern classics I've read and want to read, but I guess that will be another post for another time.

What are your experiences with classic literature? What classics did you love? Hate? Do you have any recommendations?