This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on books from my to-be-read list that were written before I was born. Here are ten I’ve been meaning to read for a while:

1. The Odyssey by Homer (I’ve had a pretty copy sitting on my desk for several years. Maybe 2021 is the year to crack it open.)
2. The Sagas of Icelanders (I dragged this ~800-page tome with me to Iceland thinking I’d hunker down and read myths from the 1200s while on vacation there. I did not.)
3. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (Karen and I were supposed to read this together a decade or so ago and I totally kept flaking on her. I’ll get to it someday.)
4. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (My two best college friends and I watched the movie, a travel adventure set in an Italian castle, a quarter century ago and I’ve been meaning to get back to it for a while. Maybe this year I’ll check out the source material, which dates from the 1920s.)
5. Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham (Don’t you want to read it based just on the title? Add to that it’s a satire skewering the literary world of London in the early 20th century and I’m doubly in.)
6. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (This routinely makes it onto lists of underappreciated, humorous novels of yore. There’s also an edition with Roz Chast illustrations, which tempts me even more.)
7. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (I’ve long meant to read all the Bronte novels, and this is my college roommate’s favorite of the bunch.)
8. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (While I’ve intended to read this since I first devoured Little Women in elementary school, I haven’t tried since middle school. I can probably get through it now.)
9. Le Petit Nicholas by René Goscinny (I picked up a copy of this French children’s classic when I was in France more than a decade ago and I should really get around to reading it.)
10. Around the World in 72 Days by Nellie Bly (A memoir (based on the newspaper columns) of a journalist’s attempt to beat the 80 days it took the fictional Verne hero to circumnavigate the globe. Who doesn’t want to read a travelogue of a cutting-edge Victorian era newspaperwoman?)

What old books are on your reading list?