Literary Classics

[Liam]

What books that fall under the banner of 'literary classics' would you recommend to read?

It seems to be an area where I lack some experience and would like to discover some older classics.

[odessasteps]

How classic are you talking?

20th century?

Elizabethan?

beowulf?

I almost picked Guillver's Travels for the book club, so i would recommend that.

[jaedmc]

I found Moby Dick to be really enjoyable after people telling me how much of a tedious chore it was to get through. I liked the tangents, and didn't feel like it was particularly dense in prose.

 

I'm reading Frankenstein right now and I really really like the writing - probably more so than Dracula, which is also a solid book.

 

1984 is always timely, but be prepared to be depressed.

[odessasteps]

I think Frankenstein is a much more different read if you know all the backstory of Mary Shelley,her father, and also the whole "how the story came to be" as dramatized (sort of) in Ken Russell's Gothic.

[Liam]

I've read and really enjoyed Frankenstein. Have taught it in school as well.

1984 is a book I will teach next academic year, so will read it in the next week or so.

Classic is fairly open ended. People have been recommending books by Dumas, Conrad, Orwell, etc. Any suggestions work for me.

[Jingus]

I think Frankenstein is a much more different read if you know all the backstory of Mary Shelley,her father, and also the whole "how the story came to be" as dramatized (sort of) in Ken Russell's Gothic.

Especially important is the detail that Mary Shelley's mother, legendary ur-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died from giving birth to her daughter. Died a horrifying, miserable, prolonged, agonizing, pointless death from postpartum infection. Frankenstein made SO much more sense to me after I learned that fact.

But for 19th century horror, imho, it's really all about The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's easily superior to Frankenstein and especially Dracula as a straight-up tale of scary shit, especially since it slowly reveals its story bit by bit and layer by layer as it draws closer and closer to the real truth. The character motivations are also much more realistic, while at times in both Drac and Frank you've really gotta meet the book more than halfway in suspending your disbelief that the people would plausibly do some of this ridiculous shit.

Conrad: Heart of Darkness, full stop. Easily his best book by a fair margin. Some argue today that it's racist, and maybe by today's standards it is; but at the time its basic message of "hey, black people are our cousins, yo" counts as being downright progressive.

I recently discovered the genius that is Voltaire, and his devastatingly vicious take-no-prisoners style of bitterly satirical writing. Most people say that Candide is his masterpiece, and it probably is; it's one of the few centuries-old books that I've read which actually had me legitimately laughing-out-loud at various jokes. But pretty much all his work is worth checking out.

And finally: it's a freakin' doorstop, a massive brick of a book, but I can't pimp Les Miserables highly enough. Maybe my favorite novel of all time, just a mind-bendingly vast epic story of the greatest heights and lowest depths that people can reach, written with both rage-fueled hatred and tear-soaked compassion for the human condition. Even if you've seen the musical (probably the best adaptation, oddly enough) you don't even know half the story. Victor Hugo is brilliant like Shakespeare is brilliant, just on another plane of intellect from the rest of humanity. (Speaking of which, if you don't know Shakespeare, his best works are mandatory for checking out: Hamlet, Tempest, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth. Just probably watch the movie versions first, with closed captioning on and a thickly-annotated copy of the play in your hand.)

[Randy]

I will second the 1984 recommendation; one of my favorite books.  I would also recommend The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; which is a classic of war fiction.  It sort of straddles the line between memoir and fiction throughout-- so that the reader has to question what is possible.

 

I also recommend Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett as a classic spy novel.

 

These are more modern than the other suggestions.  I hope they qualify for what you are looking for.

[twiztor]

1984 is awesome.

i read Dracula earlier this year and was surprised how much i enjoyed it. seeing people rate Frankenstein and Jekyll/Hyde higher than it makes me very interested in reading them, too.

[Yo-Yo's Roomie]

If you like 1984, may as well check out Brave New World too, for a very different take on some similar themes.

 

Catch-22, obviously. Still the best book I've ever read.

 

Watership Down is bloody brilliant.

 

For older shit, Crime and Punishment is pretty much a must-read.

[Super Ape]

The Count of Monte Cristo.  Probably one of the best novels ever written, in any language.

 

The Prince.  A lot of people seem to give it flack for being The Dictator's Handbook, but most of the common quotes about the ends justifiying the means are from erroneous translations (it's more like "one must think of the ends when considering the means").

 

The Spy that Came in From the Cold.  One of the finest spy novels ever written.

 

A Confederacy of Dunces.  Comic gold.

 

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.  Murakami takes bits and pieces of Latin American magical realism, surrealist fiction, and a cross-section of Western culture.  This is his breakout novel, and easily one of his best.

[Liam]

The Count of Monte Cristo.  Probably one of the best novels ever written, in any language.

 

The Prince.  A lot of people seem to give it flack for being The Dictator's Handbook, but most of the common quotes about the ends justifiying the means are from erroneous translations (it's more like "one must think of the ends when considering the means").

 

The Spy that Came in From the Cold.  One of the finest spy novels ever written.

 

A Confederacy of Dunces.  Comic gold.

 

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.  Murakami takes bits and pieces of Latin American magical realism, surrealist fiction, and a cross-section of Western culture.  This is his breakout novel, and easily one of his best.

 

Might have to run with TCOMC because it keeps coming up in recommendations.

 

Already read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - great book.

[Execproducer]

 

I think Frankenstein is a much more different read if you know all the backstory of Mary Shelley,her father, and also the whole "how the story came to be" as dramatized (sort of) in Ken Russell's Gothic.

And finally: it's a freakin' doorstop, a massive brick of a book, but I can't pimp Les Miserables highly enough. Maybe my favorite novel of all time, just a mind-bendingly vast epic story of the greatest heights and lowest depths that people can reach, written with both rage-fueled hatred and tear-soaked compassion for the human condition. Even if you've seen the musical (probably the best adaptation, oddly enough) you don't even know half the story. Victor Hugo is brilliant like Shakespeare is brilliant, just on another plane of intellect from the rest of humanity. (Speaking of which, if you don't know Shakespeare, his best works are mandatory for checking out: Hamlet, Tempest, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth. Just probably watch the movie versions first, with closed captioning on and a thickly-annotated copy of the play in your hand.)

 

This. Though I had to go back to it, because the first time I tried reading it , I ended up launching it against the wall.

 

Don Quixote. I've read that book about 10 times. Never gets old. And not everyones cup of tea, but the 1st volume of Marcel Proust's  In Search of Lost Time.....Swann's Way... is easily the best description of unrequited, obsessive romantic love ever written.

[Control]

The "classic" I can really get behind is Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. There are, as with any book that size, some tedious passages, but it's a fantastic book nonetheless.

[Guest The Magnificent 7]

The Iliad (Homer), Fall of Troy (Quintus of Smyrna), Philoctetes (Sophocles), and The Aeneid (Virgil) are all essential reading and really entertaining.  Most everyone reads The Odyssey in middle or high school, but these are largely ignored these days.  Great characters, even the minor ones like Idomeneus or Diomedes who ends up wounding some Gods are interesting and I end up liking the best.  Not the most varied works, but a bunch of badasses doing their thing. 

 

Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) in The Aeneid telling Priam to tell the Gods of the degeneracy of Neoptolemus before he kills him is the kind of epic stuff you just enjoy or you don't. 

[Jingus]

The Iliad (Homer)

Also, when dealing with ancient classics from another language, the translator really matters. I'm fond of the Robert Fagles version, I think he gets the point across best.

[Death From Above]

I found Moby Dick to be really enjoyable after people telling me how much of a tedious chore it was to get through. I liked the tangents, and didn't feel like it was particularly dense in prose.

 

I thought a lot of the parts where he blathers on about whale anatomy and that stuff was, well, blathering, but a lot of the proper storytelling is really amazing. And even those parts I disliked fit into his narrative of hammering home this obsession with whales, this obsession with the ocean. It's vivid. The book has texture. You can almost touch the scenes he describes. There's a scene early in the book where all the whalers gather in church before shipping off to sea that absolutely stuck with me forever after reading it. Hard to explain but the way he describes everything just felt so alive. And the way he delves into obsession is unlike anything else I've ever read.

 

A great book, clearly written by a madman. And that's what makes it great. I've never read anything else he did but Melville was some kind of character.

[Jingus]

I've never read anything else he did but Melville was some kind of character.

Bartleby the Scrivener is VERY much worth your time. It's Melville distilled, in much easier-to-consume friendly novella format. And nary a word about whales, to my recollection (exceptions such as "he lit the whale-oil lantern" don't count).

[Dirty J.]

I've read and really enjoyed Frankenstein. Have taught it in school as well.

1984 is a book I will teach next academic year, so will read it in the next week or so.

Classic is fairly open ended. People have been recommending books by Dumas, Conrad, Orwell, etc. Any suggestions work for me.

 

What do you teach if I may ask?

And could you define classics a little bit more? Give me some genres or topics that you are interested in. Going by the authors you've mentioned I would say the The Count of Monte Cristo is a must (but a bit of a doorstopper if you ask me). Heart of Darkness of course (short read, my version only has 70 pages), but I'd also recommend the Secret Agent by Conrad. For Orwell I'd say 1984, which is more topical as never before.

[Justin877]

I was always partial to Animal Farm when it comes to Orwell.

 

I also contend that Lord Of The Flies still stands as one of my all time favorite books.  Mileagae may vary.

[Liam]

 

I've read and really enjoyed Frankenstein. Have taught it in school as well.

1984 is a book I will teach next academic year, so will read it in the next week or so.

Classic is fairly open ended. People have been recommending books by Dumas, Conrad, Orwell, etc. Any suggestions work for me.

 

What do you teach if I may ask?

And could you define classics a little bit more? Give me some genres or topics that you are interested in. Going by the authors you've mentioned I would say the The Count of Monte Cristo is a must (but a bit of a doorstopper if you ask me). Heart of Darkness of course (short read, my version only has 70 pages), but I'd also recommend the Secret Agent by Conrad. For Orwell I'd say 1984, which is more topical as never before.

 

 

English - my interest has generally been for Non-fiction/Fantasy/General Fiction, rather than literary classic stuff.

 

When I say classics, I want to be open in terms of suggestions. The Greek stuff is the type of stuff I'd be interested in, yet so is the Orwell/Dumas type stuff.

 

The type of stuff that gets published by here - http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/

 

When I asked my other half for some ideas, the only real thing I didn't want was stuff like Austen/Bronte - doesn't really interest me.

 

Started 1984, and will also be reading Heart of Darkness - grabbed a handful of the other recommendations as well. Cheers so far.

[Dirty J.]

If you are going to read Heart of Darkness you may also like to read Things Fall Apart (if you haven't already in high school). It contrasts nicely. Right know I'm catching up with Vonnegut's work and I quite enjoy it. Dark humor and his work is easy to read. Worth checking out.

 

And whenever I think of classics, I also think of Hemingway. The proze is not for everybody, but he's pretty much the first of his kind. People have copied him and did it better. However, I still recommend either checking out his short stories or The Sun Also Rises.

 

To be honest, it's a bit hard recommending 'classics' since a lot of it was mandatory stuff for me in high school.

[Liam]

I read Frankenstein, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, The Great Gatsby and Sons and Lovers at school from what I can remember - and a lot of Shakespeare.

 

Past that, I did an English Language degree, so didn't read any (unlike say, a Literature degree).

 

I've fancied checking out some Hemmingway - what is it with the prose?

[Jingus]

I've fancied checking out some Hemmingway - what is it with the prose?

He's very laconic, to the point of almost being tight-lipped. You've gotta do a lot of reading-between-the-lines with his stories. Imagine prose written by a John Wayne character, as if they were salaried in some cockamamie fashion which was the polar opposite of "paid by the word". Still, I like him, The Old Man and the Sea is an old favorite of mine.

[Control]

Hemingway's style is very minimalist, and is largely based on journalistic writing. His work focuses on who, what, when, where, and how--though almost never "why." He's famous for his "iceberg theory" of writing:

 

 

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

 

 

For Hemingway, I'd suggest In Our Time. It's a short story cycle, and it's one of his earliest works. Hem is a better short story writer than a novelist, to my mind, though The Sun Also Rises is quite good. Early Hem is almost always better than late Hem.

 

Some of my favourite Hemingway stories are "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Capital of the World."

[Liam]

So probably better to check out his short story work than his novels, when it comes to introductions at least?