10 classics that I should read

[Orangebadger]

I try to read the odd classic. For no other reason that there are some I just think I should read. It's usually only 1 or 2 a year, currently reading Wuthering Heights. Plan to read Dracula at some point to as well as re read Pride and Prejudice.

Give me your top 10 classics that you think we all should read.

How are you defining classics? Pre 20th C only or are you up for including later stuff?

Following

You're already reading my first choice: Wuthering Heights.
I'd add Jane Austen's Persuasion - her best book IMO.
Also
Middlemarch
1984
Brave New World
The Grapes of Wrath
The Sea, The Sea
Cranford
Vanity Fair
The Age of Innocence

Nervous Conditions

Milkman

A House For Mr Biswas

Father Comes Home From The Wars

Parade’s End

Death and the King’s Horseman

Lady Into Fox

Gormenghast

The Corner That Held Them

My Brilliant Friend

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Two plays, one novella. Past, present and future classics.

Great Expectations
Moby-Dick
Madame Bovary
Anna Karenina
The Great Gatsby
Frankenstein

Tom Jones - Fielding
Vanity Fair - Thackerey
Middlemarch - Elliot
Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
The Magus - John Fowles
Homage to Catalonia - Orwell
Waiting for the Barbarians - Coetze
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston

Also something by Elizabeth Gaskell and I quite like Maria Edgeworth.

Not sure I enjoyed it, but Stendhal's The Red and the Black felt like a worthy read 😂

Jane Eyre
Rebecca
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
A Christmas Carol

The Count of Monte Christo!

I once asked a retired literature professor for her list of the best novels in English. This was her top ten (in chronological order):

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Jane Austen: Persuasion
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Dickens: Bleak House
Thackery: Vanity Fair
Joyce: Ulysses
D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love
Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Nabokov: Pale Fire

Personally, I think David Copperfield is Dickens' masterpiece, but Harold Bloom would agree with Bleak House. He also thought Persuasion was Austen's best novel.

My own, personal, top ten:

1. Dickens: David Copperfield
2. Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
3. Bronte: Wuthering Heights
4. Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
5. Anthony Burgess: Enderby
6. Virginia Wolf: Mrs Dalloway
7. P G Wodehouse: Right Ho Jeeves
8. Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point
9. Kipling: Kim
10. Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow

I don't think they're the greatest ever, just my favourites. Henry James ought to be on any list, so too Thomas Hardy, Daniel Defoe, H G Wells, Malcolm Lowery, Iris Murdoch, etc. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the great African-American novel, and Saul Bellow is the great Jewish-American novelist. Jane Eyre, Catch 22, In Cold Blood, also spring to mind. Anthony Burgess thought Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End one of the masterpieces of the 20th-century.

I've stuck to novels written in English. If you were to list the greatest novels ever written in any language, I think Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and Kafka would be the first names on the list.

If you want a modern classic, White Noise by Don Delillo says so much about our era

It's an interesting question. Also, what makes a classic? Harold Bloom complained that books are now judged not on quality but on who wrote them. In the name of diversity, critics exaggerate the importance of certain works, and downplay the importance of others. A novel, poem, play, etc, is meant to be a work of art, not an exercise in box-ticking. Just because a novel isn't PC or woke, that doesn't mean it isn't great. Equally, just because the liberal-left approve of the author and his/her opinions, that doesn't mean their novel is a masterpiece.

Personally, I'd say a novel cannot be described as a classic until at least one generation after the author's death. The dust needs to settle before we can judge how good something really is.

Beowulf
A Shakespeare play (try The Tempest)
Some metaphysical poems (get an anthology and dip in)
A thick Victorian novel - my favourite by a mile is Vanity Fair
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Poems from the Romantic age - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Percy Shelley
Jane Eyre
anything by Jane Austen
A "Golden Age" crime novel - try the Harriet Vane books by Dorothy L Sayers (Strong Poison, Have His Carcass, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, in that order)
A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill, or if that's too long, then a volume of his wartime speeches

That's 10 so I'll stop!!

The color purple
the help
memoirs of a geisha
pride and prejudice
sense and sensibility
Black beauty
Charlotte’s Web
Withering Heights

(not all classic classics but famous enough that you could justify them;))

<Rises above the goading …>

So difficult to choose! I'm going with random ones that made a impression on me at the time I read them

1. Vanity Fair
2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
3. Jane Eyre
4. Orlando
5. Beloved
6. The Well-Beloved
7. Violent Life
8. Crime & Punishment
9. Anna Karenina

10. Ulysses (which I only recommend reading with a great reading group)

I starting reading classics again this year after many years where I didn’t give them a second thought. I’ve particularly enjoyed:

The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House- Charles Dickens
Mrs Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
Giovanni’s Room- James Baldwin
Leaves of Grass- Walt Whitman (poetry)
Dubliners- James Joyce
Anything and everything by John Steinbeck
Anything and everything by Edith Wharton
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
The Iliad- Homer
Beowulf- the Seamus Heaney translation
The Count of Monte Cristo- Alexandre Dumas
Passing- Nella Larson

I’d suggest reading a mix of eras and authors to find what you enjoy. I’ve found I particularly love modern classics and the ancients but am less keen (for the most part) on the Victorians. Trying a bit of everything will help you find what’s for you.

The Tenant of Windfell Hall
Jane Eyre
Brave New World
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Crysallids
Tess of the D'Ubervilles
Little Dorritt
Rebecca
I Claudius

What did you read at school, @Orangebadger?

Good question! I agree with @Hartley99's definition. So a book that has been shown to stand the test of time with different eras of readers. One generation after the authors death is a good measure for that.

Some great suggestions.
I have Great expectations and The Count of Monte Cristo in my mental TBR list. A few others to add from here. Looks like I should certainly add persuasion.

Yes must read Virginia Wolf. Really didn't know where to begin with her books though. David Copperfield to be added.

King Lear

Vanity Fair

Wolf Hall

The Grapes of Wrath (I read it when I was 14 and it was the first book that made me realise what good writing was all about.)

T.S. Eliot poems

I have yet (at pushing 70 years old) to read any Jane Austen. Have started & failed!

The Great Gatsby-F Scott Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath-Steinbeck
Breathing Lessons-Anne Tyler
David Copperfield-Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol-Charles Dickens
Romeo & Juliet-Shakespeare
1984-Orwell
The Color Purple-Alice Walker
A Gentleman from Moscow-Amor Towles
In Order to Live-Yeonmi Park