Right-I'm sick of Booker shortlist fiction-so help me, post your all time favourite work of classic fiction

[DarrellRivers]

Ann Enright finished me off finally with the dross that is called 'The Gathering'
So I decided to start reading some more classic works of fiction.
Am currently reading Nana by Zola, it's great [bit suprised]

At least these people seem to be able to write cracking tales (and not just emotional vomit)
I think I read most classic works of fiction when I was a teenager -ie Jane Austen, when I was too young to appreciate anything about life.

So post what should i read next, and what you loved about it.I think anything published in last 20 years should not be allowed but exceptions may be permitted.

The Shadow of the Wind
LIfe of Pi
All the Claire tomalin books

Vanity Fair is amazing. Brilliant story and so vibrant.

My best book ever is Great Expectations. Another great story.

Also Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Fabbo.

Am also resolving to avoid all Bookers from now on. Just finished Mister Pip and was really disappointed. I thought it was just shockingly badly written in parts.

If you are prepared to go a bit more up to date then anything by Wally Lamb is fab (This much is true).

Also Grapes of Wrath. Loved it.

Hated Owen Meany but I am in a very small minority.

nobody has mentioned Ulysses yet have they

Just in case anyone's interested, here's an interview with Philip Pullman that says what I feel about Narnia far better than I ever could.

Warning though, it's pretty devastating, so if Narnia is your favourite comfort read, I wouldn't read the interview!

I agree with pretty much all he says but don't you think he pushes his opinions down his readers throats just as determindly as CS Lewis did?
I think readers should be given the facts and allowed to make their own judgements. Neither Pullman and Lewis concede to their readers that respect. Also both of them get carried away as their series progess by their own eloquence. IMO it is no coincidence that LWandW and N Lights are by far the best books either of them wrote. If the stable was horrible the yoghurt eating elephants on wheels were ridiculous...
CS Lewis, whatever else, could tell a story. I escaped to the magic of Narnia as a child, the Christian message went right over my thick head, but the magic wardrobe and the fauns and the beavers went straight to my pagan heart. As did the armoured bears to my daughter's.
I do not think Pullman needs to protest so much against Lewis. I wonder why he does. It is not very much to his otherwise very creditable credit.
IMHO!

Hardy?

I'm not going back there thank you very much

everyone should be forced by law to read Philip Larkin imo

Oh yes, Owen Meany is one of Irving's fab ones. A friend of mine once had an armadillo party as he was so into the book. Someone came with a vibrator encased in a tinfoil suit of armour - an "armoured dildo" - geddit? It was a great party.

I am with margoandjerry about Owen Meany

you really didn't mind that he started off a comedy book and then lost it?

you really didn't mind that he told the same story over and over again in case we'd forgotten it?

you really didn't mind how ridiculous it was? the Nativity scenes went far too far. And the crowbarred symbolism?

And Christ alive, that damn tailor's dummy and the Mary statue with the arms.

Awful

Oh God, Cap, I'm reliving every awful page now

Ooh I'll happily be forced to read Larkin.

Another member of the Middlemarch fan club. I see nobody's mentioned Trollope yet.
So I vote for:
The Barchester Towers series
The Palliser series
The Way we Live Now
Can you Forgive her?
And there are plenty more if that is not enough to keep anyone going till 2010.
Also being Irish I have to put in a word of Kate O'Brien (not be be confused with Edna).
Her last book, As Music and Splendour, is one of the great unknown classics IMO.
Her most famous book is The Land of Spices which is set in my old boarding school and was banned in Ireland for many years (we used to pass it round under the desks).

Owen Meany is the marmite of the book world, I suggest.

yes that analogy would work except I hate marmite

Middlemarch is marmite too.

Graham Swift's Waterland

it is hovering dangerously around the 20 year cut-off but it is worth making an exception

(Franny I have downloaded Franny and Zooey but am in two minds about whether to commit. Especially since you like Hardy and Owen Meany. Sell it to me)

Of course instead of reading all these books we could always bluff it.

Did anyone catch the item on R4 Today this morning about not reading books?

I'm rather about it because I like reading, but it would certainly cut down on that 'to do' list of books I feel I ought to have read by now

Here's the gist of it from the Guardian

Oh yes. Middlemarch. I should have loved it. Wanted to love it. Expected to love it.

Hated it.

oh dear

"books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading"

I have read nothing then. Nothing at all

it is so very annoying. I can remember my old boyfriend's phone number from 1989, I can remember whole conversations about complete trivia I had with dh when I was 23, but the classics of literature that I devoured during my degree and the contemporary literature I have read ever since....

gone

gone

gone

me too, m and j!

Welcome to old age Cap!

Oh Capp, I don't know

do you really hate Hardy and Irving? I adore them, but that doesn't mean you won't like Franny and Zooey. Erm, oh dear, I don't know. I would hate you to read it and hate it. I won't force you. Follow your heart

I wonder how much he got paid for writing that dreary stuff ( I must admit I nonread it).

I agree with Wuthering heights and John Steinbeck esp. East Of Eden, Of Mice and Men
I also like Graham Greene, Thomas Pynchon and Daphne Du Maurier ( Rebecca and Jamaica Inn)
Loved Madame Bovary and (not sure if they are classics but two of my fave books ever are;
Stone Junction-Jim Dodge
The Bone People- Keri Hulme
Gone off John Fowles since I read The Magus. I thought it was awful!
I thought The Handmaids Tale was okay.