So - help me with a classic novel

[happystory]

I vowed I'd read a classic novel this year and I've failed miserably. And now it's near the end of November. Please recommend something to me, American, English, I don't mind but not a massive tome you could use for a doorstop!

yy to Lady Chatterley. Really good novel. No bonnets, often no clothes at all :o

Forster - really enjoyed those of his novels I've read. Maurice was particularly good, so was A Room With A View.

Has anyone mentioned Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray? George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody?

Does Daphne Du Maurier count as classic? I'a sugguest Rebecca.

The Catcher in the Rye.

Also, RF Delderfield (To Serve Them All My Days) Arnold Bennett (Clayhanger)

The "kitchen sink" and "angry young men" novels from the 60s.

Classics, but more approachable somehow. (to the bonnet averse like me)

I also hold my hand up to reading Cold Comfort Farm and thinking what the feck was all that about then? But I accept I have a very odd sense of humour.

Thank you all, some great suggestions, and some I would never have considered. Will take list with me today and have a good browse!

And lovely that so many people re read children's classics, Ballet Shoes and the Enid Blyton school stories in particular.

Can't believe no one has included Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree stories as a classic!
I read this when I was about 8; when I realised I had almost finished the book I actually felt really sad, to the point of crying. I loved it so much I didn't want it to end!

Vocational yy to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's an incredible book.

'Three Men in a Boat' was a good suggestion. It is very short and very funny.

Agree the catcher in the Rye
1984 and the grapes of wrath

don't read Enid Blyton as an adult!!! It will ruin them stories FOREVER.

Ivan Denisovich was brilliant. In this vein I recommend The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platanov, very witty.

I loved Tess by Hardy and The Dram Shop by Zola - I am drawn to depressing books it seems and The Dram Shop is quite long.

I also really like Dumas but his books are also very long.

How about some P G Wodehouse? That should definitely be on any list of classics. And don't forget The Secret Garden, A little princess and The Railway Children.

Or some golden age murder mysteries (I'm a D L Sayers fan myself).

Farenheit 451 should probably be on the list too.

Brideshead revisited?

Lots here that I'd agree with (although try as I might I cannot enjoy Austen).

I would also suggest Under the Greenwood Tree by Hardy - starts off quite Christmassy. The Trumpet Major is one of Hardy's easiest to read novels if you find some of them a bit daunting. I also love Silas Marner by George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton.

On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin is excellent, as is Shute's A Town Like Alice.

I'm the only person I know - apart from DH - who has read it, but Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil is in my top five books of all time.

There's some books in previous posts I haven't read so will browse and add them to my list....