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).

I still love Jane Austin.

I also like Thomas Hardy, esp Tess and Return of the native.

This is wonderful. I am making a list from this site. I think I will start with wilkie collins as he came up so often from people and I have never heard of him. I love finding undiscovered (at least by me ) gems. I think this list should carry me over hte next year for sure. Thanks and keep them comming.

agree with most of these on here favourites are jane eyre, emma, wilkie collins the moonstone, tom jones, age of innocence and henry james ghost stories

If you get into Wilkie Collins, there are some lesser known ones that are rather fabulous (he churned them out, you know) like Poor Miss Finch, which is about the love of two identical twins for a blind girl. (Interestingly (well, interestingly to me at the time when I was contemplating doing a PhD on him), though, the only really striking ones - Woman in White and the Moonstone - are the ones with multiple narrators.)

With bink - I agree that War and Peace really is one of the best novels ever written. It is full of surprises.
Someone else mentioned Mrs Gaskell - she is one of my "read everything" novelists, I have never read a bad one. Mrs Humphry Ward is less well-known these days but Helbeck of Bannisdale is a really stirring Victorian romance and well worth tracking down
Also agree with those who rate Jane Eyre, George Orwell, Madame Bovary and Therese Raquin.
Robert Graves, whether writing original fiction (Wife to Mr Milton is my favourite of his less well-known works) or translating, is hard to beat, and his poetry is wonderful too.
For me the modern classics are
Donna Tartt's The Secret History
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day
and all of Robertson Davies

I know that it is strictly speaking autobiography but one of my favourite repeat reads is Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth.

And, again, non-fiction but important history classics are The Paston Letters, set during the Wars of the Roses, and Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie's Montaillou (daily life in a 12th century French mountain village recorded in inquisition court papers, utterly compelling and really funny in places). Both in Penguin I think.

How are you with Brontes? Two of my favourite novels from school and university are Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall last year, and fell in love with it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Pretty much says it all.

some already mentioned...but among my faves, so here goes:

orlando - woolf
wide sargasso sea - jean rhys - if you like this, read good morning, midnight
clarissa - richardson (looong, but i got hooked by it)
evelina - burney
moll flanders - defoe
remains of the day - ishiguro
new york trilogy - paul auster

interesting to see therese raquin mentioned a few times - does anyone know mauriac's therese desqueyroux?

agree with posters that enjoyed tenant of wildfell hall - anne undeservedly neglected imo.

ooh yes roosmum I have read mauriac - that one and Le Noeud de Viperes

Orlando is fab, also A Handful of Dust

cracking thread, am off to get Samuel Butler a.s.a.p.

hiya pruni...nice one
read it a while back, but still vividly remember it, so it must be pretty good.

i have a stash of C18th recommendations, if anyone's leaning that way.

great thread!

after I finish here I log onto the library website and start ordering, this is great. I can't wait to start. If I can add to my own list, alot mentioned canadian author margaret atwood, if you liked her, try Margaget Laurence, also canadian. She only wrote 5 or 6 books then committed suicide but they were really really moving. My favorite is " A Jest of God".

Was just thinking of Noeud de Viperes by Mauriac today, and surprisingly fondly, considering it was the book I had to talk about in my French A Level Oral!

Vanity Fair is fab, very witty.

I hate these threads. They make me realise there are just too many books I want to read and will never, ever have time to. Especially as people keep writing new ones, damn them.

yeeees absolutely SL. In fact I occasionally get overwhelmed by a sense of hopeless in libraries/bookshops, thinking that there just isn't time to read all the good books out there

Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibilty
Persuasion
Vanity Fair
Our Mutual Friend
Wives and Daughters
North and South
Woman in White
The Moonstone
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
Jane Eyre

I just discovered Wilkie Collins a few months ago and have just finished reading 7 of his books in a row.Unputdownable was Armadale,the Moonstone,the woman in white and no name.I hadn't heard of Poor Miss Finch until someone mentioned it here just now and I will be on the search for it straight away.

I ordered from the library the moonstone and therese Raquin. That will get me started. Can't wait until they come in. I have the opposite reaction to too many books, because so many of my favorite authors are dead, once I have read them all, what do I do. I panicked in my 20's about this. Now in my 40's and as you can see, there are so many undiscovered gems I will never read them all. Also, it's great to reread a book I haven't read in 20 years. I loved Tenant of wildfell hall. I read Shirley over christmas however and really didn't like it which bothered me as I usually love the bronte's.

Great thread,great thread.
Would second the Zola recommendations-anything by him is brilliant.
George Orwell too. My faves are 'Keep the aspidistra flying' and 'On the road to Wigan Pier'
Also 'Of Human Bondage' Somerset Maugham.
(Protagonist has club foot and read it when I lived in France,next to an Algerian scientist with a club foot,funnily enough.)

Speaking of North Africa, L'etranger (The Stranger) by Camus is a cracking little read.

Am loving this thread. Had made me want to re-read Madame Bovary (another one featuring a club foot, oddly enough) and many others.

Lots of French recommendations here, so I thought I'd add a few Italian ones...

Boccaccio's Decameron is worth dipping into for a laugh. 100 stories, so you don't necessarily have to read them all. Some very funny/rude too.

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is fun too - long and tortuous and mad and fantastic and wonderful.

Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno (variously translated as Confessions of Zeno or Zeno's Conscience) is very good.

OK, so my italics didn't work... sorry!