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

Oh, mustn’t forget G K Chesterton, Father Brown.

Midnight’s Children. I love Salman Rushdie, although some of his books are a bit too weird.

Has anyone seen the film of Jude The Obscure, with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet? God, it's grim.
PG Wodehouse is a god.

Goodness, I adore this book so much. I struggled to put it down as a teenager and I still don’t get why not everyone loves it! Nice to meet you!

The Age of Innocence

Please don't stop there with Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth is also wonderful. And Ethan Frome, although extremely bleak, is one of my favourite novels (although it probably only really qualifies as a novella).

Speaking of American female novelists, Carson McCullers is also very much worth reading, especially The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I am fond of sagas of families in decline. I haven't got around to Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, but I would particularly recommend (all translations from German/Italian):

Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

I agree with
Count of Monte Christo
Secret Garden
Rebecca

But I also have a few issues the English obsession about a handful of 19th century (& before) authors.

By all means read and enjoy them ... but most are not and have never been on my reading list.

Some (not all) should also move out of schools and be replaced with more contemporary literature. There is some great stuff out there that young people are missing out on... they are put off reading because of these old corpses.

All of Edith Wharton
Anna Karenina
Middlemarch
Northanger Abbey
grapes of wrath

All classics I have genuinely enjoyed and found quiet readable

Agree with a lot of the comments above.
I recently read Gulliver's Travels (for the first time( and really enjoyed it. Well written, very entertaining, and contains some surprisingly pertinent observations.
Also add Bulgakov's Master and Margarita as a great read.
Interested to see several people mention John Wyndham - I really like his novels and short stories but are they really 'great books' or 'classics'? Not sure I think of them in that way.

Any Human Heart - William Boyd

Moby Dick was a boring slog!

Someone else mentioned it earlier. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. It's very long but completely immerses you. I didn't enjoy the TV adaptation but the book was (imo) brilliant.

I think OP is referring to the classics...

I think OP is referring to the classics...

I don't think there is an agreed definition for that term. Are you setting a date before which something must have been published to be a "classic"? (I truly hate the word "classic", so I might be overreacting.)

To Kill a Mockingbird
Rebecca
1984
Lord of the Flies

The only "classics" I have ever enjoyed. Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion bored me to tears.

I think 2022 is a reasonable date to set, to be honest!

Agreed- I gave up about a third of the way through when I realised I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

Moby Dick was a boring slog!

Matter of opinion, like everything else in this thread. I loved Moby-Dick: the language is beautiful and the range of topics discussed is vast. The chapter, "Ahab and the Carpenter" is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in English.

Someone mentioned how The Grapes of Wrath alternates narrative chapters with descriptive/exploratory chapters, and that it's possible to read the story in half the time by only reading the narrative chapters. This is fine if all you're interested in is a story, but the other chapters are really interesting and, again, beautifully written. There are books with minimal story but masses of reflection (Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is an extreme example, but Moby-Dick is also an example, as are most of Joseph Conrad's novels) that are definitely worth reading but must be approached without expectation of a rip-roaring story.

@IdgieThreadgoodeIsMyHeroine - I have to admit to not having read the whole thread. Has Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café been nominated? Is 1987 early enough for a "classic"? (I haven't read the book so I don't know how closely it resembles the movie.)

One of the reasons Victorian novels were so long and ‘wordy’, was that publishers demanded novels long enough to publish in 3 volumes - as such they made more money for the commercial lending libraries, such as Mudie’s. IIRC even one volume cost around £1.50 to buy - obviously a lot then, so very few could afford to buy them.

Dickens apparently got fed up with the demands of publishers, and started his own magazines for serialising his own novels, and those of friends, inc. Wilkie Collins. One such mag cost IIRC two old pence a week, so was available to huge numbers. He was very commercially minded, and stuffed the mags with advertisements - they had a huge circulation, IIRC the cheapest mag sold 250k copies a week.

Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Woman In White’ first appeared in one such magazine, and was a massive, sensational success. The plot apparently caused a lot of frowns among the elite, since it featured a dastardly rogue who was not only titled, but British! Formerly such rogues in fiction had been dastardly foreigners!

The Woman In White has apparently never been out of print.

I found out much of this during an OU course on the 19thC novel.

But you will have no idea what is going to ‘last’ of novels published so recently.

I’m an academic who works on women’s writing of the early 20thc, and vast numbers of titles which were critically well-received, and topped the bestseller lists for long periods, by authors who had long and prolific careers and were very well-known, are now completely unheard of and long out of print. Some of this, obviously, is a gendered issue, but it’s difficult to predict what will achieve ‘classic’ status in the sense of being part of the canon, remembered, still read and taught etc.

Lovely thread @Viou ! Agree re Anna Karenina, thought it would be worthy but I just loved it – was so enamoured with Levin. And a dog narrates a bit, so wild!

If you can do short stories, I also loved Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. And Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace if you’re enjoying living half your life in the 19th century.

Previously mention in the thread is Lolita – agree, it’s incredible writing. I’ve never read a book where I felt so loathed by the narrator! (It’s no bad thing to feel like Humbert Humbert would sneer at you.)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis has some set pieces that are so, so funny, and the whole thing is written brilliantly.

@IsThisCluttered Should I try Ulysses? I’m so intimidated and yet every one of my Irish friends talks about reading it as if it was no more challenging than Take A Break.

You didn't need to read the whole thread- you just needed to read the post I quoted in my post, which nominated Lessons in Chemistry, written in 2022. Always useful to have a bit of context...

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone aside from me considers Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe a classic. You should read it though, it's excellent! The film is great too, but misses out a lot from the book (including Idgie and Ruth's lesbian relationship and the thoughts, feelings and motivations of all of the black characters).

I agree, but the OP was very obviously asking about books which are currently considered classics. If she was asking for general book recommendations, I'd have given her a much longer list!

I was loving this thread and it has reminded me of a few books I’ve been meaning to read so thank you OP. But god forbid you didn’t enjoy one of them, obviously you’re just an uneducated philistine that clearly wasn’t intelligent enough to appreciate the nuances and should get back to reading Jeffrey Archer 😂😂

I enjoy a lot of classic novels, but I often think ones that were considered a bit trashy/risque in their day can be more fun for a modern reader:

The Monk
Dangerous Liaisons
Lady Audley's Secret
Fanny Hill
Dracula

OF more modern classics, I love Stefan Zweig (Chess, Impatience of the Heart), Nabokov (especially Pale Fire), Orwell (perhaps avoid A Clergyman's Daughter), and one of my favourite novels ever is The Name of the Rose.