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!

@JaneyGee A previous poster pointed out that late Henry James is where it can get a bit trying apparently. Based on what you’ve said you enjoy reading I would give him a try though.

Yes. Good recommendations. People tend to overlook 18th-century novels. I have heard it said that the novel peaked in the 19th-century, with Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes, etc. That may be true (though the 20th-century did produce Joseph Conrad, Proust, Joyce, D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, etc), but it’s a shame people ignore novelists like Daniel Defoe, Fielding, Swift and Samuel Johnson. Tom Jones and Moll Flanders are still great stories, even today. In fact, it’s amazing how these novels don’t age. Pride and Prejudice is ever bit as fresh and engrossing in 2023 as it must have been in 1823, same with David Copperfield and Silas Marner.

If you want to read in French Therese Desqueyroux by Mauriac is great. Haven't seen the film and don't particularly want to but I loved the book. Written in 1927 so maybe not old enough for you but worth a go.

Ah thank you, I'm open to any age of book, I just realised I had pretty much only read 21st century literature for the past couple of years and would like to mix it up a bit!

Have you read any of the older writers Dr Johnson era?
Do you read Diaries and commentary? I intend to find some contemporary accounts of French Revolution. Can you find that kind of thing in French.

I have read Pepys but not John Evelyn.

I really enjoyed The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

I think I must be the only person in the world who thought it was desperately boring. I tried three times and eventually made myself plough through it. And I did a degree in English Lit specialising in medieval literature so you'd think I'd be used to boring!

“Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell

A huge book like a doorstep ( about 900 pages) but I was grateful for this as it was a real page-turner and kept me enthralled for ages.

Great thread, following up some of these.

Anne bronte's books are a good read. Love Tolstoy, the death of Ivan illich is excellent. Count of monte Cristo- brilliant. Cold comfort farm- brilliant. The age of innocence - worth a read. Various toni Morriston books, hard but beautiful.

I love reading

I read this instead of revising for my GCSEs . It's a fabulous book have read it a couple of times since. Scarlett's grit inspired me when I was battling through life as a single mum with an abusive ex.

(I read War and Peace when my parents thought I was revising for my a levels )