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Original poster

Genuine favourite genuine literary classic?

82 replies

ElizabethX · 27/07/2012 14:55

Ok what genuine pukka classic work of literature do you genuinely love and repeatedly re-read?

For me there is The Great Gatsby, The Turn of the Screw and Wuthering Heights. Dracula maybe although the theme has been so overdone since it feels a bit tarnished.

I'd like to say I love Jane Eyre and Dickens and what not but although I've got through lots of these I can't say I as rapt throughout.

What are yours?

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DilysPrice · 21/08/2012 20:50

Without straying into the 20th century
All of Austen
Vanity Fair
Tristram Shandy
Don Juan (along with all Byron's shorter poems)
Dracula
The Diary of a Nobody
Flatland
Les Liaisons Dangereux
Sherlock Holmes (like but don't love)

I'm surprised to see no Trollope fans creeping out if the woodwork - surely there must be some (I've never tried Barsetshire but I know many people swear by it).

MidnightKnitter · 21/08/2012 18:45

Moll Flanders
Day of The Triffids (not sure it's old enough)
White Fang
Lady Chatterly (and yes i know Lawrence was an arse)
lots by HP Lovecraft
The Picture Of Dorian grey
P&p
Dracula

Chubfuddler · 20/08/2012 22:54

Another vote for Brideshead Revisited. Middle march is probably the greatest novel I have ever read, and I love it but for sheer pleasure Brideshead cannot be beaten.

DaPrincessBride · 20/08/2012 22:46

Anna Karenina Smile

tiggersreturn · 20/08/2012 22:45

The 3 Musketeers. I love Kipling and will read any from Stalky & Co (very funny) to the Indian ones - try the jungle book stories.

Vagaceratops · 18/08/2012 08:35

Crime and punishment.

Kahu · 17/08/2012 04:06

Sunset Song - Lewis Grassic Gibbon & To Kill A Mockingbird, they have both travelled with me through life.

Keep meaning to reread Madame Bovary now that I am a SAHM Grin

LemonOCOGTurd · 17/08/2012 03:50

A Room With a View

valiumredhead · 16/08/2012 17:23

Rebecca by DDM - have lost count of the number of times I have read it.

PetiteRaleuse · 15/08/2012 15:41

The Woman in White is my favourite classic novel. The Moonstone, also by Wilkie Collins, is pretty fab too. Rebecca is a second favourite and I only just read Jamaica Inn (also by Daphne du Maurier) and will be re-reading again soon.

Have read Austen and Brontë books and enjoyed them, but not as much as the above. With the excpetion of Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. LOVED that one.

clemetteattlee · 15/08/2012 15:38

Most favourite: Vanity Fair.

Colyngbourne · 15/08/2012 15:36

Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights and Mansfield Park

Parade's End, and The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

The Cloister & the Hearth - Charles Reade
Lilith - George MacDonald

SerenaJoy · 15/08/2012 14:18

In no particular order:

Great Expectations
Little Women
Rebecca
Not sure if this qualifies as a classic but The Handmaid's Tale - love love love Margaret Atwood.

Also love The Secret History thepeanutsparent but I've only read it once - plan to do so again soon.

NicholasTeakozy · 13/08/2012 13:10

East Of Eden is my absolute favourite. Not sure it qualifies as a classic though.

ColourMeWithChaos · 13/08/2012 12:26

In no special order:

Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Emma
Bleak House
Great Expectations
Grapes of Wrath

Are we allowed plays too?

If so:

A Streetcar Named Desire "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" [blub]
All My Sons/A View from the Bridge/The Crucible
All of Shakespeare's tragedies - particularly Hamlet and Macbeth

Selky · 13/08/2012 12:21

Jamaica Inn

Brave New World

The Barchester Chronicles

OhDearNigel · 13/08/2012 12:17

If I had to pick 5:

Rebecca
Madame Bovary
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
and a toss up between Emma & Jane Eyre

YouBloodyWolf · 07/08/2012 20:49

He wasn't taking the piss out of calculus though, he was taking the piss out Liebnizian optimism which, to my uneducated ear, has always sounded a lot like clever-clever philosophical bollocks that deserved to have the piss taken out of it by a rationalist.

Original poster
ElizabethX · 07/08/2012 09:39

Candide pisses me off. The target of it is Leibnitz, who invented calculus. By any reckoning that's a huge accomplishment up there with Sir Isaac Newton (who invented it in parallel). Meanwhile there's clever-clever little Voltaire whose entire achievement consists of taking the piss out of someone he didn't understand because he was a liberal arts fuck whereas Leibnitz was a scientist.

OP posts:
YouBloodyWolf · 07/08/2012 04:52

Candide by Voltaire. I first read it in my teens and must have replaced it half a dozen times because I keep giving it away.

Don't know if it counts but Factotum by Charles Bukowski really speaks to me. I love most of his stuff, but Factotum is the one I go back to.

I'm gonna include Chandler, too. If his sheer writing skill doesn't put him in the literary classics club then it's a club I want nothing to do with!

MrsApplepants · 07/08/2012 00:33

Esther Waters, Jane Eyre, Dracula

ladymariner · 07/08/2012 00:06

Wuthering Heights. Read it first as a hormonal teenager and dreamt of someone loving me like Heathcliffe...... Hmm

janesnowdon1 · 06/08/2012 11:36

The Netherworld by George Gissing(and anything by Gissing - most under rated writer ever)
l'Assomoir- Emile Zola
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky-Patrick Hamilton
Of Human Bondage- Somerset Maugham (especially from Chapter 51 where the foul Mildred appears)

ladyintheradiator · 03/08/2012 22:36

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

cartimandua · 03/08/2012 22:32

I find I don't read much literary fiction at all these days, but re-read Austen every year, plus Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Then all my Pratchetts and all my Heyers and the Lymond saga.

But my favourite is Wind in the Willows. Oh, poop-poop!