The Classics Project: A Year of Classic Literature

I've always considered myself fairly well-read. After all, I read all the time. Then I saw one of those lists. You know the ones. "100 Best Books of All Time" "100 Must Read Classic Works of Literature" Those. And while I do usually score above the "average" person, that has always felt like a really low bar. Many of these books have been influential in our society, and I'm starting to feel like I'm missing out.

So I've decided to start a project. The Classics Project. I'm going to take one year of my life and devote all of my pleasure reading to the classics. I'll give myself a pretty large selection and write a review for each one so you, my readers, can follow along in my literary journey. Honestly, it's kind of shocking which books I haven't read, but please don't judge me too harshly! After all, I'm not listing the plethora of books that I have consumed. ;-)

Here are some quick rules about the list. 1) It has to be something I haven't read. 2) It has to be fiction. I prefer novels, but I do have one or two plays on the list. 3) It has to be a work of literary importance. I honestly don't care if it was written 200 years ago or 10. If it's great, it's great. 4) I'm trying not to duplicate authors with some notable exceptions, in which case, I either really love the author or I couldn't decide which was a better representation of their work. If you think I've picked the wrong book feel free to let me know in the comments! 5) The final decision is mine. I know a lot of you have very strong opinions on what should or should not be on a list like this, but ultimately this list is for me. You can definitely make one of your own though! 6) No Dickens. Just no. I'll watch his stories on the BBC.

I don't expect to finish in one year, because let's face it, some of these books will take longer than three and half days. I do plan to continue reading and writing reviews beyond 2014, but I will no longer be limited to classics.

So without further ado....

The Classics Project:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathon Swift
3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
6. Middlemarch by George Elliot
7. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
8. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
9. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
10. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
11. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13. The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
14. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
15. The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
16. Ulysses by James Joyce
17. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  by James Joyce
18. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
19. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
20. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
21. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
22. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
23. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
24. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
25. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
26. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
27. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
28. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
29. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
30. The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
31. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
32. The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas
33. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
34. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
35. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
36. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
37. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
38. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
39. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
40. The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
41. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
42. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
43. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
44. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
45. Watership Down by Richard Adams
46. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
47. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
48. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
49. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
50. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
51. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
52. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
53. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
54. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
55. The Plague by Albert Camus
56. The Bell Jar  by Sylvia Plath
57. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf
58. My Antonia by Willa Cather
59. Native Son by Richard Wright
60. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
61. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
62. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
63. The World According to Garp by John Irving
64. Beloved by Toni Morrison
65. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
66. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
67. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
68. The Heart is a LonelyHunter by Carson McCullers
69. Blood Meridian by Cormac MacCarthy
70. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
71. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
72. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
73. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
74. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
75. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
76. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder
77. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
78. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
79. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
80. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
81. The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie
82. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
83. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
84. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
85. Last of the Mohicans by James F. Cooper
86. Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
87. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
88. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
89. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
90. The Source by James Michener
91. The Hunt for RedOctober by Tom Clancy
92. Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
93. The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by James Ford

What do you think? Is there a book or two you think I should add? I'd like to get this list up to 100, so please comment below!


Edit: As I write a review for these books, I will change the title to a link. Check them out!

100 Writers Project: The Circle of Writing

Hey, guys! This is my entry for the 100 Writers Project. Enjoy!

A little more than a year ago, I had an idea for a book. Actually, I had an idea for a different book. One that would be expansive and intimate and breathtakingly original. Then I realized that for all my years of reading and poetry and dreaming about writing a novel... I had no idea what I was doing. So I put that book aside for a day when I had both the dream and the skill, and set about acquiring that skill. I began constructing a new story from the ground up.

World building has always been the easy part for me. My brain is in infinite supernova exploding with ideas. The hard part was focus. I narrowed the world down and worked on the characters. I gave them names and found pictures that fit them (because I'm a very visual person) and created character sketches. As for plot, I had a rough idea of the beginning and the end and I figured that the middle would sort itself out.

Now enters the essential element. At this point, my mother (also a writer) had been attending small group writing seminars by New York Times Bestselling Author, William Bernhardt. She loved them so much that she decided to sign me up for the first one. Now I've always been a type-A, teacher's pet and I thrive in a classroom environment. I expected to learn a fair-amount, but honestly, through my individual research and experience, I didn't think it would really help me much as a writer. Was I in for a shock.

The seminars last one week and at the end of that first week, I was mentally and emotional exhausted. And I learned. I learned so much about structure that my mind was spinning. I learned the importance of outlining and clear planning. I learned that I still had a lot to learn.

Since then, I've taken the next two levels of seminars and I attended the Rose State Writing Conference in Midwest City, Oklahoma that was hosted by Mr. Bernhardt and attended the lecture he gave there. After I solidified the structure it was so much easier to sit down and write because I new exactly where I was going.

The next phase in my book was NaNoWriMo. I was about 20,000 words into my manuscript when November rolled around. At first, I shied away from joining Nano, because I was under the impression that you had to do a brand new book for it. For those of you who haven't heard of NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and participants attempt to write 50,000 words in one month with the help and support of their fellow writers. Two days after Nano started, I decided, why not? I needed about 50,000 more words in my story and I wasn't going to let the fact that the story was already started stop me.

And I did it. I finished with nearly 52,000 and I'd written through the climax. I still had a scene or two to tack on at the end, but I felt pretty much finished.

Next came the editing. In this particular area, I am lucky because even though I work as a freelance editor, there was no way I could edit my own work. But there was someone who could without charging me an arm and a leg. My mother. My mother is an amazing writer and editor and only a phone call away. So the only thing I had to do was go through the manuscript line by line and clean up the flood of red ink that she'd decorated it with. That was tedious. But I made it through. I also wrote the remaining scenes and polished a few rough areas. I had a finished second draft.

I attended one last seminar by William Bernhardt that focused on perfecting the end. One more exhausting week and then about a month later, I was ready to start shopping it around.

I have yet to meet any writers that like this step. This step is about marketing and (gasp!) talking to strangers, trying to convince them to love your book as much as you do. We're writers because we like to write. If we liked selling things, we'd work in retail.

But anyway, here again, I got a leg up. At the Rose State Conference seven months earlier, I got suckered into pitching to an agent. My manuscript wasn't anywhere near finished, but one of my writing-friends said "Go on! It's good practice. So what if she's not interested? It's not even finished yet!" (you know who you are!) and I did. And it was terrifying. I wrote and memorized a solid pitch and delivered it in a satisfactory manner, even if it was a little rushed and deer-in-the-headlights-esque. And, shockingly, the agent requested the full manuscript as soon as it was done.

So now it's done. I don't know if she even remembers me, but I crafted a query letter and sent her the manuscript. Who knows how long it will take to hear back from her. But in the mean time, I'm starting again.

A new story full of breathless excitement and intense emotion. I'm back at the beginning with a blank canvas and a head full of ideas. I am writing again. And the circle starts over.

Grace Wagner
From attempting to write epic fantasy as an elementary school kid to serious drama as a teenager, she has finally finished a novel. Having grown up in a household were reading and literature were paramount, she loves any book that makes her think and she reads across all genres. She's also hopelessly addicted to British television including Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Downton Abbey. She's lucky enough to have the opportunity to be a full-time writer, spending most of her days in front of a computer screen desperately trying to write something that matters. She's kept company by the most patient of companions, her cat Matches.



For more, follow her on Twitter or Facebook. She's also on Pinterest, Google +, and Instagram. You can continue following her here, on her blog, for more on her and the 100 Writers Project. If you are interested in participating in the Project, please contact her on any of the above sites or comment below.