Classics....that are reasonably easy to read

[Manymoresometimes]

I've always read books, but never really classics, except Jane Eye. Ive read Beloved a part of an adult GCSE course and hated it, but maybe because i was younger.

Wuthering Heights and now Lord of the Flies on the BBC (which im hating) has made me thought. im a big grownup (dont laugh) and i need to try some classics.

All modern books bore me, HELP. Im open to anything.

Some of the books mentioned, I didn’t find easy at all!

My vote goes to Daphne du Maurier, George Orwell and Neville Shute.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

all awesome, and easy reads imo

I think you’ve made the right choice with The Woman in White. It has a modern vibe due to the mystery element, but you still get to enjoy the wonderful writing of the time in which it was written. Very readable and quite witty.

I love Vanity Fair. It was one of the first classic novels I read in my early twenties after being completely turned off the classics at school and refusing to read any for a few years. There is no doubt that it takes time to adjust to the language, but you get used to it.

Treasure Island is a favourite of mine
Northanger Abbey is wonderful and makes you realise that teenage girls have been the same for centuries.
Cold Comfort Farm is fab
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is one of my comfort reads

Middlemarch is so well written that it's an easier read/listen than I thought it would be. Sometimes with the Victorians I get lost in the meandering sentences.

I highly recommend Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey.

Emma, sense and sensibility in fact all of the Austen books I find easy to read. If they’re in the same stratosphere then Animal Farm and 1984 are easy too as is Brighton Rock.

Love the Bell Jar. Such a shame Plath had such a tragic life.

I am glad you started this thread because I tried to read Wuthering heights but really struggled and didn't finish it.

Angus Wilson (Anglo Saxon Attitudes, Such Darling Dodos) makes me laugh out loud.

Steinbeck is good also Herman Hesse. If you class I Capture the Castle as a classic there’s that.

Children’s classics are a great entry point, because you can get used to the conventions and language at a simpler level.

I love to supplement reading by listening to podcast discussions about the books.

Some classics are available free on Spotify if you have a subscription and I find it can be nice to listen to parts I’ve already read, spoken aloud with good pacing, accents, voices etc. I’ve found that improves my silent reading, and is helpful with more challenging authors.

Persuasion. My favourite Austen at every stage in the life that I have read it.

Agree about Rebecca. Gripping.

Times Arrow by Martin Amis if that counts as a classic.

The Snow Goose. Beautiful.

Timothy West reading Trollope (Phineas Finn) I found a very enjoyable listen. Trollope is easy to read.

I haven't read War and Peace, but found that Anna Karenina is not easy, but also not nearly as hard as I'd anticipated. This sounds daft, but I don't think I'd quite considered that books in translation are always translated into more or less current prose (assuming you're reading a recent translation). I thought Tolstoy would read like Dickens but I would say to actually read and parse it's much easier.

Keeping track of the characters is hard. I was also astonished, though, with how modern some of the characters felt. I had thought before reading it that Anna Karenina would be a tragic, dramatic tale of doomed love - but actually Anna is selfish and self-destructive. And the bit where Levin suddenly, instantly, falls in love with his toddler son just felt so real and tangible and relatable.

Wow ladies, thank you so much for all the suggestions.

Some ive heard of, but others are totally new to me.

And to answer the question, i dont "feel" like i should read classics, i just want something different. And the classics must have lasted for a reason!

I'm fed up of the rom-com books, down troddden mums and thrillers where a girl gets kidnapped 😂

I do love a tear jerker as well!

To Kill A Mockingbird
Sherlock Holmes
1984

All are easy to read and absolutely gripping.

If you like Mumsnet, you'll struggle with Jane Eyre. I've actually decided never to read it again. The language is great, readable but with some unusual words. Some great flashes of independence and women's rights but the awful men, the grinding poverty, the vulnerability of an 18 year old. The implausibility of coincidences.
It has some interesting bits - new kid at boarding school, how thoughtful that you get to sleep, first night, in the teachers bed.

I'm going to reread a lot of classics that I previously read before the internet sucked my concentration span.

On my list, please comment if you've reread recently:
Children of the New Forrest
Swallows and Amazon's ( I now find Narnia hard)
Silas Marner
Wurthering Heights
Elizabeth Gaskell
Thomas Hardy, read Tess when pregnant and was just overwhelmed

And I recommend
Monkey
Vanity Fair then you could update with Bonfire of the Vanities
The Odessey, Emily Wilson translation and then read Circe
And I do like the Thomas Hardy which starts with the selling of his wife at a fair - The Mayor of Casterbridge

@BookEngine I read North and South recently and absolutely loved it. I plan to read Cranford next

I agree about Jane Eyre I enjoyed it as a teen but find it deeply uncomfortable to read now

I didn't find Frankenstein or Dracula easy to read to be honest, very slow going.

Jane Austen is VERY readable, quite the page turner.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a good mystery.

To Kill a Mockingbird & Catcher in the Rye or both worth reading and easy to see why they are regarded as classics, although ' Catcher' is quite dated it was very ' edgy' when it was released.

All Graham Greene stories read well, and I love ' The Secret Agent' by Joseph Conrad

Don’t read the Mill on the Floss, unbelievably tedious. Do read Silas Marner though :)

This is maybe going to sound really patronising, OP, but it honestly isn't meant to. I would maybe start with something that's a GCSE set text - those books are chosen (by experts!) because they are considered works of importance/ that have enduring themes, and they include some of the 'classics' people have listed on this thread - but setting it as a GCSE text does mean it's been judged as approachable for a bright and engaged but relatively general reader. There's a selection of them here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/gcse-english-literature-set-texts?page=1

Yes Mill on the Floss put me off George Elliott for a long time, and then I finally read Middlemarch and loved it. I need to try Silas Marner next

I have loads of the Penguin classics that were £1 in a bookshop 30 years ago.
My favourites have been:

Moll Flanders
The Mayor of Casterbridge (love how you think things can’t get any worse, but they do!)
The Woodlanders
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
Far from the Madding Crowd
(basically any Hardy, I’ve read them all and they’re all different from high drama to gentle observation with a story)
Mrs Dalloway
North and South
Cranford
Mary Barton
Larkrise to Candleford
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Fanny Hill
Ethan Frome
The Scarlet Letter

I didn’t enjoy The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t my scene.

Adding my vote to:
Ethan Frome
Cold Comfort Farm
The Woman in White

Also Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is an amazing epistolary book.
Scarlet and Black, also fab and French. There's an amazing 90s TV adaptation too, with Rachel Weisz and Ewan McGregor.

If you like Pride and Prejudice, the PD James follow up, Death Comes to Pemberley is excellent.

I used to like E.M Forster in my teens. Howard's End and A Passage to India.
Also Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, which is the basis for Caberet.

Brideshead Revisited is brilliant too.

Daphne du Maurier is very readable - Rebecca is a good one to start with. My favourite is Jamaica Inn.

Little Women is a wonderful and easy read.

Enjoy!