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.

@CadyEastman Great to hear some one else is a fan of The Grapes of Wrath.

The Canterbury tales, a lot of Shakespeare. I don't really want to re visit either Chaucer or Shakespeare.
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
The colour Purple
The French Lieutenants Woman.

To name a few, these are the main ones I recall. Some other more obscure titles for the language side of my A'level; I did English literature and language A'level.

I've just read 'How Green Was My Valley' by Richard Llewellyn.

Not sure if it's a classic but it was excellent. One of the best books I've read!

I'd also very highly recommend George Gissing (who was writing at the same time as Dickens).

Also Patrick Hamilton.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn - A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird

Emile Zola - Nana

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Gûnter Grass - The Tin Drum

The Diary of Anne Frank

Rudyard Kipling - Just So Stories

Radclyffe Hall - The Well of Loneliness

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

Does Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch fit here?

Le Grand Meaulnes
A hero of our time

The Garden Party

The Age of Innocence
Dracula
Frankenstein
1984
The Bell Jar
Brave New World
Beloved
Metamorphosis
The Secret Garden
Little Women

The bridge of San Luis Rey

I loved The Waves. The title sums it up so well; it feels wave like and poetic.

If you like covers, Vintage have a Virgina Woolf series which I love the look of. Shallow, but they look pretty on my bookshelf.

The Glass Bead Game

I think all of my nominations have already been mentioned, but:

Grapes of Wrath
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
1984
Pride and Prejudice
Frankenstein
Dracula
Romeo & Juliet
Macbeth
To Kill a Mockingbird

More recent and probably doesn’t qualify as a classic by the definitions offered on the thread but I’d recommend The Secret History to anyone and everyone.

The picture of Dorian Gray

Silas Marner

The Colour Purple

Huckleberry Finn

Naked Lunch
Sorry I keep remembering and then having to check the spelling! @StrangeNew
I loved the Corner that held us and I’ve never met anyone who’s read it.
Would also like to suggest Beryl Bainbridge,
and I capture the castle, which I think is by Dodie Smith.

Love in a cold climate and the pursuit of love
Hard to improve on Pride and Prejudice
Room with a view
DH offers Great Expectations - I prefer David Copperfield
The quiet American

Other books that made a large impression on me but am not sure if they count as classics:

Primo Levi - If This is a Man
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
A.S.Byatt - Possession
Martin Amis - London Fields
Anonymous - Lila Says
Michael Frayn - A Landing on the Sun
Sapphire - Push
Mikhail Sholokhov - And Quiet Flows the Don

All Quiet on the Western Front

Just my personal favourites (without repeating authors):

1. Rebecca
2. The Great Gatsby
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. A Streetcar Named Desire
5. Sons and Lovers
6. Wuthering Heights
7. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
8. Anna Karenina
9. Les Miserables
10. Of Mice and Men

Actually writing this down has surprised me

Thanks for the recommendation. I've read some Arnold Bennett who was a contemporary and friend of Dickens but not read any by this author.

Echoing many above;

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
2. Cannery Row by Steinbeck
3. Great expectations by Dickens
4. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas

Modern classics

1. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
2. Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
3. Possession by AS Byatt
4. A thousand splendid suns by Khaled Hosseini,

10. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (very different from film, very intelligent)

@CadyEastman

Thanks. I'll look up Arnold Bennett.

Gissing's 'New Grub Street' is fantastic!

Oh, I’d forgotten Rebecca, @Pebbles16. I’m going to have to take Macbeth off my list and replace it with Rebecca!

Bloom was a man drunk on his own verbiage, with reductively macho ideas of the canon (and a long history of shagging his female students). I’d be very wary of taking his opinions of what constitutes a ‘classic’ as some kind of Holy Writ.

What is threatened by expanding the canon to include a wider range of texts? Dubliners isn’t going to be neglected because I’m also reading/teaching a now-forgotten sensation novelist whose work was dominating the US and UK bestseller lists.

The Go Between

Diary of a Provincial Lady