At the beginning of 2020, before any of us had even heard of COVID-19, I resolved to read 20 classics in 2020. It seemed like a good goal and an excellent way of motivating myself to read works that I had either missed during my education or ones that I simply felt I should revisit. Here were my initial criteria:
- No books written in the last 20 years. (While there may be some that will be eventually recognized as classics, they automatically fail #2 which is….)
- Must stand the test of time. I realize this qualification is somewhat vague, but it essentially means that last year’s “book that everyone was talking about” won’t make the list.
- Generally recognized as an important work. This recognition could be due to capturing a particular time period well (e.g, The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald), being representative of a literary technique (e.g., To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf), or simply standing for centuries (e.g., The Iliad, Homer).
On December 28, 2020 I read the last page for this challenge. And yes, in the midst of a pandemic it did indeed become a challenge. While the extra time around the house provided more opportunities for reading, the mental wear of the pandemic doesn’t lend itself to reading dense literature. It was a sprint at the end.
Over the next couple of days I plan to reflect a bit on the experience, and my reading life in general but, for now, here is the list:
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
- Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
- Persuasion, Jane Austen (reread)
- Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (reread)
- The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
- Silas Marner, George Eliot
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
- Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (reread)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Katherine Tuttle, Ph.D. 