the Classics Club!

Something that I will hopefully definitely stick with to help me get back in to reading regularly, is joining the Classics Club! Thanks to the wonderful lady-blogger over at Fig and Thistle for educating me further about the blogging world.
I'm very intrigued by the Classics Club because I haven't really read all that many books that people would consider "classic". I guess you could say that I am scared of them- scared that I won't understand the language or that I will think a book is atrocious that everyone else loves. Maybe it is time to set aside these fears for the purpose of some literary-self-improvement.

The ultimate goal of the Classics Club? To read every classic on your list at your blog, and write about each one at your blog. So the purpose of this project is to improve your blogging skills and to read more books! You can never go wrong with more books.
So what is on my list of 50 books to read over the next 5 years (5/21/2014-5/21/2019)? Some re-reads, but mostly books that I have never read, along with some short story collections, series', and novels:

1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
3. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - (Update 1)(Update 2)(Final Update)
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Wurthering Heights by Emily Brontë
7. 1984 by George Orwell
8. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkein
9. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkein
10. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkein
11. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
12. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
13. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
14. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
15. Beloved by Toni Morrison
16. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
17. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
18. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
19. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
20. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
21. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
22. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone
23. Silas Marner by George Eliot
24. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
25. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
26. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
27. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
28. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol
29. A Tale of Two Cities by Charlies Dickens
30. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
31. The Sketch Book by Washington Irving
32. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
33. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
34. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
35. Middlemarch by George Eliot
36. Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
37. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
38. Villette by Charlotte Brontë
39. Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
40. Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu
41. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
42. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
43. The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
44. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterson
45. Moll Flanders by Daniel Dafoe 
46. Dracula by Bram Stoker
47. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
48. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
49. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
50. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

There are many of these books that I could start with, but I'm going to start with a re-read to get my brain in order. TKAMB was my favorite book that I was forced to read in high school, and now that I have grown and become more of an adult, I believe that I will enjoy it more now than I did then.

Wish me luck!