Genuine favourite genuine literary classic?

[ElizabethX]

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?

Love Catch 22 too, with this cover - 4.bp.blogspot.com/-LkyvKcQhHhw/Tepbun4WJPI/AAAAAAAABkk/DDcGJYPNUYc/s640/catch22.jpg - book has fallen apart now so dh bought me a poster of it for Christmas.

But for an older classic: Vanity Fair. Gets funnier every time I read it.

I like your copy! <a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?q=catch-22&num=10&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=558&tbm=isch&tbnid=znrUoshxIXPy2M:&imgrefurl=rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/12/catch-22.html&docid=mgODfDZUZEpKYM&imgurl=www.ucl.ac.uk/conservation-c-22/images/catch22&w=311&h=500&ei=i6sVUPa-Asmu0QWfjYDADQ&zoom=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">This is mine. I think yours is older though.

1/The Count of Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas.
2/ The Rougon-Macquart by Emile Zola (20 volumes, but any will do)
3/Anything by Guy de Maupassant.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Then in no special order
Middlemarch
Little Dorrit
Count of Monte Christo
Brideshead

Persuasion - 'You pierce my soul' [swoon]

Middlemarch, I am in love with Will Ladislaw [swoons again]

Ah yes I'm also in love with Ladislaw, but have never recovered from Marcus in "Eagle of the Ninth" whom I first met when I was about nine!! As for Cromwell in "Wolf Hall".....

I was deeply impressed by Middlemarch and its portrayal of how people fool themselves into marriages, but in all honesty, I'm not sure I'd undertake another reading.

I happily reread Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Dracula, the Woman in White.

I absolutely love Hard Times and David Copperfield. They are Dickens' best IMO.

Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

The Mayor of Casterbridge.

The best modern classics are easily the Grapes of Wrath and Empire of the Sun. My life would be poorer if I had never read them.

Mansfield Park, unquestionably.

Jane Eyre
Vile Bodies

Although have just finished War and Peace and enjoyed it enormously except the essays on human nature, chaos, fate and the futility of historicism so we shall see how that bears re-reading.

Persuasion, Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye.

Oh, and of course 50 Shades of Grey.

Does it have to be a novel? I don't think I'm great with the 'classic' novels though maybe if you include more recent classics like AS Byatt's Possession?

But if you'll let me have poems, I re-read T S Eliot's stuff a lot, especially Ash Wednesday and The Waste Land, and Pound's Cantos (to dip into, not to read through), and Shakespeare's sonnets, and Hopkins, and Sylvia Plath. And H.D.s Trilogy poems.

I re-read Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Pericles as well, I love them.

I am really shamed that list doesn't include more women. That's me, not them!

Um I don't re-read it all the time but Moby Dick is definatley my favourite book.. Followed by The Secret History.

Pride and Prejudice and Little Women. They're just lovely to read especially when I'm feeling lazy and to want to read something predictable, where I know what is going to happen.

I reread To Kill a Mocking Bird again and again as a teenager. Read it again recently because of the anniversary of its publication and thought it was really well structured but I don't know if I got any more out of it than I did as a teenager. But that can be true of Austen as well, especially the lighter novels like Pride and Prejudice. Persuasion or Emma reward rereading more.

I don't generally reread books much but am getting to the stage where I think I should go back to some of classics I read in my 20s. I remember loving Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights so they would have to be top of the list. Wilkie Collins is very enjoyable as well and I love his complex female leads.

Oh, and PG Wodehouse is the ultimate comfort reading.

I absolutely love Pride and Prejudice. I also love the Edith Wharton books that I have read. Age of Innocence was just an amazing love story. She has such a lovely writing style.

Three Men in a Boat

Another vote for Three Men in a Boat. Remarkable how the humour still works now, for me at least.

Pride and Prejudice. I've read it about a dozen times and always look forward to reading it again. Whereas with most classic novels, once I've read them once, even if I've enjoyed them, I'm quite happy not to return to them.

But special menshes for Jane Eyre and Persuasion.

A Tale Of Two Cities
Little Dorritt
Pride and Prejudice
Madame Bovary

The Three Musketeers

Frenchman's Creek

Jane Eyre

Persuasion

Beloved