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'm not sure if any of these would be studied at A-Level, but I recommend them all

Consider Philebas by Iain M Banks

Flowers for Algenon by Daniel Keyes

Penhallow by Georgette Heyer. Very different from her romance novels and I was thinking about the characters for days after.

3 Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke

Bleak House is my all time favourite
Anna Karenina
Two Brothers by Balzac
Death in Venice Thomas Mann

3 Body Problem by Cixin L

I have this on my Kindle as DH has read it. Is it worth reading then?

Cold Comfort Farm

Brian Friel's Translations is a good read

Wilkie Collins The Woman in White and Moonstone

Empty Cradles - very hard going but worth a read

I am enjoying it. It's been on my TBR shelf for years. I was put off for some time by negative reviews but I think it's a marmite kind of book. I really enjoy quite dark books and I love the visuals of the moors, it reminds me of Du Maurier in that way, but obviously really the other way around. The characters are pretty hideous, but that just makes it more intriguing for me. It's a book that must have shocked Victorian society when it was first published!

That was my favourite book at that age too. Have you re read it? I am a bit apprehensive to as another favourite of mine sadly lost its shine the 2nd time around.

Oh I love consider phlebas , an absolute classic

Ooh I was thinking of this

Most things by Willie Collins
Probably the moon stone & haunted hotel

Frankenstein / Dracula

Nancy Mitford the pursuit of love

Dodie Smith - I capture the castle

I'd go for some Marlowe maybe the Jew of Malta or Faustus ooh and webster's Duchess of Malfi

A kid's book but Tom's Midnight Garden is a classic to me

The tenant of wildfell hall

And probably a lark ride or candleford or a Mrs Gaskel. No wait - changed my mind Laurie Lee Cider With Rosie.

@Hartley99 a good friend of mine loves PG Woodhouse and cannot believe I have never ready any! It's on my list now!

Lots of big ideas, and strangely compelling. If you've seen the Netflix series there are some similarities, but the book is better (and less Westernised)

So what do your critics make of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? And where are the female writers?

I am the last person to argue for tokenism but I am astounded that, in the 21st century, people still comfortably and unquestioningly accept the notion of the canon representing ‘the best books’, as determined by a group of white British and American men.

You’ve proved my point here, though. OP didn’t ask for ‘the best books of all time’ but for ‘classics’ - and yes, I would personally pretty much agree with your entire list, though I would definitely put Beowulf and Chaucer in there too. When you say ‘classics’ in this country you invariably get a list of Victorian and Gothic texts with a couple of others chucked in. It’s very frustrating! It means people dont end up spreading their net very far because by saying ‘classic’ and not adding an adjective to it or at least some indication of the sorts of books they enjoy, the pool ends up just being too large and conversely, strangely limiting.

Great expectations
Little women
Black beauty
What Katy did
To kill a mocking bird
Pride and prejudice
Wuthering heights
Rebecca

Heidi
Day of the Triffids

I ignore the opinions of modern critics for precisely the reason you allude to - tokenism. The literary establishment now grovels at the feet of woke bullies and pretends that certain books are masterpieces when they’re really not. The critics I respect were free of that. They lived in a different time. They were free to praise the writers they sincerely believed were the best, and that’s what makes them worth listening to. Modern critics aren’t free. They’re duty bound to praise writers who tick certain boxes. I ignore things like the Booker Prize for the same reason. Between them, ‘my’ critics could read Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Old Norse, Russian and Spanish, so I wouldn’t say they were parochial. George Steiner wasn’t even British or American. He was French.

I have no problem with new voices being added to the canon, but that’s not good enough for the sneering, liberal-left bullies who now dominate the arts. They want the canon replaced. I’m literally stockpiling old books, because the way things are going, I genuinely fear they’re going to be withdrawn from circulation and destroyed. Literally nothing would surprise me any more.

That’s hilarious that you buy his account of himself. He’s utterly unobjective, and a thoroughgoing misogynist. Maybe look again at exactly who is in his ‘canon’. I recognise your posts because they’re so dogmatic and you bang on about Bloom as though he’s the Second Coming — is it because you like being given an excuse to only read very narrowly? How much feminist, Marxist, post-colonial, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic criticism have you actually read? How. Much have you read outside Bloom’s ‘canon’? You sound thoroughly entrenched in a series of views you appear, bizarrely, to pride yourself on being stuck in — a sort of Jacob Rees-Mogg of reading defending something that doesn’t need defending? If you’re talking about the Joan Adam-Abbo book, you will of course notice that this isn’t an academic book from an academic press, but a small indie imprint, and that it’s deliberately provocative. As you won’t have read many (or any?) of the works it suggests as a decolonised canon, I don’t see how you can judge their worth?

I’m not sure you realise quite how underinformed yoir posts are.

Read more widely in criticism, and literature. Maybe read some reviews of Bloom’s work by peers who venerate him less and point out his blind spots. And maybe do some reading on canonicity/canon formation, because you seem to have delegated your thought processes to a Big Man, and to be deeply incurious about who you’re letting do your thinking for you. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Proust, Joyce, Eliot and co aren’t going anywhere, and the ‘school of resentment’ is a figment of a paranoid imagination. Be less afraid. I’m not sure what you think is going to happen — undergraduate literature degrees where only contemporary genre fiction and graphic novels by people of colour are studied?

Oh we did Flowers for Algernon as a set text in Year 8-ish. It broke me. I'd forgotten it. I'm not sure I could even read it now. It was so powerful.

I also did Bilgewater by jane Gardam as a literature text at university. A good read - disturbing and fascinating all at the same time.

Thank you for expressing everything I was thinking about these posts so incredibly eloquently!

Listening on audiobook just now. Absolutely love this book. Attempted it years ago in paper format but just found it very laborious to read. Glad I didn't give up and reading via audiobook.

Huge fan. Read Of Mice and Men years ago in school.

We should give @Hartley99 some credit, she's now added one book from outside Europe to her list of great literature. And she has not yet slagged off Zadie Smith. So some growth since the last of these debates about classics.

'Classics' are an ever moving feast as our tastes change. The Victorians did not rate Jane Austen at all and it was really only in the early 20th century that her cult started rising and her influence can be seen across many 20th century writers.

Nobody in the English speaking world read the Russian writers until Constance Garnett translated them. If she had not met a Russian exile who raved about Russian literature she would never have learnt Russian and made such readable translations of them that were incredibly popular when they first came out. So poor Tolstoy wouldn't be on Hartley99's list if it wasn't for Constance Garnett.

One of the oldest novels in the world The Tale of the Genji was written in 11th century Japan. It's still read (in modern translation) in Japan today. But it wasn't translated into English until the late 19th century. The first decent translation into English wasn't until the 1920s. So for 800 years the Japanese were reading this novel and we knew nothing about it. Chinese literary classics are generally unknown in this country.

It is not 'woke' to recognise that other parts of the world have a long and rich literary traditions that we are mostly ignorant of and the knowledge we do have is very dependent on one or two enthusiasts who have translated a small selection of works. Only 3% of books sold in the UK are translated, imagine the wealth of literature we know nothing about.

A few I've loved that I haven't seen mentioned:

A Month in the Country, J L Carr
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Possibly a left-field choice - The Fall of the Stone City, Ismail Kadare
Some Tame Gazelle, Barbara Pym

But to answer the OPs questions for books she might not have read that are in some way 'classics' but also fun and readable I'm going to suggest the following:

Kristin Lavrandatter by Sigrid Undset (read the Tiina Nunnally translation). The story of a woman in 14th century Norway.
South Riding by Winifred Holtby. A 1930s community in Yorkshire.
War and Peace by Tolstoy (much disagreement about the best translation). You'll have heard of this one but much more readable than you might imagine and one of the yearly readalongs when you read a ~4 page chapter a day is probably the best way to read it.
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Fascinating, very modern feeling autobiography.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Only 20 years old but a wonderfully written and important book about a shameful part of recent history.
The Cost of Sugar by Cynthia McLeod. A very readable historical novel about the Dutch sugar trade.

Another thought - children's classics can be a good way in, eg. The Wind in the Willows.

I found A Room of One's Own a great entry point for Virginia Wolf. And if you go for Orlando, it's well worth watching the film version starring Tilda Swinton.

Waterlog, by Roger Deakin is very enjoyable if you want to include some non-fiction.

That's seven. I may return with three more - they keep popping up in my head. I'm not arguing that they are the Best Books of All Time, just that they're books that have endured for a time, and they'll still give you a good time.

I call Godwin's Law on the assertion that 'sneering' 'liberal-left' 'bullies' are going to destroy all the books by white, privileged men classics.

Until this post I was ready to get into a discussion with you in good faith, Hartley, but now.. nah.