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).

Ooh, its making we hungry for a few spare reading hours:
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
Anglo Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson
The Bell by Iris Murdoch

Anything by Jane Austen, Vanity Fair by Thackeray, another vote for Madame Bovary. Also love Evelyn Waugh (The Loved One is one of my favourite books of all time). Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Also like Dickens. More recent 'classics' - I really like Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie) and some of the earlier Martin Amis. Oh, and Lawrence Durrell - the Alexandria Quartet.

I would also second P G Wodehouse - you can get an omnibus on amazon (The Mating Season, Code of the Woosters and Right Ho, Jeeves). They are beautifully written and very funny.

I liked Wives and Daughters, by Mrs Gaskell. As a teen I was really into Carson McCullers' books but not sure how I would react to them now (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye).

Daphne du Maurier - REbecca and My Cousin Rachel

Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

Wuthering HEights - Emily Bronte

Oscar Wilde - Importance of being Earnest.

Grapes of Wrath - John STeinbeck

and many more.........

Carson McCullers is another great Southern US female author of that era. The Member of the Wedding is great.

I also like The Master and Margarita, by Bulkagov.

And anything by Sherwood Anderson, but I expect I'm on my own there.

Oh, and The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings.

Jane Eyre

I've started buying my sister Everyman classics for her birthday and xmas - Jane Eyre was numero uno!

Another vote for Therese Raquin.

Also F Scott Fitzgerald Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby.

John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath.

oooh yes Anna Karenina

I do like a bit of vicarious adultery

Funnily enough I was just coming on here to recommend The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and then saw your comment, DG. I loved it, thought it compared very favourably with the other Brontes. Would also go for Middlemarch, and Wilkie Collins, and E.M. Forster....

Thanks Tamum. Mind you, I hate Middlemarch and wouldn't class Wilkie Collins as my favourite author either so maybe we like different things.....

No, I must try Anne Bronte soon.

Primo Levi - was just thinking I must read The Periodic Table again.

Oh, I just read (for the first time) The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Orczy) - if that counts as a classic. What glorious GeorgetteHeyeresque rubbish: everyone starts everything they say with "La!". (NB Georgette Heyer is rather fab.)

Oscar Wilde if you choose carefully - "Canterville Ghost" is wonderful, some of the other orientalist fantasy stuff is bosh.

Perhaps better avoided then :) I certainly wouldn't say Wilkie Collins was my favourite author, mind.

Especially Anne bronte's "tenant of wildfell hall". Superb.
Something I have read and loved, while not a classic (yet) is Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. Absolutely beautiful.
All of Austen - especially Pride and Prejudice, which still makes me laugh out loud.
Kate Chopin - The Awakening, a really beautiful novella.
I could go on and on - love reading!!
Oh, and Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge - not quite as depressing as Tess and Jude the Obscure.
And Thackery's "Vanity Fair"

Bink - The Scarlet Pimpernel is GREAT!!! A real romp. I wish I could find some more as it is just the first of many I believe.

On the heavyweights, War and Peace deserves its reputation (which not all of them do, to my mind). There is a bit about a young fatally wounded soldier whose experience of dying is his mind being taken over by music. It's unforgettable.

I agree with many of these. My favourites are Graham Green, Flaubert, Maupassant, Thomas Hardy, Primo Levi. Also The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Havel; Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year); Tle Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, A Sentimenla Journey by Laurence Stern.

You could also try browsing penguinclassics.co.uk

I think the only book I've ever been unable to get through was Tristram Shandy. I even made it through Joyce's Ulysses (by gritting my teeth and forcing myself), but just couldn't manage TS. Maybe time to try it again

I have to say that I HAD to read War and Peace as I studied Russian at uni, but must confess that I only read the peace parts and skipped the entire war bit as I found it so dull.

Moby Dick, too, nearly as good as its reputation promises. Even the cetology bits, since they're just bonkers.

Tristram Shandy was a fave of mine as a teenager. I wonder if I would have the patience now.

Used to love Gorky, too - My Childhood, My Universities etc.

Pushkin?

Nobody's said Henry James, have they? Portrait of a Lady? Or shiver shiver "Turn of the Screw"?

Having taken clerkKent's recommendation, here is what Penguin Classics says about My Childhood:

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky's closest friend and the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters and with the sensations of a curious and often frightened little boy. My Childhood, the first volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, was in part an act of exorcism. It describes a life begun in the raw, remembered with extraordinary charm and poignancy and without bitterness. Of all Gorky's books this is the one that made him 'the father of Russian literature'.

Go for it!

Would Colette come under this thread? I love the Claudine books. Sort of like saucy Enid Blyton when she's at school

Did anyone ever read those books set in pre-revolution Russia about Masha? Don't think they're actually classics but I remember reading them, all full of balls and palaces but I can't locate them on Amazon.