Meet the Other Phone. Child-safe in minutes.

Meet the Other Phone.
Child-safe in minutes.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

What we're reading

Find your new favourite book or recommend one on our Book forum.

10 classics that I should read

155 replies

Orangebadger · 22/04/2024 17:39

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.

OP posts:
magimedi · 22/04/2024 21:03

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

Orangebadger · 22/04/2024 21:04

StrangeNew · 22/04/2024 20:47

What did you read at school, @Orangebadger?

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.

OP posts:
LightSpeeds · 22/04/2024 21:04

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!

LightSpeeds · 22/04/2024 21:07

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

Also Patrick Hamilton.

LauderSyme · 22/04/2024 21:08

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?

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:09

Le Grand Meaulnes
A hero of our time

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:10

The Garden Party

HelterSkelter224 · 22/04/2024 21:10

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

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:12

The bridge of San Luis Rey

toastofthetown · 22/04/2024 21:12

Orangebadger · 22/04/2024 20:57

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

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.

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:14

The Glass Bead Game

Waitingfordoggo · 22/04/2024 21:15

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.

Ellenanora7 · 22/04/2024 21:16

The picture of Dorian Gray

Silas Marner

The Colour Purple

Huckleberry Finn

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:18

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.

Beamur · 22/04/2024 21:21

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

LauderSyme · 22/04/2024 21:24

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

IPartridge · 22/04/2024 21:26

All Quiet on the Western Front

Pebbles16 · 22/04/2024 21:27

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
CadyEastman · 22/04/2024 21:28

LightSpeeds · 22/04/2024 21:07

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

Also Patrick Hamilton.

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.

GingerLiberalFeminist · 22/04/2024 21:31

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)
LightSpeeds · 22/04/2024 21:33

@CadyEastman

Thanks. I'll look up Arnold Bennett.

Gissing's 'New Grub Street' is fantastic!

Waitingfordoggo · 22/04/2024 21:36

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

Craicbaby · 22/04/2024 21:42

Hartley99 · 22/04/2024 19:47

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.

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.

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:43

The Go Between

ThatshallotBaby · 22/04/2024 21:44

Diary of a Provincial Lady