Modern Classics…

[AlwaysSometimesNever]

DS17 is loving English A Level and has asked for ‘10 modern classics’ for his Christmas present. I’ve bought Catch 22.
Now my brain is frazzled. Catcher in the Rye? What else? Help!

Stoner

I love anything by Steinbeck.

Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel
Catch 22 Joseph Heller

Love in the Time of Cholera
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Bell Jar
White Teeth
I Capture the Castle
A Passage to India
Schindler’s Ark
Doctor Zhivago
Cold Comfort Farm
The Life and Loves of a She Devil
The Wasp Factory

To kill a mockingbird
1984
Animal Farm

1984
20,000 leagues under the Sea
Moby Dick
Around the world in 80 days .

Phillip Larkin talking heads

On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Stranger Albert Camus
The Trial Franz Kafka
Atonement or Saturday Ian McEwen

Great shout on 100 Years of Solitude!

The Remains of the Day
Night Watch

The Color Purple
Rebecca
The Adrian Mole books

Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier
East of Eden or Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Dubliners by James Joyce
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Stoner by John Williams
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (if he’s feeling brave- audio helps with first time reading)
The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Giovanni’s Room or If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Some great suggestions! I'm adding:

The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
Another Country - Baldwin
The Handmaids Tale - Attwood

The Secret History
Diary of a Provincial Lady (how recent is “modern”? Probably alarmingly short for a 17yo!)

A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Handmaid's Tale
Piranesi
A Room With a View
Poor Cow
Trainspotting
Lolita
A Clockwork Orange
Rebecca
Brave New World
The Sea, The Sea

Ohhh these are brilliant!
Thank you 😊

I think the ‘modern’ is fairly flexible 🤣
I think in his head at the moment it’s anything not Shakespeare!

Lolita
The Remains of the Day
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
A Little Life

Bonjour tristesse by François Sagan, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, Perfume by Partick Suskind, The dice man by Luke Rhineheart, Flowers fir Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Collector by John Fowles, The bell jar - Sylvia plath

Some of the very best books published since 1900 might be a bit advanced (Joyce's Ulysses, for example, or Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse), while others, like Nabokov's Lolita, are a little edgy. I'd also avoid things like Gravity's Rainbow or Wolf Hall (for now).

Personally, I'd say these would be a great start for an intelligent young man just getting into books:

D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
George Orwell: 1984
Kafka: The Trial
Heller: Catch 22
Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Marquez: 1000 Years of Solitude
Ian McEwan: Atonement

These are brilliant suggestions. Lots of food for thought!

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
In the Ditch by Buchi Emecheta
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

I have read many of the above suggestions and whilst some are great there are plenty there that are pretty much unfinishable in my opinion or very hard going so he shouldn't be put off if they don't suit him. Everyone has different tastes but for example I would not recommend The Sea, the Sea (boring and everyone is unlikeable in it), Mrs Dalloway (a classic but it did nothing for me), I have read several Steinbeck greats and not enjoyed a single one, I spent 4 years trying to read Sons and Lovers before I eventually gave up, On the Road, The Bell Jar, White Teeth, read them all and could not have bothered.
Some suggestions off the top of my head not covered are:
Almost anything by Hemmingway - A Farewell to Arms, For whom the bell tolls, etc
I think Atonement is poor, a truly beautiful book covering similar ground is The Go Between
Almost anything by Graham Green - The Bomb Maker of Geneave, The Quite American, Travels with my Aunt, Our Man in Havana etc
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

Beloved by Toni Morrison (a Black woman writer… nobody wants 10 modern classics all by white men!)

More women writers:

'Love in a cold climate', Nancy Mitford
'The Cazelet Chronicles', Elizabeth Jane Howard
'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', Muriel Spark
'The Country Girls', Edna O'Brien
'Their Eyes Were Watching God', Zora Neale Hurston
'The Age of Innocence', Edith Wharton
'Milkman', Anna Burns
'Elmet', Fiona Mozley

Not established classics perhaps, but good enough imo to possibly be considered so in the future,

Never let me go
Clara and the sun
A gentleman in moscow
Tresspasses
Poor
Conclave
My fathers house
They both die at the end
My sister, the serial killer
Lord of the flies
Hamnet