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.

I loved Great Expectations and David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights.

i don’t know how modern you want to go or if they would be called classics but the Adrian Mole Diaries are my favourite books ever!

Whole heartedly agree with Adrian Mole!

Oliver twist is quite short and an easy enough read. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is great too, I couldn't get into The Woman in White at all. Lady Susan is also a quick, easy read.

Ah I loved The Mill on the Floss, the poor little wench. Silas Marner is a much easier read though, a lovely book.

All of Daphne du Maurier’s books

Jerome k Jerome, Three Men in a boat is very funny.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Of Mice and Men. There's quite a few Steinbeck novellas which I think are great and you can pick up fairly easily in collected volumes.
I found Brave New World very easy to read if you're interested in any sort of dystopia. I'd also suggest A Handmaid's Tale, in the same vein.
Little Women.
I liked The Moonstone, agree The Woman in White definitely wasn't as enjoyable.

I wouldn't personally call any Dickens easy but to each their own!

Echoing all the recommendations here for Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (Du Maurier)
North and South (Gaskell)
Vanity Fair (Thackeray)

Vanity Fair in particular is wonderful for its historical setting, the amazing deeply flawed protagonist that is Becky Sharpe and the plot that rattles along nicely. It’s also funny, laugh out loud funny. It’s nice to read a classic that makes you laugh.

I’m a massive fan of Dickens but acknowledge that he isnt beloved by everyone. David Copperfield is my entry level recommendation. Great cast of characters and an engaging plot. It’s funny too. After you finish David you can then read Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s modern retelling. Also very good.

Along the same lines of reading a classic and then a modern retelling I’m going to throw in a curve ball of Antigone by Sophocles followed by Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Yes! Sophocles 😂. The play is a quick read and I was astonished at how straight forward and relatively easy it was to read. Much easier than Shakespeare. You feel fucking MARVELLOUSLY delighted with yourself for reading Sophocles and then you can read Home Fire and have all sorts of internal shivers of mental zingy pleasure at making connections between a play written in 442 BC and a novel that won the Womens’ Prize for Fiction in 2018.

Some that are great without needing a degree to decipher:

The Colour Purple
Great Expectations
Emma
The Picture of Dorian Grey
Moby Dick

Vanity Fair
Silas Marner

Both are easy reads

Arnold Bennett seems to be (unjustly) overlooked these days, but the so-called "Five Towns" novels are well worth a read - I particularly enjoyed the Clayhanger series. Lewis Grassic Gibbon is also worth exploring. I loved the "Scots Quair" trilogy, Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite.

Coincidentally, there were excellent TV adaptations of both these series of novels, well worth checking out in their own right.

I actually suggest you read a classic as if you were studying it - take notes, read in short bursts. Alongside a more modern, pacey and not too demanding read. This has really worked for me to get a few more classics under my belt as I just can't read them in bed before sleep - I need something else.

I wouldn't describe Beloved as a 'classic'. It's OK, but I agree with Harold Bloom that it's overpraised and overrated.

If you want classics that are either short or easy to read (or both):

Voltaire: Candide
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen: Emma
George Eliot: Silas Marner (Middlemarch is her masterpiece, but it's hard going)
Dickens: Hard Times
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray
Kipling: Kim
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbevilles
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
Nabokov: Lolita
James Joyce: Dubliners
George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London
Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Iris Murdoch: The Bell
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Ian McEwan: Atonement

Frankenstein (Shelley)
Jude the Obscure (Hardy)
The Picture of Dorien Grey (Wilde)
Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (du Maurier)
The Woman in Black (Hill)
The House on Haunted Hill

For more modern classics- The Secret History (Donna Tartt), and Leviathan (Paul Auster)

I really want to read some Agatha Christie and John le Carre

Try Great Expectations by Dickens. It is a rollicking easy to read introduction to Dickens.

I'll add Liza of Lambeth by W Somerset Maugham. Short but powerful. **

Slightly offbeat but some of the Zola novels are quite gripping and page-turnery. Nana/ L'assomoir/ Therese Raquin... in translation of course (unless you really want to take it up a gear!!)

Modern classics:
A Farewell to Arms
Grapes of Wrath
To Kill a Mockingbird

The first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities is a nightmare - it nearly stopped me reading it, but if you carry on, it's a great story.

Woman in white is great and The Moonstone.

Im working my way through the Anne of Green Gables series, loving them.

I think most Dickens books aren’t too complicated to read, they are long though!

I read Pride and prejudice recently and loved it.

Laughing at people suggesting Anna Karenina and War and Peace as easy reads! I’m a speed reader and those books took me so long. I rarely get confused either but bloody hell I didn’t know who was who at some points!
Can’t see that anyone has suggest Emma yet. It’s my favourite Austen.
I agree with other suggestions of Great Expectations and The Secret Garden.
I would also add Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. It’s not a classic but set in WW1 and it’s the kind of book that really stays with you for a long time.

Lord of the flies
1984
20,000 leagues
animal farm
Brave new world
Handmaids tale
great gatsby

Birdsong is a great book.

Also the Regeneration series by Pat Barker is wonderful. Includes an imagined appearance by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Orwell is always good. 1984 is fantastic.
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
The Mill on the Floss - George Elliot.
I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith (technically a young person’s novel but still a great read.)
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Attwood

Is no one else here disappointed because they clicked on the thread title in active, and came ready to discuss MN classics? I can recommend penis beaker and the Korean lady one. Also love that PFB one.

Trollope (Anthony, but Joanna also wrote some good ones). In particular, I recommend the Barchester Chronicles.