Suggest a classic

[PinotAndPlaydough]

I’m an avid reader, I usually just browse and choose whatever I fancy. I would really like to read some of the classics, I think in the past I’ve been put off because I think they’ll be hard to read or the language might be confusing.
However they are classics for a reason and I want to give it a go, what do you suggest?

Anything by George Eliot, especially Mill on the Floss. An amazing Victorian woman who defied conventions and understood the human condition.

Have you read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre? Or Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? Either of those are great places to start. I agree with the Eliot suggestion, too — just don’t start with Romola.

I love Dickens, big cast of characters, great stories, some humour.

Austen and the Brontes.

Junes Verne -sci fi and adventure, language a bit archaic.

A Town Like Alice. A 20th century classic.

Count of monte cristo and Rebecca are faves of mine

A Tale of Two Cities.

@ICouldHaveCheckedFirst

A Tale of Two Cities.

Beat me to it!

Pride and prejudice.

Moll Flanders

Anything by Daphne du Maurier, maybe The House on the Strand (and Rebecca obvs)

Patricia Highsmith - Talented Mr Ripley and the rest.

Sherlock Holmes

Catch 22. I find it very funny and clever

Anything Austen

Vanity Fair
Dracula
Pride and Prejudice
Sherlock Holmes is a good shout, very easy to read.

Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. In fact anything by Hardy.

Dracula

Wuthering Heights

Frankenstein! It's been used and abused so many times by film makers etc, it's so interesting to see the original story. You have to bear with the opening as it takes a while to get started, but then it is an amazing book.

A Dance to the Music of Time, 12 novel sequence by Anthony Powell. Published 1950 to 1975, roughly Huge cast of characters, action spans 1914 to mid 1970s.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby. Classic from the 1930s.

1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell.

Almost anything by Evelyn Waugh.

Classic humorous stories: Saki short stories, Diary of a Nobody, almost anything by P. G. Wodehouse.

I really wouldn't recommend Frankenstein for someone's first stab at the classics. It may be the best novel ever written by a teenager and a work which has shaped the twentieth century, but it's not exactly a page turner.

@BattledoreAndShuttlecock

I really wouldn't recommend Frankenstein for someone's first stab at the classics. It may be the best novel ever written by a teenager and a work which has shaped the twentieth century, but it's not exactly a page turner.

Okay, fair enough. 1984 then.

I'm just re-reading 1984 - it's hard going at the moment with the situation in the Ukraine (I started re-reading before the war started). I wouldn't read it at the moment tbh but put on your list.

I have a soft spot for Tolstoy.
And for original noir - Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep etc although you have to be prepared for racism because of when they were written.
I like a lot of F Scott Fitzgerald's short stories.
Austen's Emma is fab too.

I've avoided anything more modern but one of the most underrated writers in my opinion is JG Farrell - he won the Booker twice but hardly anyone has heard of him. 'The Siege of Krishnapur' is my favourite and there is a lovely Everyman's library classic edition of this with another of his books.

George Eliot - Middlemarch - great book

Anna Karenina or War and Peace.

Personally I wouldn't go for Hardy, he is epically miserable.

Trollope is readable, human and funny.

Or try a book by Zola. Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Ladies Paradise (nothing like, and much better than the drama of the same name) or La Bête Humaine. They all seem to have a surprise sting in the tail so don't be tempted to flick to the end.

However they are classics for a reason

I might dispute that! They're classics because people have decided they are, which is not quite the same.

I do think Frankenstein is jaw-dropping though, and disagree with the negative assessment on here.

A modern classic I love is A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.

"Jamaica Inn" and "Rebecca" by Du Maurier are wonderful. "The House on the Strand" is also very good though I couldn't really keep up with the story in the olden-timey bit of the book .

"We have always lived in the castle" by Shirley Jackson is a good twentieth century classic too.

They're not technically 'classics' (yet) but I think Isabel Allende books are in the same league - "Eva Luna" and "Daughter of Fortune" are the ones that stick out in my mind but all her novels are astoundingly brilliant.