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?

Tess of d’Urbervilles
Mill on the Floss

Totally agree on I Capture the Castle. Gorgeous novel.

Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Emma is good too, but those are my favourites.

There are some stunning classic novellas:
The Great Gatsby
Breakfast at Tiffany's
I am a Camera (The novel on which the musical Cabaret was based)
Of Mice & Men
Silas Marner
Jekyll & Hyde
The Third Man

Some good comic classics:
Our Man in Havana
Cold Comfort Farm
Decline and Fall
Scoop

The Comedians

Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Middle March or The Mill on the Floss
Cold Comfort Farm
1984
Short stories by Somerset Maugham
Sherlock Holmes’ short stories
Brave New World
The Age of Innocence
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night
The Grapes of Wrath
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye

I watched the 1982 adaptation of a couple of the Barchester books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Barchester_Chronicles and absolutely adored it. It started me on reading all of Trollope's books.

Likewise the 1981 Brideshead Revisited (which was a phenomenon here in Australia) got me onto Evelyn Waugh. I had loathed the only Waugh book, The Loved One, that I had previously read, but that was due to poor teaching. Love him now.

A dramatisation of "Anna of the Five Towns" got me reading all of Arnold Bennett. There seems to be a recurring theme here.

They're not classics, (written 1960s onwards, first book set in early Victorian times) but for some reason I love the Flashman Papers by George MacDonald Fraser. They are out of fashion now, and probably wouldn't get published, but Fraser treads a fine line between screamingly funny, and touching. You've got to approach them with an open mind and remember the character (who is completely aware of what a vile person he is) reflects some Victorian attitudes.

And my all time favourite is 'I, Claudius'. Don't forget "Claudius the god". And I'm sure you've seen the unsurpassable adaptation with Derel Jacobi.

I'm reading Barchester Towers at the moment and it's really wonderful. Witty and laugh out loud funny at times. Also, a fellow Arnold Bennett fan, there's a film of Anna of the Five Towns? Please tell me more!
My favourite Bennett is The Card, which I first read as a teenager. It's glorious and there's a lovely film of it with Alec Guinness as Denry and Glynis Johns playing naughty Ruth Earp (she's perfect).

Yes to Waugh, Decline and Fall is my favourite.

Or, as I discovered from my children, they have been watching too many tiktoks and are pronoucing everything like they are American.

Here is the serial of Anna of the Five Towns: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320822/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_1_nm_7_in_0_q_anna%2520of%2520the%2520five%2520
Yes I have seen Alec Guinness in "The Card". Love "Kind Hearts and Coronets" with him playing (I think) 8 roles, Dennis Price as the perfect slimey cad and Joan Greenwood playing a role that Glynis Johns could have. The first thing I remember seeing GJ in was a US comedy called "Glynis" where she was a writer who had a very vivid imagination. I was only little, but thought she was genuinely stunning and had a fabulous speaking voice. She was unique and perfect as the seductive mermaid, Miranda.

Love a lot of Waugh's books. Probably Brideshead is my favourite as I loved Castle Howard when I visited it, and the two have become irretrievably linked in my mind. Plus for me Anthony Andrews was note-perfect as Sebastian. Plus it was the first I read as an adult and made me realise how much poor teaching I suffered through at school with for example "The Loved One".I also found "A Handful of Dust" an interesting contrast.

Thank you so much, am going to find a way to watch it ❤️
Always nice to find a fellow Bennett fan. I'm amazed he's so unheard of.

I will have a look at the Waugh titles you mentioned. Have read Brideshead but not the others. Thank you

I have read somewhere, decades ago, that during Victorian times, Arnold Bennett's popularity rivalled Dickens'. I don't know if that is accurate or not, but yes, I can believe it.

I would love to see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159857/?ref_=fn_t_1 I know I have read the book, but can't remember it, so it might be time for a re-read. I had a brief crush on Peter McEnery from when I saw "The Moonspinners" which I had read a couple of times as a teenager, during my Mary Stewart phase (and was one of the things that got me to later visit Crete).

So, in my mind "Clayhanger" TV series has got two things going for it!

Yes he was very famous, he even has an omelette named after him!

Surely due a revival.

Completely agree with Miss Pettigrew - it’s a delight.

Great thread.

I think recommending classics to someone is a tricky task. Do you recommend classics that you yourself loved the most, or classics that you think the other person would enjoy knowing their tastes, or classics that everyone should read because they are critical to the canon and you see their influence filtering down through so many other books?

About ten years ago I decided to read ‘The Western Canon’ and then immediately realised that I will probably never get close to completing that goal. It doesn’t exist in a nice neat list for a start 😂 Turns out people have strong opinions on what should and shouldn’t be in it.

My endeavours have however helped me decide on some books that I think everyone should read because my reading life is so much richer now for having done so.

The Three Theban Plays - Sophocles
The Odyssey - Homer
Hamlet - Shakespeare
War and Peace - Tolstoy
Bleak House - Dickens

Of all of those War and Peace is my number one recommendation. My god that book has the whole world and everything in it.

As you enjoyed The War of the Worlds OP have you read I, Robot by Asimov? That’s great classic sci-fi.

War and Peace is wonderful isn't it!
I've just read David Copperfield and can't believe I left it so long to read. Bleak house is on my list now

I love A Christmas Carol and read it nearly every year so I'm not sure why it's taking me so long to dig into the rest of Dickens

I read War and Peace as a slow read over a year, a chapter a day. One of the best experiences of my life. I constantly want to just pick it up and start reading it again. Too many other classics to read first!
I’ve recently finished Wuthering Heights and am walking about in a bit of a daze at what an extraordinary and disturbing book that is.

Bleak House is I think my favourite Dickens and is such a great example of Victorian literature. It’s another one that has all the experiences of being human inside it, including spontaneous combustion which was an unexpected delight 😂

I need to reread wuthering heights I read it as a teen ,which feels a long time ago now

I also War and Peace as a teen. I was studying Russian history at a level so justified it to myself as being related to my studies, although it probably wasn't such a good idea to read it instead of revising . I remember being blown away by his writing on so many different topics all in the same book and I really want to read it again but there are so many other books to read too

@Lazychains I can highly recommend the experience of the slow read with W@P. I paid for a subscription to Footnotes and Tangents on Substack with Simon Haisell. He guides you over the year with a thread every day on each chapter, and a weekly summary with loads of rabbit holes to fall down. It became part of my daily routine to start each day with a cup of tea and a chapter of the book. I think I got infected by Tolstoy. I’ve got W&P deep in my veins now, like a sort of literary fungal mycelium.

Im doing the same this year with the Wolf Hall trilogy. Maybe come December I’ll have a similar chronic life altering contamination of the Mantel?

Riceyman Steps is a great book. It won Bennett the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Bennett himself said it was 'a jolly well constructed and done book' - i.e. the enigmatic narration was 75% of the book. However I'm not sure that I would recommend it as the place to start with Bennett: it's set in London not the Potteries and in that sense is untypical. Anna of the Five Towns is quite short but has the Bennett tragic intensity. The Clayhanger trilogy will keep you going for a while: my favourite is the third, These Twain, which captures the time when prosperous Midland and Northern merchants were forsaking even the affluent suburbs and moving to the country - which Clayhanger's wife wants to do and in the end he aquiesces.

Another suggestion: George Gissing's New Grub Street. If Bennett is out of fashion, Gissing is more so. The book is about struggling writers, some of them beavering away in the British Museum reading room. (Late nineteenth century: the reading room already has electric light.) I especially like the portrait of the Yule family's shabby-genteel north London household.

I'm currently trying to read it, but it's very dense. I started watching the BBC adaptation on iPlayer. Is that cheating?

one book I loved which is a modern classic is Circe. It's a reimagining of the Greek myths from the viewpoint of one of the more minor female characters. It really brought the Greek myths to life and is so beautifully written.