
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Oldest (aka Earliest Published) Books On My TBR.
At first, I went to my Goodreads to-read shelf to sort by publication year and look for the earliest, but then realized that I was missing many of the classics I want to get to. So… I went to my handy-dandy Excel spreadsheet (yes, I’m an Excel nerd!) dedicated to my future classics reading, and then did a little mixing and matching.
The results originally showed a few instances of multiple books by the same author, and I made the executive decision to limit it to one book each. In the end, it was very hard to whittle the list down, so…
Here is my list of 10 12 of the oldest books on my to-read shelf!












- Belinda by Maria Edgeworth (1801)
- Waverley by Sir Walter Scott (1814)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (1826)
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (1848)
- Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862)
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
- The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860)
- Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne (1872)
- Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott (1875)
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)
- The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878)
Note: I’ve read Frankenstein, but it was so long ago that I feel a reread is needed!
Have you read any of the books on my list? Any thoughts or recommendations?
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