Can anyone recommend me some classics?

[roslily]

Have just saved and bought myself a Kindle. Can't buy anymore books now until next month. However I can get lots of free classics (anything out of copyright).

Despite being an avid reader all my life, I have some what neglected the likes of Dickens et al.

I have read a lot of Jane Austin as a teenager, and Little women, but that is about it.

What can you recommend?

[wraith]

hemmingway, lewis carrol and wells

also i dont know if the kindle can handle other formats but Gutenberg.com could be your friend

[MrsShrekTheThird]

Anna Karenin is a must! Love a bit of Tolstoy!

[otchayaniye]

Anna Karenina

Dead Souls

Master & Margherita

Middlemarch

Daniel Deronda

Lolita

Saki (collected)

Daisy Miller

What Maisie Knew

Death in Venice

Sherlock Holmes (various)

Henderson the Rain King

What Makes Sammy Run

Nostromo

[AlisonDubois]

A day in the life of Ivan Danisovitch.

1984.

[bosch]

Just read the big sleep and the long goodbye by raymond chandler and much to my surprise REALLY enjoyed them.

Also recommend a farewell to arms rather than for whom the bell tolls by hemingway.

Intend to read some mark twain soon on strength of recent radio play.

[piprabbit]

The following message is doing the rounds on Facebook, might give you some ideas as to what someone (if only the BBC) considers to be Classics (made me realise that I need to read more Dickens):

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D?Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler?s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker?s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli?s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid?s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones?s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight?s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno ? Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte?s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[roslily]

Ooh I've 22 of those.

Thanks for ideas, I will check out gutenberg

[londonartemis]

I really recommend To Kill a Mockingbird.

[ZeroMinusZero]

Not sure if it counts as a classic but I Capture The Castle by dodi smith is amazing and an easy read. Diary Of A Nobody by someone Grossmith I think, is very funny.

Great expectations gets my shout as the best Dickens and Mary Barton by Elizabeth gasskell is also good.

[ZeroMinusZero]

Not sure if it counts as a classic but I Capture The Castle by dodi smith is amazing and an easy read. Diary Of A Nobody by someone Grossmith I think, is very funny.

Great expectations gets my shout as the best Dickens and Mary Barton by Elizabeth gasskell is also good.

[brimfull]

I've read 40 of the bbc list

would hardly call Lovely Bones a classic though, twas crap, or some of the others

[bossyboop]

I loved Wuthering Heights and the short chapters! Now trying to finish My Sisters Keeper so I can get started on A Christmas Carol

[LaWeaselMys]

25, I guess there's probably a lot of people out there who read none, or only what they had to for school.

Couple of other modern classics not on that list:

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (they mad a shockingly bad film of this, but it's a really interesting book)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (bit of a marmite one)

Flowers for Algernon by David Keyes
Candide by Voltaire
Both short but well worth reading. Especially Algernon.

[ASmallBunchofFlowers]

North and South by Mrs Gaskell

[NormalityBites]

I've read 64 of the list, I worked it out the other day on Facebook.

I also suggest:
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

[Nyx]

I've read 49 off the list.

I'd recommend David Copperfield, Heidi, the Oz books, all the Austin books; I like the What Katy Did series and the Avonlea ones (Anne of Green Gables - there's loads of them )

I could go on but it's mainly children's classics I have on my iphone and I know I really should stop re-reading them and read some 'proper' grown up books!

[Sarsaparilllla]

I've read 43 of that list.

I've recommend;

Beloved by Toni Morrisson
Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterstone

[TheFoosa]

Another vote for Diary of a Nobody - one of my favourites

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

A History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (Henry Fielding)

The Woman In White (Wilkie Collins) - also The Law & The Lady by him(two of the first detective stories ever written)

Second vote for Mary Barton (Elizabeth Gaskell)

A Room of One's Own (Virginia Woolf)

Sherlock Holmes - all the short stories

Canterbury Tales in modern translation? Can be v funny

[BelligerentGhoul]

I've read 69 on that list and tried reading about ten of the others and given up because they were imho crap - step forward Life Of Pi / Middlemarch / Catch 22 and a few more.

Deffo Jane Austen - if you haven't read any, I'd say start with P&P and maybe leave Mansfield Park until last.

The Woman In White and The Moonstone are both superb.

How about some Evelyn Waugh - A Handful Of Dust is v good and Brideshead Revisited has v good points although the Catholicism stuff bores me.

[BelligerentGhoul]

If you want children's classics:

Ballet Shoes
Charlotte Sometimes
Daddy Long Legs
A Little Princess