For those who read the classics-recommend your fav?

[christie1]

I read many of the classics over the years but fell off (strangely around the time I had kids). I get great book recommendations here, can you give me some suggestions of classics. I have read alot of the standard ones-dickens, george elliot, thomas hardy,jane austin, the brontes but can you suggest some I should try that you just loved? It doesn't have to be victorian, just a really good read, I can feel my brain comming back again and longing for something good to read after years of mysteries and mommy lit(not knocking them, just want to go back to an old love, the classics).

Not 'classic' literature - but A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. I love all the authors you mention and I adoed this book - it's also satisfyingly LONG!

Two of my favourites would be Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and also Therese Raquin by Emile Zola.

anything by Capote or Fitzgerald
Wilkie collins Woman in white
Flaubert Madame Bovary
the Odyssey
Goodbye to all that - graves
Brideshead revisited
Katherine Mansfield collected stories

Ghost stories by M R James
Sherlock Holmes - conan doyle

(I don't like a lot of modern fiction )

I second Madame Bovary
Candide
Brave New World
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead, The Loved One, Scoop, etc
Forster: Room with a View (what a treat :)), Maurice etc
Chekhov short stories
Crime and Punishment
Three Men in a Boat

Or some superb modern writers:

John Irving
Robertson Davies
Patrick Suskind
Margaret Atwood
Anne Tyler

Ovid - Metamorphoses - is surprisingly good (but I suppose it depends on the translation).
Rattles along nicely and v perceptive

Ovid's erotic poems are quite good too :)

George Eliot - Middlemarch especially but any onf them
George Orwell
Wilkie Collins the Woman in White
anything by Dylan Thomas

speaking of MR James, can anyone with paypal ship me a copy please and I'll pay for it. I couldn't face reading "Whistle and I'll Come Running" and I feel up to in now.

Therese Raquin - Zola
Dracula - Bram Stoker
to answer OP

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

oh there you are!!! I was just thinking about you the other day, wondered if you'd moved back home. How are you?

Doing well, thanks! How are you and your lovely boys? Yes, I'm here, but have lost your email, m'dear.

Lockets, I love To Kill a Mockingbird, too.

Any Dickens

Thanks to Suzywong I have recently discovered the joys of Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White was unputdownable. Just about to start on Dracula, also on her recommendation. So basically whatever Suzy says I slavishly follow

Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov are all brilliant.

P G Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and my all time favourite, The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, which I re-read at least once a year.

I second Margaret Atwood - an astonishing writer.

And Bernice Rubens - I love her!

God yes George Orwell is a fantastic writer

Howards End (Forster)
A Handful of Dust (Waugh - sends shivers down my spine just thinking of it)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)

A seriously underrated book, maybe because of the user-unfriendly title is 'The Way of all Flesh' by Samuel Butler. It sounds as if it should be a diatribe against the wickedness of humankind, but is actually a largely autobiographical story, desribing how the son frees himself from the rigid Victorian family ruled by a hypocritical clergyman father. It's written with a really wicked tongue-in-cheek irony (think Jane Austen, but much more spiky).

Vvv highly recommended.

Mine have been said but just to second -

3 men in a boat (and 3 men in a bummel the sequel)
Room with a view and any other Forster
Rebecca
Great Gatsby

any graham greene (our man in havana and brighton rock are good ones to start with)
daphne du maurier's Rebecca
The Odyssey (it's a fantastic read)

One of my all time favourite books is Brideshead Revisited. Also love Austen, the Brontes (though I have never read Anne Bronte - anyone comment on how she compares with the others?), even a bit of Hardy although most Victorian novelists leave me cold (Dickens, Thackeray, Elliot - have never managed to finish a single one of their novels!!) Anthony Trollope is OK though.

If you like adventure, Robert Louis Stevenson is good. Or the Waverley novels?

Oh, if we are going for 2oth cnetury, then definitely Daphne du Maurier and Graham Greene and other Evelyn Waugh novels. Also Robert Graves, Antonia White, John Mortimer (never read Rumpole though - the others), Mary Renault....I had better stop now!