Decades '08 Challenge

I was inspired to join the Decades '08 Challenge:

The rules are simple:

1. Read a minimum of 8 books in 8 consecutive decades in ‘08.

2. Books published in the 2000’s do not count.

3. Titles may be cross-posted with any other challenge.

4. You may change your list at any time.

I am also doing the "50 in 365" challenge. The decades '08 challenge will help me to focus my reading so I have a more varied reading list (rather than a bunch of murder mysteries from the same three decades). Choosing a reading list was so very exciting. Of course, it is subject to change, but here is the tentative list. A lot of the books are already in my library or my parents' library - I just needed a little push of motivation to read them.

1840s Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

1850s The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1860s Silas Marner by George Eliot

1870s An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

1880s Washington Square by Henry James

1890s Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

1900s The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

1910s Anne's House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery

1920s Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne

1930s Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

1940s 1984 by George Orwell

Alternates that I've been wanting to read for a while, and hope to fit in somewhere:

• The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas (1840s)
  
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1840s)
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1850s)
• The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850s)
  
• Eight Cousins and Little Men by Louisa May Alcott (1870s)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1870s)
  
• Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1900s)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1930s)
• And others...