The Classics

[sophia jane]

Part of my plan this summer is to read some of the "classics" that I seem to have missed. So, I'm curious- what "classic" books do you think should be required reading (not necessarily in school, but in life)? Which classics do you hate? Also, any recommendations for me? What I have on my list so far:

Mark Twain (never read any of his books, I'm so ashamed)
Faust
Madame Bovary
The Awakening
Jane Eyre

also plan to reread The Bell Jar and read some Whitman, Thoreau and works by Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. During my Humanities classes, various essays, poems and books were casually mentioned in the text so I just kept adding things to my list that seem interesting and/or important.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

The Scarlet pimpernel Baroness Orczy
The three musketers Dumas
Meditations: Marcus Areillius
The Art of War Sun Tzu

 

[sophia jane]

The Scarlet pimpernel Baroness Orczy
The three musketers Dumas
Meditations: Marcus Areillius
The Art of War Sun Tzu

I haven't read any of those, so I'll add them all to my list.

 

[Typo Fu Master]

Sorry if this is off topic, but what makes a classic? Are classics universally accepted as such, even if some are liked and some not?

 

[Nirvanadragones]

Paradise lost
The Color Purple
Madame Bovary
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Scarlet Letter,
To Kill A Mockingbird
Little Women
Wuthering Heights
Flowers for Algernon
Dracula
Cry, the Beloved Country
The hobbit
Les Miserables
Frankenstein
The Iliad

I am a huge Virginia Woolf admirer, but i am biased

These are ofcourse the novels. I guess we would need a totally seperate thread for poetry...

 

[3113]

Which classics do you hate?

Moby Dick. How this whale of a book became a classic I'll never know. It's slow and tedious and I hate the characters. I wanted the white whale to kill them all. Go Moby!

Also, as we're in the water, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which reads like a book for nerds who are deeply into ichthyology. Before you get anywhere near a story you first have to learn everything you didn't want to know about fish.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

RLS: Trasure Isalnd too

 

[Selena_Kitt]

I've read a lot of "Classics"... (English Lit major, that was my B.A.) and some will just serve to put you to sleep, "classic" or not...

and of course, to each his own... I loathed Grapes of Wrath, but have a friend who ADORES that book... go figure...

some of the more interesting ones, at least to me:

1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

"New" Classics:

The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Toni Morrison (or, really, anything by her!)
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson


My all time favorite short story:

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

[gauchecritic]

OK I'm a skiffy nut

The Dune Saga
Foundation series
Solaris
The dosadi experiment
Who
The Martian Chronicles

 

[sophia jane]

Sorry if this is off topic, but what makes a classic? Are classics universally accepted as such, even if some are liked and some not?

Good question. I think there are lots of books that are just accepted as a classic like the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example. How do books become classics? Not sure. Perhaps it's that they made an impact at some point, they've withstood the test of time and still continue resonate with readers. There are definitely "classics" that I can't stand. The Scarlet Letter, for example- required reading in English classes but I detested it.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Sorry if this is off topic, but what makes a classic? Are classics universally accepted as such, even if some are liked and some not?

Classic for me is one of those you need to have read to be conversant when inltelligent people are speaking. If someone I admire, in their speechs consistantly reference some work, I want to have read that work, so the refrences don't go over my head. So I have read Suz Tzu, And Musashi (sp) because their works are often quoted in the board room. In fact, one compnay I worked with, the art of war was required reading for their executive training program.

I suspect c;assics has a very wide reange of interpretation. I also suspect, very few works would be univesally considred a classic. So my list and Stellas list and Nir's list and your own will varry, but might include one or two that are more or less universaaly held to be classic.

 

[ibhard]

a complimentary CliffNotes with a classic book are nice to go along with your reading. I did that with Count of Monte Christo and it was very helpful in understanding what i was reading. they are also good at pointing out things you might miss.

 

[Guest]

Good question. I think there are lots of books that are just accepted as a classic like the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example. How do books become classics? Not sure. Perhaps it's that they made an impact at some point, they've withstood the test of time and still continue resonate with readers. There are definitely "classics" that I can't stand. The Scarlet Letter, for example- required reading in English classes but I detested it.

There is a lot of variance about what makes a "classic" book, especially now that the word has been stolen for advertising purposes.

Once upon a time, a "classic" was actually part of a canon of books selected by various authorities (mostly White, Englishspeaking, Anglo-Saxon Men) as the books one should read. They were considered the books one needed to read to be considered well educated. Book series such as Harvard Classics were published based on that idea. Some books are classics because they endure, generation after generation -- people keep reading them, keep discussing them, keep passing them on. Others are classics because literature teachers keep forcing them on students

The term "modern classic" is an oxymoron, in my opinion, because a classic is supposedly something that has lasted through a long period of time -- difficult for anything "modern" to do. Of course, classic also implies "stature" and "authority".

People have been creating lists of "must read" and "classic" books since the 17th century. One of the more respected, which most people haven't heard of (isn't that a contradiction? ) is "The Lifetime Reading Plan" by Clifton Fadiman. There is also James Baldwin's "The Book-Lover; A Guide to the Best Reading" which came out in 1885. There are scads more.

One little book I picked up recently and found helpful in selecting my reading is "A Little Guide To Your Well Read Life" by Steve Leveen. It contains lists of a lot of other books that discuss what books one should read.

Also, Ninja Librarian Nancy Pearl's "Book Lust" and "More Book Lust" are wonderful guides.

 

[Typo Fu Master]

I see many titles mentioned here as 'classics' and I guess I agree with them on principle, but for me a classic is something I want to read over and over.

One of my favorites is Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. Not a classic by many peoples' definition, but I find it very enjoyable.

 

[The_Fool]

Classic Authors:

Hemingway. Gotta read "The Old Man and The Sea"
Steven Crane. Red Badge of Courage
Jack London.
Will Faulkner.
Oscar Wilde.
Henry Miller.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Joseph Conrad.



Classic Poets:

Shakespeare
John Donne
Keats, Byron and Shelley
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
Whitman

I cannot stand Charles Dickens.

I found a great link: http://www.classicreader.com/

 

[Selena_Kitt]

I cannot stand Charles Dickens.

I can't either. To paraphrase the king from Amadeus: "too many notes" !!

And I'm one of the few people I know who can't stand Hemingway. Even Old Man and the Sea... sorry... didn't do it for me.

Or James Joyce. Good god, write a coherent sentence, man!

 

[Guest]

I can't either. To paraphrase the king from Amadeus: "too many notes" !!

And I'm one of the few people I know who can't stand Hemingway. Even Old Man and the Sea... sorry... didn't do it for me.

Or James Joyce. Good god, write a coherent sentence, man!

Can't do Hemmingway, despite trying. Dickens is ok in short stories, as is Joyce. Just don't let them go on and on. Of course, I think Dickens got that way because he was writing soap opera -- chapters came out every month, and people might forget what was going on.

Love Twain a lot. Love Austen. I read Jane Eyre every couple of years, have since I was 12. Love Voltaire's Candide.

But I'm a happy genre reader. Once upon a time there were no genres, there were only stories

 

[Ada Stuart]

Bookworm

Don't forget the works of Jane Austen. Especially "Pride and Prejudice" is a well written and exciting book - even by today's standard.

Also, by classis book I think of old books written in 19ths century and which are still relevant today. Some authors are easily forgotten while others like Robert Louis Stevenson, George Elliot, Shakespeare and Jane Austen are just as important today - at least in my thinking.

I enjoy any of these authors much better than for example "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. I think most of todays literature explain everything to the point of boredom so that even the most ignorant reader is allowed to follow the plot.

 

[sophia jane]

Don't forget the works of Jane Austen. Especially "Pride and Prejudice" is a well written and exciting book - even by today's standard.

Also, by classis book I think of old books written in 19ths century and which are still relevant today. Some authors are easily forgotten while others like Robert Louis Stevenson, George Elliot, Shakespeare and Jane Austen are just as important today - at least in my thinking.

I enjoy any of these authors much better than for example "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. I think most of todays literature explain everything to the point of boredom so that even the most ignorant reader is allowed to follow the plot.

I Jane Austen.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Joyce's "Araby" is quite accessible and very good as well. "The Dead" is another of his short stories that I'd recommend. I don't think his stream-of-cousciousness novels have a great deal to offer the casual reader.

I don't think I have seen anyone mention Gulliver's Travels or "A Modest Proposal"; do read something by Swift, he's a treat.

I shan't bother "seconding" the wonderful suggestions others have made so far, other than The Picture of Dorian Gray because it has utterly enslaved me in the most pleasant way.

"Beowulf" would be on my list. The modern English translations are generally pretty easy to follow, and that rough-hewn warrior feel is a beautiful thing.

Watership Down is a damned good read. It's a wonderful book, too, in that it has something to offer at every stage of one's life, or so I find. I read it first in elementary school and I still see new things each time I read it.

On Twain - he has so many personalities that I think he's definitely worth exploring. His lightest humor, like Tom Sawyer or the brilliant essay "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper," is wonderfully funny; his more serious side can be savage and glorious at once, as in some of the darker parts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman."

For poetry, I'd add William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats (mostly his middle and late work), W. H. Auden, and e. e. cummings. Ernest Downson is another excellent poet - very beautiful - but in terms of being a "classic" he's often saddled with the uneviable designation of "minor poet."

 

[Selena_Kitt]

"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

yep... I'll third it... It's a fantastic read, and it's stayed with me for years and years... I read it first when I was fourteen, I think...

got me thinking short stories now...

The Lottery, Shirley Jackson ... that one was creepy too... as was...
The Monkey's Paw, W. W. Jacobs

and I really like these, too...

The Necklace, Guy de Maupassant
To Build a Fire, Jack London
Man from the South, Roald Dahl

 

[ishtat]

I am a huge Virginia Woolf admirer, but i am biased

..

She deserves admiration not least for what she said about DH Lawrence. "He wrote nothing that George Eliot(Mary Ann Evans) had not already written and which she wrote much better".

Would Lawrence be the most tedious author ever or would he be second to Theodore Driesler?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Joyce's "Araby" is quite accessible and very good as well. "The Dead" is another of his short stories that I'd recommend. I don't think his stream-of-cousciousness novels have a great deal to offer the casual reader.

I don't think I have seen anyone mention Gulliver's Travels or "A Modest Proposal"; do read something by Swift, he's a treat.

I shan't bother "seconding" the wonderful suggestions others have made so far, other than The Picture of Dorian Gray because it has utterly enslaved me in the most pleasant way.

"Beowulf" would be on my list. The modern English translations are generally pretty easy to follow, and that rough-hewn warrior feel is a beautiful thing.

Watership Down is a damned good read. It's a wonderful book, too, in that it has something to offer at every stage of one's life, or so I find. I read it first in elementary school and I still see new things each time I read it.

On Twain - he has so many personalities that I think he's definitely worth exploring. His lightest humor, like Tom Sawyer or the brilliant essay "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper," is wonderfully funny; his more serious side can be savage and glorious at once, as in some of the darker parts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman."

For poetry, I'd add William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats (mostly his middle and late work), W. H. Auden, and e. e. cummings. Ernest Downson is another excellent poet - very beautiful - but in terms of being a "classic" he's often saddled with the uneviable designation of "minor poet."

A fellow Waterhsip down lover!

I just knew you were perfect in every way horsey

 

[haldir]

I think that "classics" are simply works that have the staying power. Some com ein and out of fashion and some become accepted as part of the "canon" (another interesting word) of great literature. For what it's worth my list would include the following ( in no particular order)

Wuthering Heights
Fathers and Sons
Dracula
Frankenstein (1813 edition please!)
On the Road
The Clockwork Orange
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I Robot
Colour Purple
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Kes
Trainspotting
Swing Hammer Swing

and some poetry - the works of :

John Donne
TS Eliot
Sylvia Plath
Tennyson
William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience
Norman McCaig
Robert Burns

 

[SeaCat]

I like the lists above and would only add a few to it.

The Bible, The Talmud as well as the Torah. The Quaran.

If you can find a copy, the Readers Digest book of Wit and Humor, 1965.

The entire Muskateer series by Dumas.

Phantom of the Opera.

Last of the Mohicans.

Shakespears plays.

Oh we should not forget some of the Philosophers just to add some balance.

Cat