North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

The Classics Club did a spin in November to select a book we had to read from our list by the end of December. I ended up having to read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, my first Gaskell and certainly a novel I had been meaning to read for years. Although I had put this down as a book I wasn't all too excited to read I soon after found numerous booktubers who raved about this book so I went into it with high hopes.
This novel is set in the 19th century but unlike the novels of Jane Austen the novel lies outside of the Regency ballrooms and large estates and in largely set in the Industrial North. The main character is a fiesty young women, raised among the rich, with a middle class family and an urging to befriend the poor and scare off any wealthy, hardworking men who show any interest in her.
Even without having seen the booktubers videos I knew within minutes of meeting Mr Thorton that he was the love interest and all would turn out well in the end, it was just a matter of getting there. Much like Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy the pair are rivals and seem unable to say anything agreeable to each other.
I really enjoyed much of this novel, despites its predictability, however I lost a bit of focus in the middle section with the story of the brother, it just distracted from all the other characters I had come to care about.
I'm looking forward to picking up Cranford in the near future.

The Classics Club

I'm heading on down and joining The Classics Club. The idea is that you create your own list of classics you would like to read and set yourself a 5 year goal to tick these read off of your list. As someone with an English Literature degree, masters and a teacher of Literature I have read a lot of classics but I still have a stack to go and I do find myself distracted by new and shiny covers.
I was supposed to have a list of 50 but that slipped away and I ended up with 100! The list has serious classics, and modern classics plus classics from particular countries and genres.
This is the 100 books I plan to tackle by 12/11/2018:
1. Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce
2. Domby and Don - Charles Dickens
3. Canary Row - John Steinbeck
4. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
5. Kristin Lavransdattar - Sigrid Undset
6. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
7. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
8. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
10. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
11. Sister Carrie - Theodore Dresier
12. Native Son - Richard Wright
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Earnest Hemmingway
14. The Ideal Husband - Oscar Wilde
15. North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
16. The Warden - Anthony Trollope
17. Beowulf
18. Adam Bede - George Elliot
19. The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens
20. The Life and Opinions of Tristian Dhandy, Gentlemen - Laurence Sterne
21. Gulliver's Travels
22. The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
23. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
24. My Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
25. Howard's End - EM Foster
26. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
27. Crime and Punishment - Fydor Dostoyevsky
28. The Brothers Karakov - Dostoyevsky
29. The Master and Margarita - Mikail Bulgakov
30. Dead Souls - Nokoli Gogol
31. Lolita - Vladamir Nabokov
32. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
33. The River Between - Ngugi wa Thiongo
34. Houseboy - Ferdinand Oyono
35. House of Leaves
36. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
37. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
38. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
40. The Leopard
41. The Odyssey, Homer
42. Don Quixote
43. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
44. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
45. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
46. The Waves - Virginia Woolf
48. Candide - Voltaire
49. Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turganev
50. The Black Book - Pamuk
51. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
52. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
53. Hunger - Knut Hamsum
54. Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
55. The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
56. The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein
57. The Princess Bride - Goldman
58. Sula - Toni Morrison
59. A Prayer for Owen Meaney
60. Red Sorghum - Mo Yan
61. Waiting - Ha Jin
62. The Arabian Nights
63. The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahari
64. Shantram
65. Red Earth and Pouring Rain
66. A River Sutra - Gita Mehta
67. Gilead
68. The War at the End of the World - Llosa
69. Ines of my Soul - Isabel Allende
70. Eva Luna - Iabel Allende
71. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado
72. The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros
73. Norweigan - Murakami
74. The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
75. Kokoro - Soseki
76. Snow Country - Kawabata
77. The Tale of Gneji
78. The House Keeper and The Professor - Yoko Owaga
79. Thousand Cranes- Kawabata
80. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
81. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
82. Pere Goriot - Balzac
83. The Three Maskateers - Dumas
84. Out of Africa - Karen Blixen/Isak Dineson
85. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
86. The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
87. The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
88. A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
89. Divisadero - Ondaatje
90. Everything that Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor
91. Confederates - Thomas Keneally
92. When We Were Orphans - Ishiguro
93. The Satanic Verses - Rushdie
94. Reading in the Dark -Seamus Deane
95. Fasting, Feasting - Anita Desai
96. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
97. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
98. The Cider House Rules, John Irving
99. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
100. The 39 Steps - John Buchan