What great books are actually worth reading?

[Viou]

Just that, so many “great” books are dull and esoteric.

But which did you actually enjoy?

I personally loved Love In The Time of Cholera and Anna Karenina

You?

I want to read more

Lessons in chemistry is one of my all time Favourites.

Middlemarch

North and South

All the Brontes and Austen. Dickens too, although he goes on a bit.

Pride and Prejudice is also my comfort book

Anything by Dostoevsky for starters, man was a genius way ahead of his time.

Lolita is an uncomfortable read but truly brilliant.

Giovanni’s Room, Post Office, The Plague.

Just avoid Dickens and Jane Austen and you’ll be fine.

Jane Eyre
The Mill on the Floss
Anne of Green Gables
A Christmas Carol

War and Peace!
Honestly, if you enjoyed Anna Karenina you will enjoy W&P. It is long but it is really enjoyable and has unforgettable characters.
If it helps, there is a Substack called Footnotes and Tangents that does a read along and is full of notes.
Actually, how could I forget, there was also a Mumsnet read along thread that you can still access!

"1984" by George Orwell?

I do agree with you: I sometimes think when reading 19th-century literature that the author really needed a good editor who would take their blue pencil to whole pages, if not chapter! Dickens, Tolstoy...

Having said that, "A Tale of Two Cities" is gripping once they actually get to France (the first third is a bit slow and turgid).

A great alternative to Dickens, and much underrated in my opinion, is "The Odd Women" by George Gissing.

I don’t think ‘so many’ great books are dull and esoteric at all! Which ones are you thinking of? The only one that comes to mind as genuinely dull and esoteric is George Eliot’s Romola, which is nearly unbearable, even when I read it in my teens, full of enthusiasm from Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss.

Vanity Fair - my all-time favourite book

Great novels are not "esoteric. They are about subtle, difficult, complex and multilayered philosophical or sociological or psychological matters, that speak to millions over time. They absolutely were never for a small group of aficionados. That they have become so is largely because we have other forms of entertainment, have lost the skill of reading well, and our society now tries to avoid looking at those difficult issues, such as inequality (Dickens), what it is to be human (Russian novelists), the emergence of industrial power (Mrs Gaskell), the decline of traditional rural society (Hardy).
That's why they are "great".

What they are not, is a "rollicking good read", or "easy reading". Look elsewhere for that.

Top thread, making notes. I’ll add -

The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver (I know it doesn’t always get listed on the more traditional great literature lists).

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Great Expectations has wonderful characterisation and some excellent set pieces.
Persuasion is truly romantic.
Candide is very funny.
Lolita is a fabulous piece of characterisation through voice. So clever (“Picnic, lightning.”).
Northanger Abbey is a cracking pisstake.
Cold Comfort Farm is hilarious satire.
Middlemarch is very dense and involving.

I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word 'esoteric'.

Sometimes they are ‘rollicking’! I think Dickens (though am not an enormous Dickens fan) is pretty broadly-appealing, and had huge mass appeal in his lifetime, like hugely popular tv shows today, but where you had to wait, old-school, for the next episode to air. Likewise Jane Eyre was a big popular success.

And there’s a lot of rollicking in slightly earlier stuff like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, or Smollett.

I love Moby Dick. It manages to be both about nineteenth century whaling - you can almost taste the salty air - and the human condition. I’m usually quite severe on books with no female characters but this is so absorbing and all-encompassing that it doesn’t seem to matter.
I know this is quite a niche view! - and I wonder if people who don’t like it are expecting a rollicking yarn and are disappointed to find it’s more meditative and descriptive.

@LadyHester Moby Dick is sitting forlornly in my to read pile - thanks for some encouragement to get to it!

Anthony Trollope is very readable for a 19th century novelist, The Palliser novels, Barchester Chronicles, and also The Way We Live Now and He Knew He Was Right.

Also Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence is great.

East of Eden!

Def agree with 1984, everyone should read. Also, Animal Farm. I really like all of his books, just blow your mind and very relevant still.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck - fantastic.

Frankenstein - I love that book and Jane Eyre

I’m halfway through The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas & loving it.

Mary Barton by Mrs Gaskell has vivid characters and is a real page turner.

Definitely not rollicking but weirdly compulsive. Especially all the endless passages about ambergris, whale oil, blubber processing etc.

Seconding Edith Wharton — start with The Age of Innocence or for black comic social satire, The Custom of the Country? Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth are brilliant but glum.

Crime and Punishment is an absolute banger. Love it.