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

I have a degree in English literature and I firmly believe that it’s perfectly possible for a novel to cover all those things and be ‘a good read’.

In fact, I would argue (and did argue in academic essays) that if it can’t manage to do both, it isn’t a ‘great novel’.

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)

Modern literature really does not avoid difficult issues, at all. Thousands of contemporary writers are confronting those issues, and many more, in very accessible and readable literary fiction, and genre fiction too.

In answer to your question, OP, I think it’s always going to be a matter of personal taste. I think Bleak House is a cracking good read, but I’m sure plenty of people, perfectly reasonably, find it turgid and dull. And Jane Austen is probably one the most popular ‘classic’ novelists that people still read for pleasure, but I find her pretty tedious.

I’m not the biggest fan of 18th/19th century novelists in general, but I would say my favourite classics of that period are:

Dracula
Frankenstein
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Bleak House
A Tale Of Two Cities
Madame Bovary
The Turn Of The Screw
North And South

Among my favourite modern classics are:

All Orwell’s novels
All Camus’s novels
The Bell Jar
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Brideshead Revisited
The Great Gatsby
The Grapes of Wrath
The Sun Also Rises
To Kill A Mockingbird

Middlemarch is a fine example of a novel that should have been half its length.

Maybe we should have a list of classics we hate!
Not all books are for everyone that's for sure. Jekyll and Hyde for example, Mrs Stevenson made him throw it on the fire, she said it was rubbish and she was right. Unfortunately he rewrote it.
They made us read Hard Times for A level, I think to punish us. Our English teacher said its only positive attribute she could think of was that it was much shorter than Bleak House and Little Dorit. To be fair to Dickens, Christmas Carol has inspired some awesome versions like the Muppet one and Catherine Tate's one. And he was great in Dr Who.

Maybe we should have a list of classics we hate!

@Notgoodatpoetrybutgreatatlit Robinson Crusoe. SO TEDIOUS.

Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas. Any Jane Austen. Lord of the Rings - Tolkien. Dracula, Bram Stoker. Madame Bovary (can’t remember the author). Going to check other recommendations for inspiration when I am not supposed to be working.

Yes, I totally agree with including the author John Wyndham.
However I would include his book ‘The Chrysalids’.
Often it is the books you read in adolescence, (and through to mid teens) that present you with new concepts and lead you away from previously accepted and unquestioned themes.
I went to a religious base school, and it gave voice to previously unexpressed disquiet about how harmful controlling and unchallenged religious dogma can be.

@KreedKafer
Ooh you have an English degree and wrote "academic essays" on the subject. I must stand corrected.
anythinginapinch PhD Eng Lit.

I love down and out in London and Paris.

Also whoever said that Pride and Prejudice was their comfort blanket, I reread it to my MIL when she was on palliative care. I don’t know why but it felt like the natural thing to do in the small hours sat holding her hand. So it has a special place in my heart.

I also love Little Women and Peter Pan.

Jane Eyre

A Suitable Boy by Virkram Seth
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
In the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

It is! And I'm just now seeing the autocorrect.

Ditto to many of those already mentioned, but I’d add Three Men In A Boat - a truly hilarious classic.

@KimberleyClark , ditto to the Trollope novels, esp. the Barchester and Palliser series, and The Way We Live Now.

The Three Musketeers. Turgid, tedious drivel. The real history of the time and the real people Dumas smears are far more interesting and engaging!

My favourite classic novel is Barchester Towers, though I’ll never love it as much as the series. Nigel Hawthorne, Alan Rickman, Getaldine McEwan - love it to bits.

Norwegian Wood by Murakami
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald
Wolf Hall by Mantel
Beloved by Morrison
The Colour Purple by Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee
Lolita by Nabokov
Heart of Darkness by Conrad
The Bell Jar by Plath
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
Middlemarch by Eliot
A Passage to India by Forster
Jane Eyre
Midnight's Children by Rushdie
The Trial by Kafka

What’s needed is a ‘rotten tomatoes’ for books. A critics score and a readers score.

Just love Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Have you read Julia by Sandra Newman? Reimagines it all from her point of view and somehow it’s much softer. An interesting counterpoint, I thought. She is so much better adapted than Winston Smith, and the world seems more possible to survive than in 1984.

The Raj Quartet - Paul Scott.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Wuthering Heights
The Woman in White
Madame Bovary

Thinking something is not an assertion; I stand by my original comment.

Not yet considered to be in the pantheon.

Yes the poisonwood bible is a great book and also Barbara Kingsolvers more recent Demon Cooperhead

Jane Austen (my favourite character is Mrs Bennett from P&P)

I have read a few by Thackery and enjoyed them.

Fielding - goes on a bit but the stories are good and funny.

Hardy - Jude The Obscure is my favourite.

Dickens - he is very good at characterisations. I feel like I know lots of his characters in real life.

James Michener. Very well researched books. They follow the history of an area through the generations. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed them.

Another one who loves Tess of the D'urbervilles and Vanity Fair.

A brilliant and much needed reminder, thanks for this.