Classics Club Spin: Zamyatin's We

The number was posted on the Classics Club website today:  20.  That corresponds to Yevgeny Zamyatin's book, We on my spin list.  I'm looking forward to it.  I've read several utopian/dystopian novels, but this one I've neglected. 

Classics Club Spin List

This is my first time participating in the Classics Club "Spin," and below I've included my spin list.  It's pretty straightforward:  next week, the Club will pick a number between 1 and 20.  We then have to read the book that corresponds to that number on our spin lists by April 2.

1	Boswell, James	The Life of Samuel Johnson
2	Bunyan, John	Pilgrim's Progress
3	Dickens, Charles	Great Expectations
4	Dos Passos, John	Manhattan Transfer
5	Eliot, George	Romola
6	Faulkner, William	Absalom! Absalom!
7	Forster, E. M.	A Passage to India
8	Gissing, George	New Grub Street
9	Gogol, Nikolai	Dead Souls
10	Greene, Graham	The Quiet American
11	Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Marble Faun
12	Heller, Joseph	Catch-22
13	James, Henry	Sacred Fount
14	Lessing, Doris	The Golden Notebook
15	Mahfouz, Naguib	Palace Walk
16	Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
17	Stendhal	Charterhouse of Parma
18	Stoker, Bram	Dracula
19	Trollope, Anthony	Barchester Towers
20	Zamiatin, Yevgeny	We

Classics Club challenge

I decided, at the New Year, that I wanted to attempt the Classics Club 5-year challenge, and picked the 75-book level for the challenge.  Fifteen books each year should be a manageable amount, and won't make it feel as though the entire reading year has to focus on the challenge only.  My goal is to finish several 19th-century novels, as well as a couple of massive 18th-century novels like Clarissa and Tom Jones.  I've wanted to get to both of these, but it's easy to put down a 1,500 epistolary novel when there is nothing to hold you accountable.  I'm long past grad school, where there might be some accountability in, say, preparing the book for oral exams, so this challenge seems like the next best thing.

I've put Joseph Conrad on the list because I haven't ever read any of his novels.  I was supposed to have read Nostromo during the summer before my junior year in high school, but that never really did seem to have happened, did it? It seemed awfully boring to my hormone-addled 15-year old brain.  Now, of course, Conrad is fascinating to me because he was born near Kyiv in Ukraine and lived in Lviv.  I lived in Kyiv for a year, and visited Lviv twice, and so I'm curious about his writing and the ways in which Eastern Europe influences, or is woven into, his novels.

So here's my list of 75 books for the challenge:

Balzac, Honore	Lost Illusions
Balzac, Honore	Louis Lambert
Balzac, Honore	Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau
Boswell, James	The Life of Samuel Johnson
Bronte, Anne	Agnes Grey
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bunyan, John	Pilgrim's Progress
Cather, Willa	O Pioneers!
Cervantes, Miguel	Don Quixote
Conrad, Joseph	The Secret Agent
Conrad, Joseph	Under Western Eyes (finished 3.2.14)
Darwin, Charles	The Origin of Species
Defoe, Daniel	Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles	Great Expectations
Dos Passos, John	Manhattan Transfer
Dostoevsky, Fyodor	Demons
Dumas, Alexandre	The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George	Adam Bede
Eliot, George	Romola
Eliot, George	Felix Holt
Eliot, George	Mill on the Floss
Faulkner, William	Absalom! Absalom!
Faulkner, William	Go Down, Moses
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Forster, E. M.	A Passage to India
Gaddis, William	The Recognitions
Gissing, George	New Grub Street
Goethe, Johann	Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai	Dead Souls
Greene, Graham	The Quiet American (finished 3.30.14)
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the D'urbervilles
Hardy, Thomas	Jude the Obscure
Hardy, Thomas	Return of the Native
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Marble Faun
Heller, Joseph	Catch-22
James, Henry	Sacred Fount
Jerome, Jerome K.	Three Men in a Boat
Lessing, Doris	The Golden Notebook
Mahfouz, Naguib	Palace Walk
Mahfouz, Naguib	Sugar Street
Mahfouz, Naguib	Palace of Desire
Mann, Thomas	Magic Mountain
Melville, Herman	The Confidence Man
Musil, Robert	The Man without Qualities
Nabokov, Vladimir	Pale Fire
Richardson, Samuel	Clarissa
Roth, Joseph	The Radetzky March
Scott, Walter	Ivanhoe
Scott, Walter	Bride of Lammermoor
Scott, Walter	Heart of Midlothian
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stendhal	Charterhouse of Parma
Stevenson, Robert Louis	The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Kidnapped (finished 5.13.14)
Stoker, Bram	Dracula
Thackeray, William	Pendennis
Thackeray, William	The Luck of Barry Lyndon
Tolkien, J. R. R.	The Two Towers (finished 1.9.14)
Tolkien, J. R. R.	Return of the King
Trollope, Anthony	Barchester Towers
Trollope, Anthony	Doctor Thorne
Trollope, Anthony	Framley Parsonage
Trollope, Anthony	The Small House at Allington
Trollope, Anthony	The Last Chronicle of Barset
Turgenev, Ivan	Virgin Soil
Twain, Mark	Innocents Abroad
Verne, Jules	Around the World in Eighty Days
Waugh, Evelyn	Brideshead Revisited
Woolf, Virginia	Mrs. Dalloway
Zamiatin, Yevgeny	We
Zola, Emile	Therese Raquin
Zola, Emile	Fortunes of the Rougons
Zola, Emile	La Curee
Zola, Emile	The Belly of Paris

Classics Club 5-year challenge

I've also decided to sign up for the Classics Club 5-year challenge, at the 75-book level.  The goal is to read them by January 3, 2019.  I'm still working on the full list, but here's the list I plan to read in 2014:

Balzac, Honore	Lost Illusions
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bunyan, John	Pilgrim's Progress
Defoe, Daniel	Moll Flanders
Dostoevsky, Fyodor	Demons
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the D'urbervilles
James, Henry	Sacred Fount
Mahfouz, Naguib	Palace Walk
Mahfouz, Naguib	Sugar Street
Mahfouz, Naguib	Palace of Desire
Mann, Thomas	Magic Mountain
Nabokov, Vladimir	Pale Fire
Tolkien, J. R. R.	The Two Towers
Tolkien, J. R. R.	Return of the King