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.

I found out just yesterday that Jane Austen was (wait for this) 20-years-old when she wrote it! 20!!! God, it makes me want to curl up in ball and die of inferiority!

I have read them both. Got to say Jane Eyre is far superior. Rhys’ book contains some beautiful writing, but it’s surprisingly gloomy and depressing. I can’t be doing with writers who leave me feeling worse after reading them, no matter how good they are (I’m looking at you Joseph Conrad, and you too Philip Larkin).

Brighton Rock
The Great Gatsby
Moll Flanders
Frankenstein
A Clockwork Orange
Stepford Wives
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Some modern classics: Margaret Atwood. I should probably say The Blind Assassin, as it won the Booker, but personally I think Alias Grace is her/a masterpiece.

Also The Crimson Petal and the White. Very aware of its antecedents and influences, but utterly modern and itself.

No one has yet mentioned War and Peace, which is an absolute joy and not as intimidating as you might think. Footnotes and Tangents has a readalong at the moment.

My list

Old
Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
Pride and Prejudice

Less old
To the Lighthouse
Frenchman’s Creek
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Life and Fate
Wolf Hall

Some interesting pairings
Pride and Prejudice & Longbourn
David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead
Jane Eyre & Wide Sargasso Sea
Rebecca and Rebecca’s Tale
Great Expectations and Mr Pip

One of the posters argued that we should read for entertainment. I’m afraid I disagree. If I just wanted entertainment, I’d play video games and watch repeats of Bake Off. Literature is about much more than entertainment. It’s a source of comfort, guidance and wisdom. It stimulates thought and deepens and enriches your inner life. Every time I read a classic, I feel different. The greatest books work on you at a subconscious level. Someone once said “I don’t enjoy reading, I enjoy having read,” and it’s a good point. Dickens, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, even Jane Austen, can all be a slog at times. But they re-pay the effort. Think of what the canon is. It’s the best that has been thought by the best minds expressed in the best language. A book is a miracle. It gives you access to a mind that no longer exists. Even better, it gives you access to the best that that mind ever produced.

Literature should also be a source of beauty. That is something people forget. I did a couple of literature degrees, and not once, not once, were we taught to appreciate the beauty of the writing. Part of the problem is what Harold Bloom called ‘the schools of resentment’. The Jungians, Post-Structuralists, Feminists, Post-Colonialists, Marxists, etc, treat literature as nothing but raw material. Feminists love to hate D H Lawrence, the Marxists go for Dickens, and the post-colonialists dissect Kipling and Conrad. But they all forget that these writers were first and foremost artists. God knows what an aesthete like Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde would make of modern academia.

Lord of the flies! It's been mentioned above but I also love the Bell Jar. If you just want a rollicking good ride then either the Tenant of Wildfell Hall or the Moonstone.

I do agree with the poster who said that some writers are great even though they’re not ‘serious’ or ‘classic’ or high brow.. The obvious example is P. G. Wodehouse. No one studies him at university, but as a stylist, he is second to none. His prose is sublime, and far superior to the rather clunky Thomas Hardy. When he died, critics compared him to Shakespeare, and they weren’t joking. He does things with language that makes your head spin. The only other modern writer whose language makes me shiver like Wodehouse is Anthony Burgess.

@Hartley99 my DH has a soft spot for Woodhouse and it’s the only thing that can reliably make him hoot and snort with laughter

100% you must read The Count of Monte Cristo!

I think it really depends on how you’re defining ‘classic’. Only English literature or are you including French/Russian /American? Only 19th century or are you including modern /medieval? Honestly, I always think it’s a bit of a daft question because it’s relatively meaningless- it covers too many genres, nations and time periods. It also depends who you ask- an American, for example, will always give you the same 6 titles and most Brits wouldn’t even consider them to be classics!
Rather than working your way through Austen or Dickens or the other authors that people always list it might be more interesting to choose a book from each time period and place so, for example, something from Old English eg Beowulf, something medieval eg Canterbury Tales or Malory, something Elizabethan (Shakespeare is the most obvious but there are other options eg Jonson), something from 18th century eg Pope, something Regency eg Austen, something Victorian eg Dickens and something 20th century eg Du Maurier. Then try something Italian eg Dante, something Russian eg Tolstoy, something American eg James, Hawthorne. Then move on to classic sci fi, modern classics… whichever takes your interest you can then read a bit more of… just don’t limit yourself to ‘I must read P&P, Oliver Twist…etc’

Ah - a PP mentioned The Things They Carried and that is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. Amazing writing.

Think of what the canon is. It’s the best that has been thought by the best minds expressed in the best language.

Really? 🤨 I mean, there is some great stuff on there, sure. But declaring it ‘the best’?

1984 is a good read. Frankenstein, but be aware that you will be considered 'woke' if you interpret it as intended! I like the old sci fi novels: War of the Worlds; The Chrysalids; The Day of the Triffids... and anything by Agatha Christie is fun and easy to read.

Are ypu enjoying Wuthering Heights OP?

Riders by Jilly Cooper

I’m always so glad to hear that people still read him 😀. But he’s more than a ‘funny’ writer. I don’t even think of him as a novelist - more a comic poet. He writes prose poetry.

I've loved some of the books on this thread and hated others.

I would add -

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The Warden and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

If you read the best literary critics (George Steiner, T S Eliot, Harold Bloom, etc), you find that there is a general agreement on the best books. There really is a hierarchy.

Obviously there is no definitive list, and you could debate it forever, but I think there is a rough agreement on the top ten. Shakespeare, Dante and Homer are the top three, no question. If people like George Steiner, C S Lewis, T S Eliot, Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, and so on, all agree on that, it’s hard to dispute. After those three, it becomes trickier, but I think Tolstoy, Proust and Dostoyevsky would be in there. Many would make the case for Dickens, Goethe, Kafka, Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Sophocles, Virgil, Cervantes, the author of The Bhagavad Gita and The Tao te Ching, etc.

Just for the sake of argument, I will have a go at listening the top ten books of all time. This isn’t my list btw, it’s based on the views of the critics I most respect:

1. Shakespeare: Complete plays
2. Dante: Divine Comedy
3. Homer: Iliad and Odyssey
4. Tolstoy: War and Peace
5. Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
6. Sophocles: Oedipus plays
7. Plato’s Dialogues
8. Virgil: The Aeneid
9. Cervantes: Don Quixote
10. The Bhagavad Gita

I forgot Don Quixote! Definitely one to read.

@Orangebadger Am in a big phase of must read classics that i have never read-or re-read some I love.

Just finished Virgina Wolf's Mrs Dalloway.
Didn't take to it right away and then read a bit about it.
Went back to it-really brilliant book-very thought provoking.

Am loving this thread!

The Virgin and the Gypsy
Far From the Madding Crowd
The Italian
Rebecca
Robinson Crusoe

Just read The Bell Jar-absolutely brilliant. Haunting and beautiful.

Definitely Persuasion!
A Christmas Carol
Lady Chatterly's Lover
North and South
Town like Alice
Jamaica Inn
Frankenstein
Jayne Eyre
Great Gatsby
Tess

@AudHvamm - I loved The Magus when I was 18, was totally transfixed by it. I don’t think it’s aged well though.