Your top 10 classics

[misterlit]

What are your top 10 classics?

(or top 5 if you have not read that much)

[Joreads]

1. All the Jane Austen books
2. 1984
3. To Kill a Mocking Bird
4. Catcher in the Rye
5. Anna Karenina

If you count the Jane Austens as six novels that makes 10

[Dark Muse]

Out of the books I have read, as there may still be wonderful classics waiting for me that i have not read yet I would say:

1. Catcher in the Rye
2. The Magus
3. The Rainbow
4. The House of Mirth
5. Pride and Prejudice
6. Jane Eyre
7. Frankenstein
8. The Sun Also Rises
9. Call of the Wild
10. 1984

[johann cruyff]

In no particular order:

The Brothers Karamazov
The Master and Margarita
Steppenwolf
The Death and the Dervish
The Trial
Siddhartha
Nausea
The Glass Bead Game
The Damned Yard
Crime and Punishment

[Dark Muse]

Siddhartha is an exellent book

[mayneverhave]

Also in no particular order:

The Sound and the Fury
Hamlet
The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses (yes, I'm serious)
The Stranger

[johann cruyff]

Siddhartha is an exellent book

Absolutely brilliant.If there's one book that can get you thinking about spirituality and your being,it's that one.

[Dark Muse]

I had to read it in highschool, and it is perhaps one of the most inspirational and influential books I have read. That is one of the few books that acutally made me want to read a biography of the author after reading it.

[bazarov]

1. The Brothers Karamazov
2. Don Quixote

and then with no particular order

Les Miserables
Crime and Punishment
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Fathers and Sons
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
Eugene Onegin
Dervish and The Death - recently discovered, would highly recommend it to everyone
Idiot
Master and Margarita

That's 11, but I can't exclude none of these, sorry!

[livelaughlove]

Definitely Don Quijote. And anything by Shakespeare :)

[Tillottama]

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Quo Vadis by Senkevich
Don Quixote by Cervantec
White nights by Dostoevsky
Rudin by Turgenev
Story about Hodzha Nasreddin by Leonid Soloviov
The Garnet Bracelet by Kuprin
Edge of the razor by Ivan Efremov
Famine by Hamsun

[Ryduce]

1. The Brothers Karamazov
2. Don Quixote

and then with no particular order

Les Miserables
Crime and Punishment
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Fathers and Sons
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
Eugene Onegin
Dervish and The Death - recently discovered, would highly recommend it to everyone
Idiot
Master and Margarita

That's 11, but I can't exclude none of these, sorry!

That's a list I can agree with.

However, I'd add Faulkner,Steinbeck,and The Great Gatsby.

[Il Penseroso]

I actually like Steppenwolf more than Siddhartha. This might be explained by the fact that I encountered the former having never heard of it, while Siddhartha had the expectation of brilliance drilled into my head on multiple fronts before I finally got to it.

[Etienne]

Cervantes' Don Quixote
Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel
Tolstoy's War and Peace
Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov
Voltaire's Candide
Goethe's Faust
Gogol's Petersburg Tales
Bely's Petersburg
Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony
Döblin's Berlin Alexandetplatz

or something among those lines...

[SirRaustusBear]

Dharma Bums and Subteraneans by Kerouac
Pere Goriot
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
War and Peace
The Fall
Hamlet
Brave New World
Watership Down
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

No real order except Dharma Bums is number 1

[Oomoo]

All my favorite books are "classic". In fact, I only read classics. Why waste my time when there are so many wonderful books that are known to be great?

[Dark Muse]

Because you never know when you might find a hidden gem in an unexepcted place

[Oomoo]

Chances are too small. I suppose that there are good books that are lesser known, but all truly great books are recognized as such; and I'd rather read the greats for the 4th time than read something new and mediocre. Another thing: I trust the dead more than the living. Not all books from the 19th century are phenomenal, but I suppose that if something survived, it survived for a reason

(Unless it's Jane Austen)

[Dark Muse]

To each his own, perosnaly I like to read a wide range of books and not everything I read has to be "Great" as long as I enjoy it.

[kandaurov]

Heh, I too find time too precious to play the hit-and-miss game, so I usually stick to the classics. If I devoted all my spare time to literature I'd probably venture myself in the uncertainties of contemporary literature ;) I must admit that sometimes I do regret only reading the canon and being somewhat alienated from the present literature, though.

[Dori]

Chances are too small. I suppose that there are good books that are lesser known, but all truly great books are recognized as such; and I'd rather read the greats for the 4th time than read something new and mediocre. Another thing: I trust the dead more than the living. Not all books from the 19th century are phenomenal, but I suppose that if something survived, it survived for a reason

(Unless it's Jane Austen)

:lol:

I also trust the dead, but more so the dead white male. ;)

[emimoi]

1-Pride and Prejudice
2-Alice in Wonderland
3-Gone With the Wind
4-North and South
5-Animal Farm
6-Anna Karenine
7-A Christmas Carol
8-Emma
9-Little Women
10-Tess of the D'Urbervilles

[aeroport]

Hamlet
Moby-Dick
Paradise Lost
The Portrait of a Lady
(One place goes to all of Henry James's short stories)
Portnoy's Complaint
The Scarlet Letter
The Brothers Karamazov
The Merchant of Venice

Hmmm, that makes 9 - maybe you will write the tenth! :D

[Sir Bartholomew]

Emma (Austen)
To the Lighthouse (Woolf)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy)
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather)
The Rainbow / Women in Love (Lawrence)
The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
An American Tragedy (Dreiser)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
The Golden Bowl (James)



Portnoy's Complaint


:lol: I'm dying with curiousity what females thought of this book. Makes me kind of sorry for Alex, he strongly reminds me of someone. Portnoise! Porte-noir! Portnose! :lol:

[straibyrd]

the Dream of the Red Manssion/the Story of Stone by Cao Xueqin
the Norwegian wood by Haruki Murakami

[Janine]

Sons and Lovers,Women in Love, The Rainbow, Lady Chatterly's Lover and others by D.H.Lawrence
The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and others by Thomas Hardy
Hamlet, Henry V, Richard III, Othello....Shakespeare...etc, etc, etc.
Les Miserables
Picture of Dorian Gray
A Tale of Two Cities
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
Fathers and Sons
Death Comes to the Archbishop
She by Haggard

and probably too many more to mention.....

[aeroport]

:lol: I'm dying with curiousity what females thought of this book. Makes me kind of sorry for Alex, he strongly reminds me of someone. Portnoise! Porte-noir! Portnose! :lol:

Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever heard a positive thing about Roth from a woman - possibly because of this novel!
He reminds you of someone you know???

[Jane's Nemesis]

Chances are too small. I suppose that there are good books that are lesser known, but all truly great books are recognized as such; and I'd rather read the greats for the 4th time than read something new and mediocre. Another thing: I trust the dead more than the living. Not all books from the 19th century are phenomenal, but I suppose that if something survived, it survived for a reason

(Unless it's Jane Austen)

Books tend to survive because of their critical acclaim...but if you consider that women have only relatively recently been recognised as critics, that's a lot of forgotten books that perhaps are not recognised because men did not consider them 'worthy' of attention.

Btw, I happen to think Jane Austen's endurance is justified by her genius.

[Sir Bartholomew]

Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever heard a positive thing about Roth from a woman - possibly because of this novel!
He reminds you of someone you know???

Yes, but I assure you he's not me.

[thom]

paradise lost
portrait of the artist as a young man
heart of darkness
macbeth
As you like it
gulivers travels
lord of the rings
on the road
the rubiyat
The odyssey

[Hank Stamper]

On The Road
1984
Heart of Darkness
Dracula
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Great Gatsby
The Outsider
Great Expectations
War of the Worlds
Wuthering Heights

*subject to change obviously as I work my way through more classics!

[_Shannon_]

I can't say that this is a "top" ten--but it's the ten from the other thread that I picked for now :
1. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
2. Sister Carrie- Theodore Dreiser
3. The Good Soldier- Ford Maddox Ford
4. Jane Eyre- Charolette Bronte
5. The Dharma Bums- Jack Kerouac
6. Pudd'nhead Wilsom- Mark Twain
7. Bridge of Sighs - Richard Russo
8. Sanctuary- William Faulkner
9. Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos
10. Appoinment in Samarra - John O'Hara

I dunno I have a real affinity for early 1900's American writers .....except Edith Wharton who I loathe and cannot understand why she is condsidered important outside of the fact that she was a woman-as if she were chosen after the fact so that women are represented in the canon of AMerican writing of the time. LOL! I have the same reaction to her as I have to Jane Austen where I just want some character to be somewhat interesting....except that Edith Wharton doesn't have the redeming technical briliance and command of language as does Ms. Austen. It is strange, too, that many of these fellows go unread today-while Edith Wharton is required reading again and again. I can't see how a person can objectively view her writing if it is not compared to the writing of the time.


Chances are too small. I suppose that there are good books that are lesser known, but all truly great books are recognized as such; and I'd rather read the greats for the 4th time than read something new and mediocre. Another thing: I trust the dead more than the living. Not all books from the 19th century are phenomenal, but I suppose that if something survived, it survived for a reason

(Unless it's Jane Austen)
But there are some really fantastic modern writers out there- who will be the classics of tomorrow. And there are also some very awesome books pigeon holed into genre fiction that are worth reading--Canticle for Liebowitz, Ender's Game, The Matlese Falcon, Shane....

Having read some "classics" which I have absolutely loathed...I don't see that there is any guarantee that it won't be mediocre or even awful.

I dunno- I read lots and lots and lots of classics--and I understand your point about wanting to use time reading well and wisely when there are so, so many great books out there from which to choose...but it seems a shame that someone must be so rigid in their ideas so as to end up missing some truly phenomenal writing.

[Devil Child]

1. Dante's Inferno,
2.Purgatory, and
3.Paradiso
4.The Catcher in the Rye
5.1984
6.The Stranger
7.Heart of Darkness
8.A Tale of Two Cities
9.The Count of Montecristo
10.Shakespeare

The Count of Monte Cristo
The Man in an Iron Mask
Heart of Darkness
1984
The Stranger
The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare
Dante's Inferno
Pride and Prejedice
East of Eden

[RingoLass]

I mostly read the classics but these are my top SIX:
1) Wuthering Heights
2) The Great Gatsby
3) Little Women
4) Sense & Sensibility
5) Gone With The Wind
6) To Kill A Mockingbird

(not in order)

[cipherdecoy]

Jane Eyre
A Clockwork Orange
To Kill a Mockingbird
1984
Love In The Time OF Cholera
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Brave New World

In no particular order.

[icandoit]

Pride and prejudice
Wuthering heights
Jane Eyro
the rainbow

[Ethan Roy]

In no partuclar order:

1984
Lord of the Flies
Animal Farm
Treasure Island
The Chronicles of Narnina
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz
Billy Budd, Sailor
Tom swayer
Huckle Berry Finn
Alice's Adeventures In Wonderland

[Vincent Black]

Les Miserables
Crime and Punishment
Brave New World
A Clockwork Orange
Frankenstein
Oil!
Catch 22
Wuthering Heights
Homage to Catalonia
Beau Geste

(in no particular order)

[Tiny Dancer]

1. Gone with the Wind
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Emma
4. Little Women
5. Jane Eyre
6. Wuthering Heights
7. Tenant of Wildfell Hall
8. Arabian Nights (bet no one has said that one!!)
9. Sense and sensibility
10. Anna Karenina

GEEZ I really need to read some classics written by men! But where to start... any suggestions?

[kelby_lake]

1. Gone with the Wind
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Emma
4. Little Women
5. Jane Eyre
6. Wuthering Heights
7. Tenant of Wildfell Hall
8. Arabian Nights (bet no one has said that one!!)
9. Sense and sensibility
10. Anna Karenina

GEEZ I really need to read some classics written by men! But where to start... any suggestions?

F Scott Fitzgerald writes quite romantically- perhaps the style might attract you.

[romantic novel]

1-Wuthering Heights
2-Where Angels fear to trade
3-Pride and Prejudice
4-Hamlet
5-Jane Eyre

[slobone]

If we're talking about my favorite great novels, not my favorite favorite novels (2 different things), then in no particular order:

Ulysses
Bleak House
Pride and Prejudice
A Handful of Dust
Cousine Bette
Madame Bovary
The Wings of the Dove
The Invisible Man
Anna Karenina
The Rainbow

[Livia]

in no particular order..

Little Women
Northanger Abbey
Catch 22
Seven Little Australians
1984
The Runaway Jury
King Lear
A Midsummer Nights Dream
The Harry Potter Series
To Kill a Mockingbird

[EricP]

1. "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
4. "The Trial" by Franz Kafka
5. "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
6. "The Stranger" by Albert Camus
7. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair
8. "Beloved" by Toni Morrison
9. "Querelle" by Jean Genet
10. "Devil on the Cross" by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

[livMB]

Pride and Prejudice
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Brothers Grimm
Anything Shakespeare
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Importance of Being Ernest
Tartuffe
The Metamorphosis
The Stranger
Harry Potter (I'm counting HP as a future classic since university courses are already adding them to syllabi and discussing classical themes in them)

[bethps]

Not necessarily in this order:
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
War and Peace
Machado de Assis' short stories
Wide Sargasso Sea
The Pickwick Papers
the "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Mists of Avalon
Demian
Le Matin des Magiciens

[_Shannon_]

1. Gone with the Wind
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Emma
4. Little Women
5. Jane Eyre
6. Wuthering Heights
7. Tenant of Wildfell Hall
8. Arabian Nights (bet no one has said that one!!)
9. Sense and sensibility
10. Anna Karenina

GEEZ I really need to read some classics written by men! But where to start... any suggestions?Is there any other place to start, except Dickens? :)

[JBI]

Is there any other place to start, except Dickens? :)

Homer?

[Scheherazade]

Homer?Simpson?

:p

[wessexgirl]

:) Hi everyone. I'm a newbie, and I was just looking around and found this great thread. Here are my top ten, not in any order...

1. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
3. L'Assommoir - Emile Zola
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
6. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Choderlos de Laclos
7. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
8. Candide - Voltaire
9. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
10. Middlemarch - George Eliot

[kelby_lake]

I mostly read the classics but these are my top SIX:
1) Wuthering Heights
2) The Great Gatsby
3) Little Women
4) Sense & Sensibility
5) Gone With The Wind
6) To Kill A Mockingbird

(not in order)

Why on earth have you put To Kill A Mockingbird? :flare: I assume you must like it but it should be a criminal offence to call it a classic.

[Inderjit Sanghe]

1-Ulysses, James Joyce
2-Pale Fire-Nabokov
3-Madame Bovary-Flaubert
4-Anna Karenin-Tolstoi

[Inderjit Sanghe]

1-Ulysses, James Joyce
2-Pale Fire-Nabokov
3-Madame Bovary-Flaubert
4-Anna Karenina-Tolstoi
5-Petersburg-Bely
6-Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carrol
7-Exercises in Style-Queneau
8-In Search of Lost Time-Proust
9-The Trial-Kafka
10-Dead Souls-Gogol (Also, Lolita by Nabokov)

Can someone please delete by above two messages? I accidentally pressed the enter button, and did not realise they had gone through as posts.

[johann cruyff]

1-Ulysses, James Joyce
2-Pale Fire-Nabokov
3-Madame Bovary-Flaubert
4-Anna Karenina-Tolstoi
5-Petersburg-Bely
6-Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carrol
7-Exercises in Style-Queneau
8-In Search of Lost Time-Proust
9-The Trial-Kafka
10-Dead Souls-Gogol (Also, Lolita by Nabokov)


I really like this list. I especially approve of number 5, one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Definitely the most underrated one.

[WICKES]

:)
10. Middlemarch - George Eliot


For my money the best novel in the English language

[kelby_lake]

1-Ulysses, James Joyce
2-Pale Fire-Nabokov
3-Madame Bovary-Flaubert
4-Anna Karenina-Tolstoi
5-Petersburg-Bely
6-Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carrol
7-Exercises in Style-Queneau
8-In Search of Lost Time-Proust
9-The Trial-Kafka
10-Dead Souls-Gogol (Also, Lolita by Nabokov)


Your list looks good. :) I get the double posting problem too.

[Inderjit Sanghe]

I really like this list. I especially approve of number 5, one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Definitely the most underrated one

Well, well, well, the last time you posted about a post of mine, you said you had never disagreed with something so much, and now this! :p :lol:
In relation to Petersburg-well it stands to reason. ;) Jejunish irrelevancies aside, Petersburg is indeed a overlooked masterpiece, it is an utterly magnificent masterpiece, words cannot describe how great a novel it is, though I bet it was a pain to translate, in fact the fact that it reads so well in English and yet lost so much of it's brilliancy in translation speaks volumes about the quality of the book.

I have been having second thoughts about my Kafka choice-The Metamorphosis and The Castle could stake a equal claim to The Trial, as being the greatest Kafka story; America is relatively mediocre however. Proust should problably be higher up, but 'Lost Time' is wayyyyyyyy to long.

[Etienne]

In relation to Petersburg-well it stands to reason. ;) Jejunish irrelevancies aside, Petersburg is indeed a overlooked masterpiece, it is an utterly magnificent masterpiece, words cannot describe how great a novel it is, though I bet it was a pain to translate, in fact the fact that it reads so well in English and yet lost so much of it's brilliancy in translation speaks volumes about the quality of the book.

:nod: A favorite of mine as well.

[johann cruyff]

Well, well, well, the last time you posted about a post of mine, you said you had never disagreed with something so much, and now this! :p :lol:

Oh yeah, the post about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy... Ah, I guess there's no accounting for taste. I still heavily disagree, though :p



I have been having second thoughts about my Kafka choice-The Metamorphosis and The Castle could stake a equal claim to The Trial, as being the greatest Kafka story; America is relatively mediocre however. Proust should problably be higher up, but 'Lost Time' is wayyyyyyyy to long.

As much as I liked The Castle, I'd still take The Trial over it. As for The Metamorphosis, okay, I guess it could be considered Kafka's major work, and yet, again, I feel The Trial was a slightly better choice. Proust is great, I couldn't get enough of the book despite its length.

[bazarov]

To all law students, I would give The Trial to read. I think only few of them would stay studding.:D

[Inderjit Sanghe]

[QUOTE][To all law students, I would give The Trial to read. I think only few of them would stay studding/QUOTE]

Studding? Funny, I never knew Law students were involved in the breeding of horses-would problably explain why so many lawyers have sociopathic tendencies! ;):p TBH, I do not read Kafka as a parable or as a allegory, I read him more as a fantasy writer, as Robbe-Grillet said, Kafka is the kind of writer who is subjected way too much to the socio-political opinion of his critics.

[Guinivere]

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj
2. A passage to India by E.M. Forster
3. The Trial by Franz Kafka
4. Illiad by Homer
5. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
9. Arabian Nights
10.Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[misterlit]

Nice lists!

[misterlit]

anyone else?

[kainso]

1. Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk ( Story about a New York Jew)

2. The Secret Garden ( I love Yorkshire and the moor)

3. Wuthering Height ( the same thought but its continuation, sadder)

4. The Gathering by Anne Knight ( I love the prose of Ireland)

5. The Dead and Dubliner by James Joyce

6. Possession by A.S. Byatt ( I love those fairytales inside)

7. The old man and the sea ( why Hemingway killed himself?)

8. Atonement by Ian McEwan ( the third part made me chilled and cried)

9. The Remains of the Day ( the butler is so dignified and thought-provoking)

10. Let me put down The Language of Metaphors by A.G , my professor

[bounty]

mutiny on the bounty
kidnapped
david copperfield
watership down (if it can count being so contemporary)
the sea wolf
the once and future king
either last of the mohicans or the pathfinder
to kill a mockingbird
the three musketeers
and since ive only got one more---either dracula or frankenstein

[rtc143]

I don't read that much, so I'll give a top 5. Not in any order.

A Wrinkle in Time
Slaughter-House Five (Sorry, it's my favorite book, so i use it a lot)
The Gambler
1984
The Iliad

[johann cruyff]

I don't read that much, so I'll give a top 5. Not in any order.

A Wrinkle in Time
Slaughter-House Five (Sorry, it's my favorite book, so i use it a lot)
The Gambler
1984
The Iliad

That's not a bad list at all. Especially the last three.

[rtc143]

Thanks

[rewalker]

1- The Brothers Karamazov

- Macbeth
- Crime and Punishment
- Dune
- The Wrath of Grapes
- Notes from Underground
- Don Quixote

[idiosynchrissy]

In no particular order:

"Macbeth"
"Hamlet"
"Death of a Salesman"
"Cyrano de Bergerac"
Paradise Lost
The Stranger
Midnight's Children

[kelby_lake]

All for the tragedy? :)

[idiosynchrissy]

All for the tragedy? :)

Hmmm. Hadn't noticed, but I guess so. Well that's depressing...

[kelby_lake]

I like tragedy too :) It's nice to know that someone's worse of than I am.

[JBI]

Yeah, Paradise Lost is the biggest tragedy; stupid god manages to defeat the noble Satan!

[idiosynchrissy]

Yeah, Paradise Lost is the biggest tragedy; stupid god manages to defeat the noble Satan!

In my opinion it was a tragedy. Satan is arguably the most charismatic character in Paradise Lost. It's a shame he was defeated. Don't get me started on the pathetic fates of Adam and Eve.