Which classics have you read?

One 'classic' I had a real hard time with was Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice.

I confess.... I went the easy route and just watched the older TV series and loved it.

I tried to read the book.. I really did (ha)
but I couldn't keep up with the language and you could tell somethings were supposed to come across as witty and quick.. yet.. the book made it all feel so ... flat..

But from the movie, ( not the newer one either ) the story was great , and the characters were fantastic.
Might make a good read for someone..

First Kafka. I read Metamorphosis three times. First time, nuttin'. Second time I was intrigued. Third time I found it tremendously moving. It's possible that if I read it again, I'd not like it now. But I think that it's the strongest of Kafka's works. If somebody's reading the classics, I'd put it on the list.

As for Mailer, his early works were powerful. Strong use of language. Vivid depictions of people and events. A very good writer. After he wrote Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (two excellent nonfiction works), I found that his fiction deteriorated. I could no longer take his work seriously. I think he lost whatever it was he had. But the early works I recommend.

This seems to happen to many writers. They start off strong and lose the spark--the special something.

Other relatively contemporary works worth investigating (IMO) are:

Bernard Malamud, The Natural, The Fixer
John Barth, Gile Goat-Boy
Truman Capote, Other Voices Other Rooms

Oh man, I've got a bunch.

Emma - Jane Austen
Old Man & the Sea - Hemingway
Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
The Red Pony - Steinbeck
Return of the Native - Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Hardy
Wuthering Heights - Bronte
Metamorphosis - Kafka
Amerika - Kafka
The Trial - Kafka
The Castle - Kafka
plus I've probably read just about all of his short stories
Magic Mountain - Mann
Death in Venice - Mann
Siddhartha - Hesse
Demian - Hesse
On the Road - Kerouac
The Dharma Bums - Kerouac
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Suetonius
Tacitus
Inferno - Dante
Purgatorio - Dante
Paradisio - Dante
Huck Finn - Twain
Tom Sawyer - Twain
Turn of the Screw - James
White Fang - Jack London
Call of the Wild - Jack London
Johnny Tremain - Esther Forbes (dunno if that's considered a classic)
Alice in Wonderland - Carroll
Through the Looking Glass - Carroll
Three Sisters - Chekhov
Death of a Salesman - Miller
The Skin of our Teeth - Wilder
Our Town - Wilder
a lot of Shakespeare, mainly the tragedies
Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O'Neill
A Doll's House - Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde
The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Crime & Punishment - Dostoyevskii
In Cold Blood - Capote
Iliad - Homer
Odyssey - Homer
Aeneid
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
Great Expectations - Dickens
Ragtime - Doctorow
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
1984 - Orwell
Animal Farm - Orwell
Gulliver's Travels - Swift
much of Vonnegut
Walden - Thoreau
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Dracula - Stoker
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

I used this list: http://www.thewritingtutor.biz/suggested_reading/APliteraturebyauthor.php as a memory guide. A lot of these were read in High School; I had an unbelievable AP English teacher, Kitty Lindsay.

A few I have on my list to read are Beowulf and Pepys.

Dang, that's a big list.

Very interesting lists & comments.

I've tried, but Kafka and Thomas Hardy are just not to my taste. Probably my fault.

The Thornton Wilder entry is intriguing.. "The Bridge at San Louis Rey" left an unforgettable impression on me. I haven't read "Skin of our Teath" -- is it as good?

I had mostly focused on novels of the last two centuries, but agree that from Tacitus to Dante there is much to treasure.

Teeth is okay (that sounds ungrammatical); Our Town is really the better play.

I wasn't a huge fan of Hardy, mainly trying to see if the first read (Tess) was flukey, but, no, I'm still not a fan. I know I read more Hesse but I'm drawing blanks on the titles. Plus I read a bunch of Philosophy if that counts, things like Being & Time (Heidegger). Yeesh I doubt I could get through it now.

The only Hesse I read and enjoyed was Glass bead game.

Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a classic to me. It gave me my first thudding clue that people in the sixteenth century were just like us.
It starts out with his not wanting to study/work at what his father wanted him to.. Well, maybe not my first clue, but the book had a major impact on my sense of time and history. I read somewhere that that was the first autobiography; I've no idea if that is true.

There are a couple of translations available, one by George Bull and one by John Symonds. I liked one better than the other, but don't remember which, alas.


I did like Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Have read a lot of Kafka short stories, but not Metamorphosis, et al. Liked the short stories, what I remember of them.

Fine. I'll read East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath then...

Loved the Cannery Row.

Is John Irving considered classic literature?If yes, I'm in luck, as i read all of his books.

I also need to add two authors not mentioned yet:

Mikhail Bulgakov (Master and Margarita) and

William Sarroyan (the Human Comedy, Daring Young Man on a Flying Trapeze, Tracy's Tiger...)

I've read most of Dostoyevsky (even chugged through the White Nights in Russian) except for the Demons. I started it on a vacation, but it belonged to the house there, so I didn't finish... It's next on the list.

From home i'd also add Karel Capek. I also love Mayakovski, but that's mostly poetry.

My tastes.

Kafka is always great, In the Penal Colony is amazing.

As for Hesse, I think there's an age. Demian seemed too didactic for my taste in my late teens; friends in the early teens loved it.
Read Narcissus and Goldmund at age 30, still think it's a masterpiece.

Old Man and the Sea... sooooooo boring.

Dante: Limbo is very good, Hell is great, Purgatory is good, Heaven is sooooo boring.

Nineteen Eighty-Four ranks as the second best novel I've read in the XX Century.

Kafka's Penal Colony perhaps the only reason to read any Kafka.
In my mind a true classic, modern, would be Vonnegut's Player Piano.

I forget which Vonnegut I liked best...

I never got to Heaven, but liked Hell and Purgatory..

Interesting and varied reactions. OK, now I feel (a little) bad about not liking Kafka! I found Benvenuto Cellini a more interesting character than Gregor Samsa. Haven't read the Penal Colony: perhaps I'll try.

fbaezer, You mentioned the confusing thicket of the Russian novels. However, once you have grasped the patronymics (and evidently you have) that aspect isn't so bad. Perhaps you should consider starting with Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time". Though it is the oldest of thiose I cited, it is the most contemporary in character development (also the shortest of the pack). It is set in Chechnya soon after the Russian conquest: fascinating story within a story, and a central character which camus later imitated in "The Stranger".

Someone mentioned Joseph Conrad. My favorites are "Almayer's Folly", "The Nigger of the Narcissus". and "Nostromo".

Conrad's "Youth" influenced me (badly, as I see it in the retrospective) during my school time, when we read it in English classes.

And I really didn't like Kaffka - we read him in English classes as well.

While we're on the subject of Russian writers, I'm adding two more works. A third by Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov have already been mentioned): The Idiot.

And a more contemporary work--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward.

Also have two more U.S. writers to add to the mix. Henry James, Washington Square. (Portrait of a Lady is also good.) And Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

I love this:

and this:

: )


Cancer Ward, now there was a book...

Well, they have a review here that sumarizes my opinion: Sepulveda, the old man

Ah, excellent, more folks have read In the Penal Colony. It's so, so, I dunno -- it's creepy and very modern mechanically and eef it still gives shudders but not in cheap horror ways. More like viscerally, that you know that people could be capable of that.

And Narcissus & Goldmund! That's a title I was trying to remember!

What about Don Quixote! That's another one I forgot to list.

And the "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovic". A tiny book, but one of the most powerful - rang a little too close to home. It is literally a one day in the life of this guy in a gulag.

Dag, Thought of A Day in the Life after I posted. You're right. A small gem. Powerful. Personal.