Classics recommendation

[lemonbiscuit]

I'm thinking of reading one of the classics on holiday for a change. What would you recommend? ideally nothing too depressing. I've read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights plus all of the Thomas Hardy novels (a long time ago!) Suggestions welcomed please.

Brave New World
Catcher in the Rye
Grapes of wrath

OMG On The Beach- most depressing book ever. Loved it though......

I have read Dracula and Frankenstein this year which I have loved, they are not very long though.

I also loved Lady Chatterley's Lover and enjoyed Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

Persuasion is my absolute favourite Austen.

Middlemarch
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
Madame Bovary
Balzac (forgotten names)
Dorothy Whipple - SO SO SO GOOD

Get some Dorothy's for a holiday. You'll spend it weeping, but in a good way.

Definitely anything by John Steinbeck or George Orwell or Somerset Maugham.

Or how about Edith Wharton? I loved House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence.

Gone with the Wind. It's epic :)

Little Women & Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott.
Jude the Obscure always worth a retread for the sheer sadness/misery.
I've never managed to read Jane Austen without nodding off. Probably says more about me than her!
Part way through The Woman in White now.

Yes! Gone With the Wind.

A room with a view

Passage to India

The Great Gatsby

Thanks for suggestions! think I'm going to give North and South and a Dorothy Whipple a go. I have to admit I'd not heard of her until now.

Anything by Anthony Trollope but particularly The Way We Live Now. Sadly my DH wouldn't let me name either of our DSs after the wonderful but caddish Sir Felix Carbury.

hurrah for Dorothy!

Read They Were Sisters, particularly if you do have a sister...

Emma is my favourite.
YY to Vanity Fair and the Great Gatsby

Pied Piper is my favourite Shute.

George Eliot is fantastic, Silas Marner is quick and easy, The Mill on the Floss is my favourite of hers.

Yes to Zola, I'm re-reading The Earth at the moment. Also yes to John Steinbeck who I discovered recently.

Knut Hamsun is a brilliant author, Growth of the Soil is on my top ten of all time. Some people disagree with some of his politics, but if you can get past that he's fab.

I discovered Dorothy Whipple on here, have only read one, but one more waiting on the bookshelf - thanks Mumsnet

I've never read Vanity Fair, I don't know why! Will put it on my list.

agree with Anna Karenina. If that puts you in a Russian mood, A Hero of Our Time, by Lermontav is brilliant.

French Lieutenants Woman by John Fowles - pretty much anything by him really.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I also really like Maupassant and Chekhov, masters of the short story, along with Katherine Mansfield.

Recently re-read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, really enjoyed it.

If you like medieval stuff, try Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Story of a stonemason who travels all over the south of England looking for work in the middle of winter. Eventually builds a cathedral. Was recently produced as a television series which was fairly true to the book, but as usual the book gives much more detail than any film could.

Anna Karenina
Idiot