Which classics?

[lucyellensmum]

I have decided it was about time i read some classics. I never really did this when i was younger as english lit at school put me off, all that searching for hidden meanings and analysing language - yuck!

I am reading bram stokers dracula just now, and im really enjoying it, it has fantastic atmosphere and is even a bit scary, and i dont scare easy. I picked it up in the charity shop for 50p - bargain.

I'm not well read, and i battle sometimes with "harder" books these days, on account of being knackered with an addled brain.

So can anyone point me in the right direction. I dont particularly like romance or family sagas. One of the things i like about dracula is its written ages ago, so it is not that the author is describing a time gone by, its present tense to him, i think. As i say, im pretty thick when it comes to literature so i may have that totally wrong.

Any thoughts?

I read Rebecca (loved it), but is that a classic i wonder?

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - a fantastic book IMHO.

Try reading Jane Austen. She only wrote 6 books. And when you're reading them, remember that they're actually very light-hearted and supposed to be quite funny!

The language might be harder, but they're very much the 'chic lit' of the age.

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre and Villette
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Scott Fitzgerald - Great Gatsby
Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men

possibly not a classic, but I think Peyton Place by Grace Metallius (?sp) is a cracking read.

oh yes you must read great expectations one of the best imo

I found jane eyre a bit hard going for some reason, but did enjoy JAne Austens books.

Second of mice and men too, quite short but good

to kill a mockingbird, not sure if a classic but fantastic book

You might like Hardy. Jude the Obscure is a good one to start with.
Also George Eliot - Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda.
Elizabeth Gaskell. Not Cranford though - try Wives and Daughters or North and South.

I did the same and started reading 'clever books' on the train, I discoverd that I love Jane Austen. Moll Flanders by Daniel Dafoe was a good one which is also quite old. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and agree about Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. These are all kinda girly but the other thing is that if you get really bogged down you can get hold of films to finish them off.

Vanity Fair - but you have to read it quickly (like any classics except Austen IMO). Trick is not to get bogged down in the language.

Here's another vote for Jane Austen! I also love reading Charles Dickens' David Copperfield - it's long but I got really sucked in

I'll second Jane Eyre too; I know you say you don't like romance, but I found it a riveting read as well as having romance (if that makes sense).

Dostoevsky (sp?), Crime and Punishment.
Made me sweat.

I would say "Rebecca" ia a classic, yes.

Middlemarch

The Grapes of Wrath

anything by patrick hamilton oh and cold comfort farm

The Great Gatsby.
Short and haunting.

Yes to Camus, and also Gide, if you want something in translation. Try The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-Monnayeurs) but you will need a flow diagram to keep up with who is doing what to whom.

Oh yes, def cold comfort farm.
I would leave war and peace for a bit, if you're new to the classics, there's so very much of it you see!

I think you could leave War and Peace for a long time.

One book which I once heard read on Radio 4 and found beautiful to listen too was Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. Its a 15 century Book so sounds a bit off putting, but a recent Penguin translation makes it really readable. Don't know why I like it but I do.

Always quite liked Emile Zola for some reason - he wrote the ultimate family saga spanning 20 books but they are an almost contemporary record of life in rural France in the mid-nineteenth century

On Jane Austen some are easier reading than others - Pride and Prejudice is the most popular for a reason, Mansfield Park has an irritatingly dull heroine as it preaches virtues of dullness, but as you're liking Dracula perhaps the one to start is Northanger Abbey, about a young woman who likes reading the gothic novels of her time. I thought it was really really funny.

And on the Brontes, the less well known Anne Bronte only wrote 2 novels as she died at 29 (!) but one was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - I was stunned by someone writing such a powerful novel about lots of rather serious issues like domestic violence.

Daphne Du Maurier's books have recently been reissued by Virago Modern Classics with introductions - they're not perhaps as highbrow as some of the others mentioned here but I think they're worth going back to and lots of quite serious literary writers have put introductions to these editions.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
(I agree on) Middlemarch by George Elliot
The Dubliners by James Joyce
The Cantebury Tales, by Chaucer