I want to read classic or important books

[PointOfTipping]

I would really like to start reading important books- not sure how much time I'm going to have to do it so think realistically I want to compile a list of 10 and aim to do them this year. I'd be happy to be honest if I manage at least five.

The only one I have on my list so far is War and Peace. I love literature yet feel like I don't know anything about significant books - would anyone like to nominate any titles?

The Count of Monte Cristo and A Suitable Boy are both great but buy on Kindle if possible as they’re huge

My selection would be;
Great Expectations (or David Copperfield, but I downloaded this free on my kindle, and only made it halfway through, so prefer GE)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Middlemarch
Far from the Madding Crowd

I struggle with the Russians - dense and too many names for each character - but The Master And Margarita was great. If you want one of the French classics I’d choose either Le Grand Meaulnes or Mme Bovary rather than Victor Hugo stuff.

The Silence of The Girls and Wolf Hall are two of the best books so far this century, in my opinion, so I’d definitely endorse them.

I’d throw in a poetry collection - The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. Moving, funny, silly and serious one after another.

Like this thread! It has inspired me to get reading again! Have got 1984 in my garage somewhere so will dig it out. Also started wuthering heights a few weeks ago but only read a chapter so will go back to that. Only book I refuse to read is Catch 22! Had to do it for A Level, read half of it and then realised I could get it on audio book - 17 tapes!!! Needless to say I slept through most of it and still don't know how it finished, found it a struggle!

Great Expectations

Grate Expectations ? Also by Edmund Wells

If you’re after a break from fiction OP, I’ve been reading Sapiens recently. Haven’t quite finished it yet but so far it has blown my mind and changed how I’m thinking about our time on the planet. It’s a ‘brief’ history of humankind. An important book if you ask me! Happy reading.

Haven't read the whole thread but The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster is a fantastic short story. Incredible considering it was written so long ago. One for the WhatsApp addicts!

Other recommendations :
George Orwell - I'd start with 1984
Kurt Vonnegut -I like slaughterhouse 5
Margaret Atwood -any
Germaine Greer - I'd start with female eunuch

I really like Alain de Botton's writing, there are some lovely essays on his website.

I read Existentialism is a humanism by Sartre at University and it has really stuck with me. Also last days of socrates by plato I got on well with.

I can't get on with DH Lawrence, much rather reread a Room with a view instead.

Bill Bryson's are a nice relaxing meander but you actually learn stuff!

For balance I make sure to read loads of trash too!

@PointOfTipping I have many many many books I would like to recomend but I'm not going to as I would like to join the read along, and I'd like to use the opportunity to read some things which I haven't read before. I am happy to start with 1984, I have read that before but not since I was about 10 and I know my recall of the novel has been skewed by adaptations and references over the years.

I will however quit this new book club-y read along thing immediately if we going to have to read Great Expectations. Dickens was an incredible story teller and simply marvellous at character cenception and development but his actual novels suffer from the way in which they were published (paid per word/column inch and both written and published as serials) so they have incredibly slow and at time turgid pace and excessively long passages of description. Great Expectations is the only book I have ever actively thrown across a room and I was driven to that by a 3 page description of a home when the front door was opened to a guest right down to the design of the floral pattern on the curtains the of window in the pantry which was visible through the door to the hall left ajar. Just recollecting this now is making me ragey.

Travels with my Aunt - (Green)

100 Years of Solitude / Love in the time of Cholera (Marquez)

Sabbaths Theatre (Roth)

Possession (Byatt)

The Rabbit series (Updike)

Beyond Black (Mantel)

A Brief History of seven killings (James)

Silas Marner (Elliot)

Frankenstein (Shelley) - this was the first book I started with when trying to read through 1001 books to read before you die and really enjoyed it - enjoy!

On reflection I will make one recommendation as I've not seen it mentioned at all.
If you're not into readings essays or non-fiction but would like to broaden your horizons then Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder is as excellent an introduction to the clasisical philosophers as you could wish for.

Here's my list, quite a long time line and a wide range of styles
The Color Purple ~ Alice Walker
Tess of the d'Urbervilles ~ Hardy
Great Expectations or David Copperfield ~ Dickens
Middlemarch ~ George Eliot
The Woman in White ~ Wilkie Collins
This Thing of Darkness ~ Harry Thompson
A Confederacy of Dunces ~ John Kennedy Toole
Woolf Hall ~ Hilary Mantel
Mrs Dalloway ~ Woolf
Midnight's Children ~ Salman Rushdie

And an honourable mention to Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.

If experiencing a different sense of time and place appeal to you I can recommend

• Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day is my favourite book)
• Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami *Yoko Ogawa - especially The Housekeeper and the Professor

Also, Fair Stood the Wind for France by HE Bates. It's beautiful.

Anyone been put off things they had to study at school? Perhaps The MIll on the Floss is a good book, but I only have horrible memories of it, torturing me all of the summer holidays between lower and upper sixth.

Anyone suggested Brighton Rock? I only read it last year (having been put off Graham Greene at A Level as well!) and it was brilliant . Really menacing.

Anyone been put off things they had to study at school?

I take it you missed my critique of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ?

Anyone been put off things they had to study at school?^
^
Far from the madding crowd. I got an A at a level on it but remember nothing.

And The Hobbit. We got halfway through and the teacher gave up. She actually said, "I've decided to move to another book because this is awful"

Jux I’m autistic! Haven’t come across the book though so will purchase it and read. Thank you! 💐

Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith - short, wonderfully well observed, very, very funny. I never tire of it.

Second the recommendations for Saki and P. G. Wodehouse.

My favourite Dickens novels are Bleak House and Little Dorrit. I also like Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend.

Persuasion is my favourite Jane Austen novel, followed by Mansfield Park. (Fair warning, most people seem to like MP the least of all Jane Austen's novels!)

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

South Riding by Winifred Holtby - a marvellous novel from the mid 1930s. Would probably be my Desert Island book.

To follow on from Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - written from the perspective of the first Mrs Rochester

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell - 12 volume novel sequence. I've read it several times. The first time, I enjoyed vol. 1 but I wasn't fully hooked until vol. 3 - it was worth it. Widmerpool, one of the main characters, is wonderfully awful.

A Perfect Spy or The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John Le Carre

Sorry, I liked The tenant of Wildfell Hall and it’s far more feminist than Eyre.
May I also recommend Toni Morrison.

I applaud many of the suggestions here - not sure that some of them count as 'classics' or 'important' but someone mentioned Bram Stoker's Dracula. Which is - arguably - 'important' in that it has helped shape a lot of popular culture but it's a fecking awful book! Stoker was a dreadful writer.

Sorry, I liked The tenant of Wildfell Hall and it’s far more feminist than Eyre.

As a snapshot of the society in which it was written it is unique, and deserves recognition alongside Dickens.

As a good read, it fails miserably. There's a reason why it's "Emily, Charlotte and the other one". When I started reading it, I'd already cleared out my DMs bookshelves, and most of the local library, taking in Austen, the other Brontes, Shelly, Dickens and fragments of Dante and Chaucer. It bored me rigid. It may be an important book. But is it well written ? The Oscar test .

@Longtalljosie - I was also going to recommend the Count of Monte Cristo - it's such a good read -very addictive. But it is quite long.

Middlemarch

@bluejayblue - totally agree on loads of Nevil Shute's books. They're amazing! 'A Town Like Alice' and 'Pied Piper' are thrilling reads but the love stories in them are also really really beautiful.

Gerald Durrell's 'My Family and Other Animals' is a classic - it's hilarious! (see username!)

I also second reading some of the Sherlock Holmes stories - especially some of the shorter ones - they're great for a quick fun story.

If you want something easy to start with I loved Around the world in 80 days.

I've read most of Orwell but my favourite is Down and out in Paris and London.

I also love Jane Eyre, it's the only Bronte work I've managed to finish.