Classics - what would you recommend to me?

[pippistrelle]

I've resolved to read more classics this year.

I'm currently reading 'Middlemarch' and finding it a slog. Towards the end of last year, I read 'Northanger Abbey' which I found okay.

They can be of the more modern variety so I also read some Maigret short stories and Dashiell Hammet's 'The Thin Man'. Maigret was okay, didn't much like the Hammet.

Classics I have enjoyed - ' A Tale of Two Cities', and I absolutely love 'The War of the Worlds'. And my all time favourite is 'I, Claudius'.

Based on that skeleton information, what else might I enjoy?

North and South is a much easier read than Middlemarch.

I wonder if Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns novels would be up your street? Quite readable and with a dose of bleak Victorian industrialism.

You might like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

That's on my 2020 list but I also read Anna of the Five Towns later and enjoyed that more.
Mind you I read North and South while WFH and home schooling so I might not have been in a very relaxed frame of mind.

Oh yes, Arnold Bennett is a good shout.

I also really enjoyed Passing by Nella Larsen. Published in 1929 I think.

I'm a big fan of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell (very underrated) and Anthony Trollope. In some of Trollope's books not an awful lot happens but they just absorb you into the time and place so it's great escapism in that way. And he has his surprisingly modern moments and unexpected twists, especially Orley Farm

I do have a copy of Riceymand Steps by Bennett. I wonder if that's a good place to start with him.

I am not a Hardy Fan. That said, I have vowed to re-read Tess this year to see if I hate it as much now as I did as the very young person I was when I first read it.

Short stories are good if you fancy a shorter read, eg ghost stories of M R James, PG Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster stories, Scott Fitzgerald's Diamond as Big as the Ritz story collection etc. Not sure if they count as classics, but they are old at least!

And Angela Carter fairy tales too

I think I'd like to try Trollope but I'm unsure where to start. Is The Way We Live Now a good place?

I'm a big fan of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell (very underrated) and Anthony Trollope. In some of Trollope's books not an awful lot happens but they just absorb you into the time and place so it's great escapism in that way. And he has his surprisingly modern moments and unexpected twists, especially Orley Farm

Hardy is too mushy and sentimental for me, but Jude took the narrative back to the city.

How about Iris Murdoch? I enjoyed A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Well, enjoyed might be the wrong word but I found it fascinating.

BBC Sounds has Julie Andrews reading Pride and Prejudice if you’d like an audiobook

I find your suggestions intriguing @TwoTuesday. Love Angela Carter, love Wodehouse (the ultimate comfort read), I find MR James interesting as a person but kind of dull as a writer. Scott Fitzgerald can do one. I cannot compute how a person can love the first two even the first three but then also Scott Fitzgerald.

I think mainly that I am reaslising that I hate anything that I ever had to study - even tangentially - at any point.

Brideshead Revisited
The Great Gatsby
Cider with Rosie

I do like Iris Murdoch, so they would be re-reads but again it would be interesting to see how I feel about them now.

Does Laurence Sterne have any champions?

Don't forget classic children's fiction, for something lighter
E. Nesbit
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Arthur Ransome
Louisa M Alcott
L.M. Montgomery
to mention just a few

Oh, and not children's, but Sherlock Holmes. Also fairly undemanding.

I meant We Have Always Lived in the House on the Hill by Shirley Jackson.

Oh yes, agreed.

The Little House on the Prairie collection
The Borrowers
The Anne of Avonlea series
Ballet Shoes

I’m not very keen, studied his works (Eng Lit graduate) but did not get the joke.

Thanks for this.

I left out my absolute personal favourite, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.

A Handful of Dust is my favourite Waugh. Poor Tony.

Based on some of your likes I wonder if you'd like Miss Buncle's Book and Tory Heaven (both published by Persephone) as well as some Monica Dickens and Dorothy Whipple.

And The Making of a Marchioness is glorious escapism.

Do you like Nancy Mitford?

Ballet Shoes

Oh yes, I'd forgotten Noel Streatfeild. I was trying to think of all the authors I read as a child, and knew I had missed some.

A lot of the best children's fiction, and even some of the less good, you learned stuff while still being immersed in the story - about life in the Lakes or on the Broads or what was involved in being a child actor. Or all about the Anschluss - points to username.

I do quite like Nancy Mitford.

Those chldren's classics are a list of Christmas and birthday presents from my great aunt, if you add Heidi. She gave me Heidi three times in a row.