Following the success of my winter (and spring) of reading Russian fiction, I’m planning on working my way through a list of British “classics” this summer. I’d like to include more works by people of color, but here’s what I’ve got so far.
(The groupings here are admittedly arbitrary… I’m assuming that I’ll be able to categorize the books in a more helpful and interesting way after reading them.)
Pre-1900
- Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Would be my first Austen!)
- Middlemarch OR The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Has been on my list since reading, and loving, Jane Eyre)
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins?
- North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
1900-1924
- No Surrender by Constance Maud
- The Good Soldier OR Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford?
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- Britons Through Negro Spectacles by ABC Merriman-Labor
- High Wages by Dorothy Whipple
1925-1949
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
- Minty Alley by C. L. R. James
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- Scoop OR Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene?
- Caught by Henry Green (or Loving)
1950-1999
- The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
- The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
2000-Present
- Something by Zadie Smith. I’ve only read White Teeth so far. Maybe NW?
- Remainder by Tom McCarthy
- Something by Ali Smith. Maybe The Accidental?
- Night Haunts by Sukhdev Sandhu?
- Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Note that I’m intentionally setting aside Shakespeare, Vanity Fair, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens (meh), and the Brontës for now.
What am I missing?
What Sam's Reading 