Classic Literature Must Reads Please!

[ALBRIEF]

Hello! My name is Ashley and I am brand new to this forum. I am a new Spanish and History teacher and now that I am done with college I actually have time to read for pleasure. I want to start reading the classics. Does anyone have a list...any genre/ountry/authors that I can start with? So far I've read Pride and Prejudice, Brave New World, A Christmas Carol and am starting The Jungle. Thank You!

*country

[liberal viewer]

Hello! My name is Ashley and I am brand new to this forum. I am a new Spanish and History teacher and now that I am done with college I actually have time to read for pleasure. I want to start reading the classics. Does anyone have a list...any genre/ountry/authors that I can start with? So far I've read Pride and Prejudice, Brave New World, A Christmas Carol and am starting The Jungle. Thank You!
:
:
It is going to sound like a cliché, but you must read:
Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Sophocles: Antigone and Oedipus Rex
Virgil: The Aeneid
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Dante: the Comedy
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.

If you like Spanish lit:
Cervantes: El Quijote
Lope de Vega: Fuenteovejuna
Calderón de la Barca: El Alcalde de Zalamea y la Vida es Sueño
The poetry of Quevedo, Góngora and San Juan de la Cruz.
You can't go wrong with these choices!
Cheers

[Niamh]

The History of Tom Jones a Foundling by Henry Feilding
Persuasion and Mansfeild Park by Jane Austin
The Massacre of Paris and Dr Faustus By Christopher Marlowe
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

[Nico87]

How about everything from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov?

[Dori]

How about everything from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov?

And Turgenev. ;)

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Hugo
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Fathers and Sons by Turgenev
Candide by Voltaire
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck

[Scheherazade]

Decameron by Boccaccio

[manolia]

Every Dickens' book :D

[Etienne]

I believe the 10 books you should start from:

Dante - The Divine Comedy
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Shakespeare - Plays
Voltaire - Tales
Goethe - Faust
Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Tolstoy - War and Peace
Dickens - David Copperfield
Kafka - The Trial

[stlukesguild]

Etienne... good starting point. I'd throw in The Odyssey, The Bible, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, J.L. Borges' Labyrinths, Milton's Paradise Lost, and the selected poems of Shelley, Keats, Blake, and Wordsworth... and while we're on the poets: Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal

[andave_ya]

The Bible. Lord of the Rings. Definitely Keats, Byron. Faust by Marlowe is very interesting too.

[LadyWentworth]

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Persuasion - Jane Austen

[crazefest456]

don't forget Prometheus Bound

[aabbcc]

Excluded pieces of national literature whose names would probably not mean much to you, and which are more important in the context of national than in the context of European/world literature, here is the basic list from my lycée, which I believe to be very good as a starting point for Literature studies:

Year 1
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Bible - excerpts
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Aeschyles - Prometheus Bound
Euripides - Electra
Plautus - Aulularia
Vergil - Aeneis
Ovid - Metamorphoses

Year 2
Alighieri, D. - Inferno with excerpts of other two parts of La Divina Commedia
Petrarca, F. - Canzoniere
Boccaccio, G. - Decameron
de Cervantes, M. - Don Quijote
Shakespeare, W. - Hamlet
Shakespeare, W. - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, W. - Macbeth
Calderon de la Barca, P. - La Vida es Sueno
Corneille, P. - Cid
Racine, J. - Fedra
Moliere - L'Avare
Moliere - Le Misanthrope
Goldoni, C. - La Locandiera
Voltaire - Candide
Schiller, F. - The Robbers
Hugo, V. - The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Les Miserables

Year 3
Goethe, J. W. - The Sorrows of Young Wether
Goethe, J. W. - Faust
Byron, G. G. - Childe Harold
Poe, E. A. - selected poetry and prose
Pushkin, A. S. - Eugene Onegin
Lermontov, M. Ju. - A Hero of Our Time
Balzac, H. de - Father Goriot
Flaubert, G. - Madame Bovary
Turgenev, I. S. - Notes of a Hunter
Turgenev, I. S. - Fathers and Sons
Gogol, N. V. - The Overcoat
Dostoevsky, F. M. - Crime and Punishment
Tolstoy, L. N. - Anna Karenina
Zola, E. - Germinal or Therese Raquin
Maupassant, G. de - selected short stories
Ibsen, H. - Nora

Year 4
Baudelaire, Ch. - Les Fleurs du Mal
Proust, M. - Combray
Pirandello, L. - Six Characters in Search of an Author
Kafka, F. - The Metamorphosis
Kafka, F. - The Trial
Hemingway, E. - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Fauklner, W. - The Sound and the Fury
Brecht, B. - Mother Courage and Her Children
Sartre, J. P. - Nausea
Camus, A. - The Stranger
Ionesco, E. - The Chairs
Ionesco, E. - The Bald Soprano
Beckett, S. - Waiting for Godot
Mann, Th. - The Death in Venice
Hesse, H. - The Steppenwolf
Bulgakov, M. - Master and Margarita

As any list, it is imperfect (and I probably missed some, could not remember all of them, the lists are huge); but there are some good things about it. It is more-less chronological (year 1 classical antiquity, plus a couple of other works; year 2 up to romanticism, etc.), and if approached chronologically and in addition with the textbooks we used (which had numerous excerpts from other works of same period or movement, theoretical essays on history and theory of literature for each period, etc), it can do wonders and give to a young person a nice overview of, European at least (and national, which is excluded here), literature.
You do not need to approach it chronologically, as you are not in high school any longer and threatened by grades as we were when reading this; you can just pick what you like off the list and enjoy it.
I hope it helped a bit.

[NickAdams]

Anastasija: This is just what I need. I would expand a little (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Marginl, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber), but it's a great starting point. Thank you for posting this. Odd that this is only a High School list.

[J.D.]

I was in a similar position regarding the "classics" a while ago. What did it for me was trying to read Joyce's Ulysses. Dude's allusions were so difficult that I decided to return to classical sources to figure them out. One thing led to another, and I've been on my own odyssey through classical and classic lit. ever since.

Here's what I have read so far:

Homer--Iliad, Odyssey
Hesiod--Works and Days, Theogony
Aeschylus--Oresteia
Sophocles--Oedipus the King, Antigone
Euripides--Trojan Women, Medea
Aristophanes--The Clouds, The Frogs
Pindar--The Odes of Pindar
Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, others--Greek Lyric Poetry
Plato--Republic, Ion, Symposium, Apology, Crito
Aristotle--Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, Rhetoric
Herodotus--Histories
Thucydides--Peloponnesian War
Aesop--Fables

Plautus--The Captives
Terence--The Brothers
Lucretius--The Nature of Things
Epicurus--Basic Writings
Livy--The Wars with Hannibal
Caesar--The War Commentaries
Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Catullus--The Latin Poets
Ovid-Metamorphoses, The Art of Love
Virgil--Aeneid
Cicero--Second Philippic (Against Marc Antony), On Friendship, On Old Age, Personal Letters
Lucius Apuleius--The Golden Asse
Suetonius--The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Marcus Aurelius -- Meditations
Plutarch--Selected Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Pliny the Younger--Letters (especially concerning the eruption of Vesuvius)
Seneca--On Tranquility of Mind, Letters of a Stoic

The Gospels
St. Augustine of Hippo--Confessions
Boethius--The Consolation of Philosophy
St. Benedict--The Rule of St. Benedict
The Quran
Bede--The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
The Arabian Nights
Beowulf
The Song of Roland
The Nibelungenlied
The Mabinogion
Gawain and the Green Night
Thomas Malory--Le Morte D'Arthur
Dante--The Comedy (or Divine Comedy)

(Please excuse any poor spelling. :))

I am currently moving around in the middle ages based on what interests me at a given moment, and I plan to keep moving through "the Canon" by time period.

Here are two other things that have helped me get the most out of my readings: I read history books and contemperary criticisms (which can be found on EBSCO, LION, or other databases at the local library) in order to make sure I've got the context of the books; in addition, I also try to keep a journal or write a pseudo-scholarly piece on each thing I read.

Good luck. If you are self-motivated and have your summers off, you can really educate yourself in the classics.

[Etienne]

Since you seem intent to read the main philosophical works of the periods, I'd like to suggest you to read Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed and Averroes The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Dante's Monarchy is also a great work. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologia, theological work, but an important one) should also be a must and so is Ockham, he has both philosophical and political works. Besides this, Pseudo-Denys (which should be the first to read if you want to go in chronological order) would also be an important figure. Pierre Abelard's Sentences was the most commented work of the Middle-Ages, so you might want to get into that.

[tscherff]

http://www.amazon.com/Novel-100-Ranking-Greatest-Novels/dp/0816045585/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198198363&sr=1-1

amazon site for the novel 100. excellent resource for you. gives a wide range of titles including many foreign writers. also gives a brief sysnopsis of the book and the reasons why it is one of the best. he also has one for the best books if you care to go beyond fiction.

like any list of this type, there are differences of opinion.
here is on e he missed

sometimes a great notion by ken kesey---best book i ever read

[thescholar]

Bram Stoker's Dracula?

[hellsapoppin]

There are a great many classics written by non Westerners such as:

Soseki Natsume I Am A Cat

Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji

Tosan Shimazaki's The Broken Commandment


I sincerely believe you will find these to be quite eye opening.

[ALBRIEF]

Thank you for all of your suggestions! :) They really helped a lot!

[rgdmalaysia]

Some books ignored when the term "classics" is used that are must reads....

Independent People by Halldor Laxness
The Cairo Trilogy(Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) by Naguib Mahfouz
The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
and
anything by Yasunari Kawabata or Knut Hamsun

[stlukesguild]

If you're looking for the philosophical lit of the era don't forget Michel Montaigne's essays.

[jon1jt]

Hello! My name is Ashley and I am brand new to this forum. I am a new Spanish and History teacher and now that I am done with college I actually have time to read for pleasure.


Or do you mean now that you're done with college you actually have time to read for the sake of knowledge? ;)

[jlb4tlb]

Hello! My name is Ashley and I am brand new to this forum. I am a new Spanish and History teacher and now that I am done with college I actually have time to read for pleasure. I want to start reading the classics. Does anyone have a list...any genre/ountry/authors that I can start with? So far I've read Pride and Prejudice, Brave New World, A Christmas Carol and am starting The Jungle. Thank You!

*country

The following list might help, it has its limilations as all of the boooks are written in english and the fact that they were written in the last 100 or so years ago.

Modern library´s 100 best novels of 20 century



Rank Novel Author
1 ULYSSES James Joyce
2 THE GREAT GATSBY F. Scott Fitzgerald
3 A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN James Joyce
4 LOLITA Vladimir Nabokov
5 BRAVE NEW WORLD Aldous Huxley
6 THE SOUND AND THE FURY William Faulkner
7 CATCH-22 Joseph Heller
8 DARKNESS AT NOON Arthur Koestler
9 SONS AND LOVERS D.H. Lawrence
10 THE GRAPES OF WRATH John Steinbeck
11 UNDER THE VOLCANO Malcolm Lowry
12 THE WAY OF ALL FLESH Samuel Butler
13 1984 George Orwell
14 I CLAUDIUS Robert Graves
15 TO THE LIGHTHOUSE Virginia Woolf
16 AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY Theodore Dreiser
17 THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER Carson McCullers
18 SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE Kurt Vonnegut
19 INVISIBLE MAN Ralph Ellison
20 NATIVE SON Richard Wright
21 HENDERSON THE RAIN KING Saul Bellow
22 APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA John O'Hara
23 U.S.A. John Dos Passos
24 WINESBURG, OHIO Sherwood Anderson
25 A PASSAGE TO INDIA E.M. Forster
26 THE WINGS OF THE DOVE Henry James
27 THE AMBASSADORS Henry James
28 TENDER IS THE NIGHT F. Scott Fitzgerald
29 THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY James T. Farrell
30 THE GOOD SOLDIER Ford Madox Ford
31 ANIMAL FARM George Orwell
32 THE GOLDEN BOWL Henry James
33 SISTER CARRIE Theodore Dreiser
34 A HANDFUL OF DUST Evelyn Waugh
35 AS I LAY DYING William Faulkner
36 ALL THE KING'S MEN Robert Penn Warren
37 THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY Thornton Wilder
38 HOWARDS END E.M. Forster
39 GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN James Baldwin
40 THE HEART OF THE MATTER Graham Greene
41 LORD OF THE FLIES William Golding
42 DELIVERANCE James Dickey
43 A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME Anthony Powell
44 POINT COUNTER POINT Aldous Huxley
45 THE SUN ALSO RISES Ernest Hemingway
46 THE SECRET AGENT Joseph Conrad
47 NOSTROMO Joseph Conrad
48 THE RAINBOW D.H. Lawrence
49 WOMEN IN LOVE D.H. Lawrence
50 TROPIC OF CANCER Henry Miller
51 THE NAKED AND THE DEAD Norman Mailer
52 PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT Philip Roth
53 PALE FIRE Vladimir Nabokov
54 LIGHT IN AUGUST William Faulkner
55 ON THE ROAD Jack Kerouac
56 THE MALTESE FALCON Dashiell Hammett
57 PARADE'S END Ford Madox Ford
58 THE AGE OF INNOCENCE Edith Wharton
59 ZULEIKA DOBSON Max Beerbohm
60 THE MOVIEGOER Walker Percy
61 DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP Willa Cather
62 FROM HERE TO ETERNITY James Jones
63 THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES John Cheever
64 THE CATCHER IN THE RYE J.D. Salinger
65 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Anthony Burgess
66 OF HUMAN BONDAGE W. Somerset Maugham
67 HEART OF DARKNESS Joseph Conrad
68 MAIN STREET Sinclair Lewis
69 THE HOUSE OF MIRTH Edith Wharton
70 THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET Lawrence Durell
71 A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA Richard Hughes
72 A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS V.S. Naipaul
73 THE DAY OF THE LOCUST Nathanael West
74 A FAREWELL TO ARMS Ernest Hemingway
75 SCOOP Evelyn Waugh
76 THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE Muriel Spark
77 FINNEGANS WAKE James Joyce
78 KIM Rudyard Kipling
79 A ROOM WITH A VIEW E.M. Forster
80 BRIDESHEAD REVISITED Evelyn Waugh
81 THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH Saul Bellow
82 ANGLE OF REPOSE Wallace Stegner
83 A BEND IN THE RIVER V.S. Naipaul
84 THE DEATH OF THE HEART Elizabeth Bowen
85 LORD JIM Joseph Conrad
86 RAGTIME E.L. Doctorow
87 THE OLD WIVES' TALE Arnold Bennett
88 THE CALL OF THE WILD Jack London
89 LOVING Henry Green
90 MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN Salman Rushdie
91 TOBACCO ROAD Erskine Caldwell
92 IRONWEED William Kennedy
93 THE MAGUS John Fowles
94 WIDE SARGASSO SEA Jean Rhys
95 UNDER THE NET Iris Murdoch
96 SOPHIE'S CHOICE William Styron
97 THE SHELTERING SKY Paul Bowles
98 THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE James M. Cain
99 THE GINGER MAN J.P. Donleavy
100 THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS Booth Tarkington

[PeterL]

The people who have posted made some interesting suggestions, but I would suggest that you ignore all of those, and I will refrain from mentioning any of my favorites. I suggest that you read a little of the history of literature and take your suggestions from that. The other way would be for you to go to a public library, take books from the shelf, flip to an interior page, and read a few paragraphs. If you enjoy reading those paragraphs, read the whole book. For poetry and short fiction, you might want to check out some anthologies The Oxford of English Verse, Norton Anthologies, etc..

[manolia]

Allow me to add "The trial" by F Kafka (not sure if it is considered a classic). I just finished this book and i am fascinated.

[thelastmelon]

I'd simply say Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and 1984 by George Orwell.

[stlukesguild]

The problems with the Modern Library's list include the facts that:

1. All the listed books are novels... no poetry, short stories, non-fiction, etc...
2. All the works are 20th century creations...
there were good books before then as well.
3. All the books were written in English... the French, Italians, Germans, Russians, Japanese, Poles, etc... have managed to write books worthy of reading from time to time as well...

If you want a guide to classic world lit there are several good sources. Harold Bloom's Western Canon and Genius are perhaps the most inclusive... although they focus on Western lit alone. Fadiman and Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan is also worth a look. An excellent sources of lists of "must read" books can be found here:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html

[stlukesguild]

What is this obsession with Orwell? I mean he wrote a few decent books, but the way his name is bantered about here you'd almost think he was Dante reincarnated. :confused: Or Jack Kerouac:D :lol:

[JBI]

Look up Harold Bloom's western canon. That has every book in the Canon pretty much.

[Oomoo]

Anna Karenina, really, is extremely readable and fun but one of the greatest books ever written. This is the place to start with "the classics", no doubt, and I suppose it should keep you occupied for a while

[Nossa]

Anything Jane Austen. Besides that, you might wanna read Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell (I'm not sure if they're 'classics' but they're def. a must-read).
I totally second The Iliad, and anything Russian, esp. Chekhov.

[Sir Bartholomew]

how about Wuthering Heights

[B-Mental]

I think any Victor Hugo: any of the Musketeers, especially Les Miserables.
War & Peace, or try the Death of Ivan Illych both by Tolstoy
really there are plenty of great suggestions, but you will have to find your own path through this paper jungle.