What are your favourite classic?

[BrandNewAndImproved]

Can we make a list please?

I'll start with Rebecca, would love to know yours now it's almost winter.

Bleak House (despite Esther Summerson)

Sunset Song (Lewis Grassic Gibbon )

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)

Heroes and Villains (Angela Carter)

Middlemarch George Eliot

Persuasion.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird

Rebecca here too. DH bought me a lovely edition a couple of years ago but it is too nice to take out of the house!

Pride and Prejudice and the little known Green Dwarf, a very short early work by Charlotte Bronte, I became obsessed with dissecting it when I did my Eng. Lit. O level. Moved on a bit but I did take it on my honeymoon!!

I would add Cloud Atlas to my list but it's not I suppose a "classic "

The Go-Between

Not sure whether to watch the adaptation tonight - I might get cross if it's "wrong"

Wuthering Heights; always has been.

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins.

A Town Like Alice (if that's old enough)

Pride and Prejudice by a country mile.

Some repetition from above, but

Middlemarch
Pride and Prejudice
Tess of the D'urbervilles
The Scarlet Letter
Orthello (but that's a play not a book, obvs).

War and Peace. Every so often I get a hankering for it and have to read it again. Such an amazing book

Also love Wuthering Heights, Tale of two Cities, Silas Marner, One hundred years of solitude, Brothers Karamazov

Jimmy I've just finished the Go Between. Really looking forward to the adaptation tonight

Jane Eyre
Gone with the wind (?) I love it

Tristram Shandy. not for everyone but I love it.
The Moonstone and The woman in White (Wilkie Collins)

XiCi, my late mother read War and Peace every twenty years, though after the first reading (when she was 20) she allowed herself to skip the Battle of Borodino.

I love Dickens more and more, sometimes suffering chocolate-type cravings. I was close to tears when I finished Our Mutual Friend - I just didn't want it to stop.

Hardy for me - Return of the Native or Jude the Obscure.

Mrsjolowicz I feel like dickens books are friends iykwim?

I love all these books on the list apart from tristam shandy and cloud atlas. Will put them on my to read list thanks.

How do you define a classic?

Do Dorothy L Sayers and Josephine Tey count? I love The Nine Taylors and Daughter of Time. What about Lord of the Rings or The Screwtape Letters?

Otherwise my favourites are:
Pride and Prejudice - Austen
As You Like It - Shakesphere

The Count of Monte Christo. I am scared to re-read it because it won't be like the first time. Wuthering Heights was top of my list for years and years and the Count came along.

I also really enjoyed The Dram Shop by Emile Zola and am looking forward to reading the other books in that series.

Tess has already been suggested but I still am not over how it ends.

I think the term "classics" has been wildly interpreted. Not a bad thing. Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure story, not classic literature.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez only died recently (last year?) so his stuff can't really be called a classic, unless you want to call it "modern classic"

but I don't even know why I am saying this because really it doesn't matter at all.

Persuasion

Nothing 'wrong' with modern classics.

Weary let's term it a classic adventure then

What does a story need for it to be a 'classic' then?

JA arguably is chick-lit (not my personal opinion but I think a valid argument) and would we consider that chick-lit has a place within the realm of classic?

I also think that more than one label can apply to a story.

I think The Count of Monte Christo is definitely a classic novel! Why would it not count as a classic?

My favourite classics are D.H Lawrence, so Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow etc. and also things like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Man.

I love Tristram Shandy.

Catch-22
Dracula
Return of the Native
Therese Raquin
20000 Leagues Under the Sea
Tender is the Night

I have a tradition of reading a "classic" novel, usually 19thC, every autumn as the nights start to draw in - it has to be one I have never read before. This year I'm reading The Mayor of Casterbridge. Just started it in the bath a few nights ago.