Top 10 Tuesdays: Books Written Before I Was Born

I was very surprised to see how few of the books on my TBR were written before I was born! Of the nearly 4000 books on my list, only about 130 or so were published before I was born. On the other hand, it may not be such a surprise since I’ve already read quite a few classics, and I don’t have a ton of interest in many books that were published in the decades just before I was born. Actually, the majority of books I had on my list from the 20th century were the Wizard of Oz series, the Anne of Green Gables series, and various Beatrix Potter stories, among a handful of others. I decided it would be more fun to go back even further and find the oldest books on my TBR. They are all fairly well-known classics so I didn’t really feel the need to go into much detail about what each one is about, but I had a surprising number of books from the 1800s. It’s been quite a while since I’ve really been in the mood to pick up a classic, so I have a feeling they will be on my list for quite a while.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

1) The Odyssey by Homer (8th century BC)

2) The Arabian Nights by Anonymous (800 AD)

3) Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory (1485)

4) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1615)

5) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1623 – although I have individual plays on my TBR that range from 1593 to 1605)

6) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)

7) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

8) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811 – I have other Jane Austen books on my TBR as well, which are from 1814-1818, but skipping them for the sake of variety)

9) Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (1819)

10) The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (1831)

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