2026 What classics are you reading?

Another year of reading begins. Share the classics you're reading in 2026. All welcome.

My first project for the year will be to attempt Les Miserables, in a translation by Christine Donougher. I've never read it, although I've seen the film version of the musical. My edition is 1300 pages long, with an additional 100 pages of notes. I'm reading it (hopefully) over 3 months, although I've never been successful at that slow-paced reading. We'll see.

I'm continuing in a Thomas Hardy chronological read project. January's book is A Laodicean (1881) which is completely new to me.

Just started Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett and quite enjoying it. Happy reading and new year, all!

>2 kac522: I read Les Miserables back in high school, although I believe it was an abridged addition. it was still very long. I really enjoyed it.

My 2026 is going to mostly be focused on classics. My first finished read of the year was Jonathan Swifts essay A Modest Proposal. I’m currently working on Essays by Michel de Montaigne, The Collected Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

>4 Rome753: I've only heard good things; I am crossing my fingers that I stick with it.

>5 PawsforThought:

Early in this past fall, I was part of a group reading Book 3 of the essays. I'll be interested to see any updates you post.

Ovid's Metamorphoses here in preparation for an online reading group later in the year.

>7 librorumamans: Oh, nice! I probably will only get through book one this time around (too many books to read) but I’m enjoying it so far and if it continues like this I’m likely to read books two and three at some later date.

>6 kac522: Best of luck.

>10 Rome753: Thanks! Read the first few chapters and so far, so good!

>5 PawsforThought: I love Never Let Me Go. Enjoy!

I am hoping to reread Vanity Fair pretty soon this winter. I also got Light in August from the library, as last year I really loved my first Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom.

A new to me modern American classic author, Saul Bellow, is on my list if anyone has recommendations. I've heard he was lauded throughout the 20th century then faded into some obscurity, so I am curious.

I'll also be continuing through Cormac McCarthy slowly but surely.

In a couple of months I'll be reading The Red and the Black. I've been warned about this one, but I am heedlessly on a collision course.

>13 Cecrow:

Are you, by any chance, reading Stendhal with the Catherine Project?

>14 librorumamans:, nope, I'm a lone wolf.

>11 kac522: Welcome! Glad to hear!

Started reading through To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This is my first time reading through the book.

January's classics:

Lady Susan, Jane Austen (1875), a many times re-read on audiobook
Letters for Literary Ladies, Maria Edgeworth (1795); fictional letters and 1 essay
A Laodicean, Thomas Hardy (1881), part of my monthly reading of all Hardy's novels
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins (1868); a re-read; originally thought to be the first English language detective novel UNTIL scholars discovered:
The Notting Hill Mystery, Charles Felix, aka Charles Warren Adams (1863); now considered the first English language detective novel

Modern Classics (1900-1950):
Tea with Mr Rochester, Frances Towers (1949); short stories
A Murder is Announced, Agatha Christie (1950)

I'm trying to figure out Lady Audley's Secret.

>19 Cecrow: That's a fun one. We did a group read of this with Liz (lyzard) back in 2020. You may be interested in the background Liz provided and the group discussion along the way:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/318457

In January I read the 10th book in the Rougon-Macquart series to continue my journey of reading one every two months in the recommended chronological order.
Emile Zola : Une page d'amour (A Love Story)

Then I went and read a play to continue my journey of reading all the French plays I missed out on growing up.
Victor Hugo : Hernani

And then I read the majority of Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection which I will be finishing up today. I think I will pick a book off my Jules Verne TBR as my next classic.

I have embarked on a re-read of Buddenbrooks (published 125 years ago) and I am enjoying it so much more than as a teenager.

>22 MissWatson:

What translation are you using – assuming you're not reading the German?

I ask because I find the second Woods translation of The Magic Mountain inferior to the Lowe-Porter translation.

>23 librorumamans: I am reading the German because that is my native tongue. The pages are just flying by. It feels like a soap opera, something I don’t remember from my first attempt.

David Horton, in Thomas Mann in English : a study in literary translation discusses the complexity of Mann's German: his use of regional dialects, arcane vocabulary, and word play, among other techniques. He observes that even educated German speakers today find him challenging.

Without explicitly saying so, he makes Mann's style sound analogous to what Joyce was doing in English around the same time.

It doesn't sound as though that's your experience. Comments?

>25 librorumamans: There’s quite a lot of dialect in Buddenbrooks, both the Northern version as spoken in Lübeck and some Bavarian as spoken in Munich, during the brief Permaneder episode. Neither are a problem to me, but I have moved around a lot. What I did notice this time around is the spelling, it is pre-Orthographic Conference of 1901, and he is not consistent with it. (And I wouldn’t have noticed it so much if the last reform from 1996 hadn’t restored so many of the old rules.) But he is definitely old-fashioned in his grammar and vocabulary, and I imagine young people today would find it difficult.
And I freely admit that the philosophical sections in his later works are a challenge.

I finished Halldór Laxness' modern Icelandic classic, Independent People. I liked it very much.

>27 rocketjk:

What hard lives they lived! Iceland, though, is the only European country to have benefitted from the two world wars.

Well, Laxness definitely describes the WWI years as boom years in Iceland, as they finally had an international market for their mutton.

Reading through On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. It includes multiple essays from Mill. I'm still early in the first essay, and so far, I'm finding it very interesting and thought provoking.

Continuing in reading the delightful tales of Tuti-Nameh, or "Tales of the Parrot", in an a bit antiquated German translation but fun to read (like eating pralines.

Not yet finished Herodotus and Xenophon, both pretty exciting to read.

>31 Buchmerkur: I'm guessing you're reading the "Persian Expedition?"

Yep, for class. Very slow in the original, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. The mercenaries had just decided to continue fighting with Cyrus after their pay was increased. "but as regards the suspicion that he was leading them against the King, no one heard it expressed even then—at any rate, not openly. " A3.21, translation by Carleton L. Brownson, 1922. (And so the story goes even today, with half-hearted confessions and less-than-ideal motives... (critical edition: Xenophōntos Kyru anabasis Karl Hude, German translation : Anabasis: Der Zug der Zehntausend)

>33 Buchmerkur: That's very cool. That must be very interesting reading it in the original. I read a translation a few years ago. I found the book to be very interesting.

I finished Chronicles of the Canongate by Sir Walter Scott, a collection of three long short stories, or perhaps two long stories and one novella, published by Scott in 1827 (200 years ago!). The volume also includes a long introductory narrative by Scott's fictional author Chrystal Croftangry, explaining a humorous "how and why" of the writing of the tales, plus shorter introductions before the second and third tales. The stories are all historic tales (taking place around 75 years before Scott wrote them) recounting legends of the Scottish Highlands. I found the three tales to be of varying enjoyment, but still worth the reading.

Classics read in February:

19th Century:

Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens (1866); a re-read on audiobook
Two on a Tower, Thomas Hardy (1882); monthly read of all Hardy's novels; this lesser-known novel features astronomy
Ten Days in a Mad-House, Nellie Bly (1887); investigative journalism at New York's Blackwell's Island; based on her newspaper reports

20th Century:

Anna of the Five Towns, Arnold Bennett (1902); fiction set in the Staffordshire pottery, coal and iron mining area
Crossriggs, Jane & Mary Findlater (1908); fiction from my Virago collection
Christine, Alice Cholmondeley (pseud. of Elizabeth von Arnim) (1917); fictional letters from 1914 in pre-war Germany
Mary Olivier, May Sinclair (1919); fiction from my Virago collection
Mrs Miniver, Jan Struther (1939); fictional diary through the 1930s; originally a newspaper column
Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, George Orwell; collection of Orwell's narrative essays, 1920s-1950
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953); re-read of classic science fiction for my RL book club

Also, still (VERY s-l-o-w-l-y) making my way through Victor Hugo's 1862 classic Les Miserables. I started in January and hope to finish in March. I'm also listening to a series of podcasts about the book: The Les Miserables Reading Companion https://sites.google.com/view/readlesmis/home-menu which has been so helpful to put the novel in historical context.

>35 rocketjk: I read The Highland Widow from that collection and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

Reading the intro to Dante's Inferno and thinking I'm in over my head. I'm a prose man.

>37 kac522: Yes, I have generally enjoyed the Scott I've read. It's all "adventure" writing!

>39 rocketjk: Yes, I remember that a lot was packed into the 60 or so pages of The Highland Widow.

I'm actively trying to read more "classics" this year with the eternal question, what is a "classic"? Not sure all of these count but so far this year it's been

Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Club of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf
Nurse's Stories by Charles Dickens
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot, my first time reading her
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe which was so good
The Man Of The Crowd by Edgar Allan Poe

Now I've got the following in progress:

In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu
The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

Just finished On Liberty and Other Essays by John Stuart Mills. I found the four essays contained in it to be very interesting and thought provoking.

About halfway through Lucretius's The Nature of Things (Penguin Classic ed.)

Back after a long hiatus - I was attending to personal matters (you know how it is) and had so little time. Now I hope I have a bit more.

Something that has been keeping me busy is that my animal family has grown to the proportion of a small sanctuary, with currently nine dogs and nine indoor cats. Thank goodness costs are lower here in Mexico.

I may repeat this message (more or less) in some other groups, so if you read it more than once, my apologies! I am going to try to participate in fewer groups this time, here and at Goodreads, because going too big is always my temptation.

Starting The Red and the Black. Might learn what fate could have held in store if I hadn't grown out of my youthful pride.

>45 Cecrow: Just finished The Red and the Black!

After sitting on the shelf for many years, I’ve finally started The Decameron mainly because of the comedy series on Netflix.

>47 varielle: I have been reading The Decameron mixed in with other things. I am on the eighth day.

I'm still munching away at Metamorphoses at the rate of one book per week. We've reached Book 9 now, and at this point the main challenge is keeping the all the names straight. Thank goodness for Zimmerman's Dictionary of Classical Mythology!

>47 varielle:, read that a while back but didnt know about the show, looks interesting!

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as the running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the thoughts from my mind.” – Michel de Montaigne

This is certainly true of me these days, when provocations to gloomy thoughts are no farther away than simply opening the Internet in the morning. And among the very best books for banishing those thoughts is Montaigne’s own. I have been reading the complete Essays in a leisurely manner in this splendid Penguin edition, 1300+ pages, and am getting close to the end of the journey. C’est magnifique. Like Pascal’s Pensées and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, the Essays is one of those volumes that will actually assist you in the business of living, and should be kept close at hand always.

I'm still working through In A Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu. It's been a great read. It's my backup book and I can put it down and return a few days later and remember what was happening, etc. Definitely enjoying it.

William Harrison Ainsworth, Old Saint Paul’s: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (1841) - It all starts with Edward Wagenknecht’s Cavalcade of the English Novel (1954 edition), which was one of my entry-points into literary history as a teen. I don’t think much of it as criticism, now (or of his parallel book on the American novel). Especially as he gets closer to his own time, Wagenknecht is hamstrung by his conservatism and his Puritanism; and he is far too canonically oriented to read ANYTHING non-canonical with perception. But for checklist purposes, the books are terrifically useful, and I have always hoped to read something by every author mentioned, a good number of whom are fairly obscure.

Two mid-19th Century historical novelists who frequently come up (and are just as frequently dismissed) as “minor” followers of Walter Scott are G.P.R. James (1799-1860) and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). I finally got around to reading a James novel, the entertaining and well-written Henry Smeaton, set during the reign of George I. It utterly belies his reputation as a “hack”. On finishing it, I thought I should follow up with my first Ainsworth, Old St. Paul’s (London during the tumultuous 1660s). I am a few chapters in, and enjoying it very much.

Classics completed in March:

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel DeFoe (1719)
Ayala's Angel, Anthony Trollope (1881)
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy (1886)

Modern classics (1900-1950):
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II, Arthur Conan Doyle, which includes: The Hound of the Baskervilles / The Valley of Fear / His Last Bow / The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
The Hotel, Elizabeth Bowen (1927)
Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather (1940)

Currently enjoying The Warden by Anthony Trollope, almost through. I read Barchester Tower before, but shall probably read it again after this to get the proper order. Most engaging thoughts, about church, law and conscience, and an enlightening questioning of social interaction, role of the press and literature etc.

>55 Buchmerkur: Ah, I love Mr Harding and his "air" cello!

>56 kac522: indeed. However, I never encountered air-cellists in real live, only air-pianists and air-drummers ;-) .

>57 Buchmerkur: I think I've only seen air-guitarists! But that's what makes it so endearing to me. Although I can picture Yo-Yo Ma doing a lot of air cello 😉

Continuing my journey reading through Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, I read the 11th book, Le ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), which is my last reread of the series. After this all the books will be new to be.

In more exciting news I read a classic in the travelogue genre, Isabella Lucy Bird's The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither which I was absolutely smitten by.

>59 lilisin: I am reading the Rougon-Macquart novels in narrative chron order, in the Oxford editions, and recently finished The Kill, which seemed very timely to our moment.

Isabella Bird is a wonderful writer. I adore A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and I am currently reading The Hawaiian Archipelago.

My friend Scott Thompson has done salutary work on behalf of female middlebrow writers at his website Furrowed Middlebrow. Yet there are male novelists who wrote this sort of book too. The Case Is Altered (1932) by William Plomer (1903-1979), a London boarding house novel, is an excellent example.

Plomer was born in South Africa to English parents, and was active in the South African literary scene in his early twenties; his first and most celebrated novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), scandalized that country with its positive account of inter-racial romance.

After a few years in Japan, Plomer spent all the rest of his life in England, where he was friendly with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and many other prominent figures in British cultural life. He was an editor for Ian Fleming and a librettist for Benjamin Britten. His literary criticism is excellent (Electric delights).

For a man with impeccable “highbrow” connections, The Case Is Altered reads perfectly as a middlebrow novel, with an emphasis on character and social class, and a shifting Altman-esque focus among the residents of the boarding house. It has some real bite, and felt rather timely to me, with domestic terror and homosexuality among its themes (Plomer was gay himself). A good read altogether.

>60 PatrickMurtha:
If you haven't seen it already, definitely check out our group read at
https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/24460/Emile-Zola-Group-Read

We have been reading the books in recommended chronological order at a pace of one book every other month. The Kill is definitely very apropos to current times.

I want to get through all of her East Asian travelogues first then will head over to her American series.

>62 lilisin: Thanks for the link!

Reading Balzac - I just finished Lost Illusions - and Zola feels so relevant right now. Of all the national groups of novelists, the French are the least afraid of looking at the reality of human affairs. The English writers are much sunnier and more comforting. I love Dickens, but I have news for him, Scrooge never does reform.

I am reading one of James Fenimore Cooper’s lesser-known novels at the moment, Lionel Lincoln. It does not have much of a reputation, but I am really enjoying it. Set in Revolutionary War Massachusetts, it was intended to be the first of a series coveting each of the 13 colonies during that conflict, but Cooper never got further with the idea.

Cooper interestingly makes his hero a Boston-born Tory with a conscience, who is not entirely out of sympathy with the rebellious Americans. The novel is dialogue-driven, without the long descriptive passages of other Cooper novels, and thus reads much faster than those. The plot is well-managed. Altogether a nice read which I am happy to point people to, because I do not think it has much of a fan base.

The Trollope-ian Barchester saga continues; just started volume three, Doctor Thorne, but am only at the start of the introduction because of busy life, though.

There's much translation activity for class: did the first 100 lines of the Illiad and have to memorize the Proemium, but it is a great read and of sad topicality.

I am very partial to pre-1820 American literature, undoubtedly because I studied it, and can read all of it with pleasure.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is a writer who has interested me ever since I first encountered his work in American literature classes in college. At that time I read Wieland and Ormond; recently I re-read Wieland, along with its unfinished companion text Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, in the Penguin edition. Now I have started on Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Huntly (also issued by Penguin) rounds out the set of CBB’s four key Gothic novels, although these are hardly his entire work.

Brown’s novels are by no means cookie-cutter Gothic, but represent interesting spins on the genre, incorporating such manifestations as ventriloquism (Wieland), sleep-walking (Edgar Huntly), and disease (Arthur Mervyn - the actual Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793). All of these Gothic novels are set in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, so Brown was a regionalist as well. He was a forward-looking individual, an abolitionist and a feminist (this is reflected in his philosophical dialogue Alcuin), and was involved in many reform efforts up until his early death of tuberculosis at age 39. There is no telling what more he might have accomplished had he lived longer.

The Library of America published three of Brown’s Gothics in one volume (minus the long Arthur Mervyn, which originally appeared in two volumes a year apart). But the Delphi e-book omnibus contains just about everything he wrote, at their usual low price.

As part of my deep dive into American literary realism, I recently started two novels I have been meaning to get to for YEARS, both by authors with the initials HF, born only a year apart, The Cliff-Dwellers by Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) and The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic (1856-1898).

Oddly, neither of these two important realists have appeared in the Library of America, despite being in the public domain. Nor have others such as Edgar Watson Howe, Joseph Kirkland, John William De Forest, Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Rebecca Harding Davis. I see a possibility for a couple of omnibus volumes here. (Or even more, going farther into “local color” writers such as Alice Brown, Grace King, James Lane Allen, and Mary Noailles Murfree.)

The Frederic novel, his seventh of ten, highly regarded by Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published just two years before his premature death at 42. He had lived hard (including eight children, five by his wife and three by his mistress).

Fuller, perhaps America’s first unequivocally gay writer - he really did not try to hide it - got a late start, and lived a good deal longer. The Cliff-Dwellers was his third novel, a landmark in Chicago literature. With the Procession, his fourth and also set in Chicago, is equally well-regarded, and I will certainly read it as well.

I imagine that Fuller and Frederic must have been aware of each other, but I would like to know more about that.

More about these as I get further along.

T.S. Stribling’s The Forge (1931), the first in his Vaiden Trilogy, deserves far more of a reputation as one of the best Civil War novels. It centers on the Vaidens, slave-owning but far from rich, and other families in northern Alabama as they are involved in and react to the war and its aftermath. The slave and Union points of view are not neglected either. The Forge is frequently VERY funny, a quite unexpected and welcome characteristic in a Civil War novel.

The second Vaiden novel, The Store, which takes place in the 1880s, won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The third, Unfinished Cathedral, skips ahead to the 1920s. Faulkner bought and read these as they appeared, and there is an obvious affinity with / influence on his own Snopes Trilogy.

>68 PatrickMurtha: How interesting. I've never heard of him before. I will have to have a look at these books. Thanks!

>69 rocketjk: Stribling has tended to slip through the cracks, but he is a very interesting and accomplished writer.

Currently reading Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu and it's quite good.

Classics completed in April:

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo (1862), translated by Christine Donougher: started in January and finished in early April. Lots to contemplate. I was immensely helped by listening to a 60-episode podcast (an episode for every few chapters) explaining the themes, subtle meanings in the original French, historical background and author's background.
John Caldigate, Anthony Trollope (1879); a page-turning Trollope, partially set in the gold mines of Australia
The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy (1887); slightly less miserable than Tess or Jude, but a definite sense of doom from the beginning.

Modern classics (1900-1950):
A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1905)
Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey (1946); mystery set in a girls' boarding school
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905); a re-read

I have finished a Norwegian classic, Alexander L. Kielland’s first novel Garman & Worse.

I'm reading a bunch of short stories of a gothic or mystery theme by Amelia B. Edwards from the 19th century. Most of them are very good.

For eight weeks, in a Zoom reading group, I'll be reading Jude the Obscure to be followed by the Apology. I had never considered putting the two together.

>75 librorumamans: love Thomas Hardy, read this some time ago. Would be interested in some thoughts regarding the combining with Plato/Socrates.

>76 Buchmerkur:

Yes, indeed. I wrote a lengthy paper on Jude in undergrad, some fifty-plus years ago. I'm looking forward to rediscovering it.

The facilitator hasn't been in touch yet, so I don't know which order we'll be discussing them in.

I've just read and enjoyed Joseph Conrad's short novel, The End of the Tether. It's not really among Conrad's very best works, but I suppose the entire Conrad canon is considered "classic" in some ways. My review is on my Club Read thread.

Classics completed in May:

Tess of the D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy (1891); I've been reading one Hardy every month in publication order, and let's just say I'm beginning to feel Hardy-fatigue. Only 2 left to read: The Well-Beloved (new to me) and Jude the Obscure (a re-read).

Modern classics (before 1950):

Crooked Cross, Sally Carson (1934)--amazing portrayal of a family in Bavaria in 1932-33, based on Carson's own experiences in Germany during this time period.
South Riding, Winifred Holtby (1936 post.)--a sprawling portrait of Yorkshire between the wars, which demands a re-read to fully appreciate
The Foolish Gentlewoman, Margery Sharp (1948)--post WWII suburban London, about a woman who tries to atone for a long-past wrong.