Could you recommend some classic literature to help me get back into reading classics?

[SweetSakura]

I seem to have swung from reading almost nothing but classics as a teen (because my parents house was stuffed full of them) to now reading nothing but contemporary literature.

I'd like to mix it up a bit but can't decide where to start!

I've read pretty much all Jane Austen/Brontes/Dickens/George Eliot/Thomas Hardy I think, although I guess it was a long time ago and I could re read them!

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell definitely. I reread Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier recently and really enjoyed it but that might be too recent for you. Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles for a bit of a drama (not a cheer up!). How about a bit of Dickens - maybe Great Expectations to distract you from the current terrible TV version?!

Rebecca

@Changeau followed up by The Wide Sargasso Sea, which is fantastic and tells Bertha’s story.

The Forsyte Saga? I loved it and I think it’s nine volumes so will keep you going a nice long time!

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders

Both really good novels, and a fascinating glimpse into 18th-century Britain (so different in tone and feel to Dickens)

Vanity Fair
The Picture of Dorian Gray (gorgeous dialogue)

How about D H Lawrence? I enjoyed Sons and Lovers. Women in Love is meant to be his masterpiece, however.

Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent
E. M. Forster: A Room with a View (the film is superb)
Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow (my favourite novel)
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
Nabokov: Pale Fire
Ian McEwan: Atonement
Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
Edward St Aubyn: Melrose novels
Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time

I'm a huge fan of Anthony Burgess. Amazing novelist, and superb prose stylist. Try his Enderby books, or Earthly Powers (which should have won the Booker).

Harold Bloom compiled a list of the greatest books ever written, beginning with Homer and ending with writers like Cormac McCarthy and Jeanette Winterson. Take a look at that if you need ideas. It makes you realize just how many classics there are. I've never read a word of Henry James, Iris Murdoch, H G Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Don De Lilo, Martin Amis, Antony Trollope...oh, too many to name.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
Wuthering Heights
David Copperfield
Jude the Obscure
Jane Eyre.

I keep them all on the kindle, and I will never be short of a great read. Classics.

I second this.

Therese Raquin is 🤯

Oh I loved Wilkie Collins! More along those lines would be great.

Try Armadale - it’s dead good.

Anything by Balzac, very readable. Cousin Bette is a scream.

Zola can a slog, but it’s worth it.

Gulliver's Travels
Tom Jones

Would also recommend Trollope. Loads of books - in some of them nothing massively dramatic happens, although some can also have very surprising and 'modern'-feeling twists too, but they all really pull you into the England of his era (which is what I love about the best of the classics) with some very compelling characters and notably some well-written, unconventional female characters too. Which is something quite unusual for the time, especially for a male author.

Elizabeth Gaskell is fantastic and rather underrated - North and South is probably her best.

Follloeing, thank you.

F Scott Fitzgerald
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain

Also The Swiss Family Robinson and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White. One of my favourites ever!

Another vote for Vanity Fair - Thackeray is wonderful. Try going earlier: Sterne, Fielding, Defoe.

Wilkie Collins is wonderful and his not-so-famous novels are really interesting too. Zola is really good.

I love Robertson Davies, who's a sort of twentieth-century Canadian Dickens.

Other twentieth-century classics? Orwell, Waugh, Wells, Murdoch...

I have lots more books on my list to read now, thank you!

Yes, absolutely Trollope - he’s great. I read The Barchester Chronicles during lockdown and really recommend them. I’m looking forward to reading the Palliser series next.

yy to Vanity Fair and Mrs Gaskell too.

and what about Arnold Bennett? He so deserves to be more widely read. The Old Wives’ Tale is very good; also Clayhanger.

Re Zola, I set out to read all of the Rougon Macqart series however found some much better than others. Germinal and The Ladies’ Paradise were excellent .. and very different!

I love à good big traditional novel; can’t be doing with over-complicated narrative tricksiness.

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton, if you fancy going across the pond for some high society.

I love Kristin Lavrandatter by Sigrid Undset. Read the recent Tiina Nunnally translation, not the 1920s translation which has fake archaisms.

Otherwise, another vote for Trollope.

My two choices were going to be
Anna Karen Karenia
The Sound and the Fury
But also
Portrait of a Lady
Any Steinbeck novel

Excuse error there.

I do the Victorian readalongs on MN- Woman In White has probably been the favourite. Other than that they have mostly been Dickens which you say you have read but, for the record, I think we all liked Bleak House and David Copperfield the most.

I'd second some Gaskells. I'd never read any until recently and have enjoyed them, especially North and South. Much better than I thought they would be.

I read a lot of US literature back in the day - my heritage is American and I did lots at uni. I loved Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser- and Willa Cather, especially A Lost Lady, which has Go Between vibes.

@JaninaDuszejko I also loved Kristin Lavrandatter, that new translation sounds very tempting…

Just noticed there is a typo and it should be Zora Neale Hurston.