Your Top 5 Classics

[misterlit]

So what are your top 5 classic pieces of literature and why?

[Equality72521]

1. A Tale of Two Cities
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Vanity Fair
4. Jane Eyre
5. Emma

[Dark Muse]

1. The Magus: I thought this was just an amazing book and it kept me upon the edge of my seat. I was fascinated with it.
2. Catcher In The Rye: I loved Holden, and though it has been a long time sense I read it, I loved it.
3.Siddhartha: This book just deeply touched me and really spoke to me, and it is wonderful to read
4. Call Of The Wild: This was just a great story that I loved reading
5. Passage To India: A witty, touching and spiritual book.

[Leabhar]

1. Crime and Punishment
2. Faust
3. War and Peace
4. Growth of the Soil
5. The Idiot

Why? Well, they are all pretty much self explanatory. This list will probably change.

[WICKES]

Good thread misterlit.

1. Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall (funniest book in the english language- beats even P G Wodehouse...and that's saying something! If you've never read it, get a good audio version)

2. Siddhartha- beautiful, moving, sad (as life is) but ultimately wise. It is spiritual in the way Spinoza is- without asking you to believe in myths/superstitions etc.

3. Aldous Huxley: Those Barren Leaves (fascinating glimpse of the dinner party conversations of highly educated, sophisticated and literate but somewhat decadent and despairing upper class Brits/English in pre war Italy. Like Siddhartha though it finishes with a sort of solution- mystic transcendence rather than organised religion or nihlism.)

4. Henry V: (Watching the Kenneth Branagh film got me into Shakespeare, so I owe it a huge debt.)

5. Philip Larkin Collected Poetry (beautiful- my favourite poet. I guess I, unfortunately, share his view of life.)

[MissCosette]

War and peace
Crime and punishment

[J.D.]

These are my favorites.

Dante's Comedy
The Golden *** -- Lucius Apuleius
Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
Macbeth--William Shakespeare

And if I could list five more . . .

The Odyssey -- Homer
Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Das Nibelungenlied
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

And if you gave me five more . . .

Dr. Faustus -- Christopher Marlowe
Nicomachean Ethics -- Aristotle
Gargantua and Pantagruel -- Francois Rabelais
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- Pearl Poet
The Gospels

[WICKES]

These are my favorites.


The Golden *** -- Lucius Apuleius


Interesting list JD. Why the Golden ***? I read it at University and remember it being pretty hairraising stuff (and a fascinating insight into the day to day life of the Roman world), but it seems odd in a list of such classics as The Divine Comedy and Don Quixote. I'd be interested to know why you love it- it is on my 're read' list btw so I'd like a bit of persuading ;) .

[WICKES]

Since JD has had 15 I'm going to have another 10:

1. Hamlet (tbh I suspect one could spend a lifetime on this play alone)

2. Aldous Huxley: Antic Hay (his early stuff, satirising the English upper middle class is his best)

3. Sartre: Nausea (deeply disturbing and one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read- the mystic experience gone wrong)

4. Henry IV (Falstaff!!!)

5. The Tempest ('As I sat, weeping again the king my father's wreck, this music crept by me upon the water' etc- what a play to round off the master's explortion of life- transcendent, beautiful)

6. Ian Mc Ewan: Saturday (best living British/ English writer)

7. Blake: 'Songs of Innocence' ( I have a great recording of these poems by a wonderful reader- really brings alive the great English mystic poet)

8. Anthony Powell: Dance to the Music of Time (a great work following the life span of a series of English aristocrats)

9. Anthony Burgess 'A Clockwork Orange' (possibly the most underrated novelist ever)

10. Evelyn Waugh: The Sword of Honour Trilogy (possibly my favourite novelist- great to listen to on audiobook)

11. The Wasteland (try and get hold of a copy of Paul Scofield, the famous English RSC actor reading it...wow!)

12. Hardy: Jude the Obscure

13. D H Lawrence: Women In Love

14. P G Wodehouse: Any of the Jeeves novels (funny and beautifully written- as well as being the second best comic writer in modern English after Waugh, he wrote in near perfect prose)

15. Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That

[Niamh]

Persuasion- Austen
North and South- Gaskell
East of Eden- Steinbeck
Hamlet- Shakespeare
Oedipus- Sophocles

[Jozanny]

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, because it is the penultimate achievement in 19th century fiction, the first which nearly threatens to destroy language itself, such that it grandfathered the cracks which the literary Modernists would soon turn into rumbling fissures, and later influenced Sartre.

The Golden Bowl, by Henry James, his most ambitious and tortured tautology.

Grendel, by John Gardner, because yes, Virginia, post-modernism works in the right hands.

The Divine Comedy, by Dante, because his work led to the demise of the epic as a grandiose boast, and ushers in the Christian archetype which frustrates the superior intellect of the atheist to this very day.

IL GATTOPARDO by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, because I love my homeland, and Lampedusa is a type of bridge between Empire and the totally devolved provincialism of the modern Italian state.

[Etienne]

Hm 5...

Don Quixote by Cervantes
War and Peace by Tolstoy
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais
Petersburg Tales by Gogol
Candide by Voltaire

Note that I've kept myself to pre-20th literature...

[J.D.]

I thought the Golden *** was Don Quixote on bad LSD, to be honest. It was hilarious and bizarre in a way that nothing modern seems to be. If it was just that Lucius turned into a donkey and a bunch of cartoonish stuff happened to him, then it would only be so so. But it isn't cartoonish stuff--some of it is, but not all of it. The story has a creepy weirdness at times that I really dig--an almost Brothers Grimm element.

You know the story, yes? Think about the scene early on where the character called Socrates is stabbed through the neck by the witch. You think he's dead, and his traveling companion is about to hang himself, thinking he'll be blamed, then Socrates just gets up like nothing's wrong. So you think he's just fine and it was all a dream, he and his traveling companion ride off, but later they stop to eat, and after lunch, Socrates falls over into the river, dead. The whole time this is happening, you're wondering what the heck's going on--how is he alive, is he a ghost, et cetera? There's a macabre element to that particular section, in my opinion.

The Golden *** is also really funny, and carnivalesque. And I love the tone of the translation I have; there is language play, but the narrator is in complete awe of all the magic going on everywhere around him. It makes you feel the superstition yourself.

[Erichtho]

I like Apuleius' Metamorphoses as well, and I'm quite fond of picaresque novels anyway (Lesage!). (@J.D. I don't want to be a smart *** but I cringe when I read "Der Nibelungenlied", it's "das". If you could edit it?)

Concerning the thread title: My favourite authors are Hölderlin and Kafka, I like pretty much everything by them. I don't want to do any form of ranking though. Hyperion, Empedokles, Amerika, Schloß and Proceß, Hölderlin's poetry and Kafka's shorter prose: I love it all. Both of them have a special place in my reading life, because they showed me two extremes of what is possible to archieve with literature: utmost beauty and disrobement of reality.

[stlukesguild]

1. The Bible (preferably the King James translation). A magnificent (albeit flawed) collection of narrative, myth, legend, history, epic, and lyrical poetry. The Book of Job, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, The Sermon of the Mount, the so-called "Book of J" and the Solomon/David narratives alone are brilliant works of literature with few peers.

2. Dante-The Divine Comedy- After the Bible (which is obviously a work of numerous hands) I can't think of another work with such breadth and scope (and certainly limiting myself to 5 books, I want to get the most bang for my buck). Dante gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly... from the earthly and earthy to the depths of horror and despair to the sublime heights of a transcendent spirituality. Add to this a marvelous array of characters and narratives and a magnificently structured poetry.

3. Cervantes- Don Quixote- A lover of books who confuses what he reads with reality. A sadly comic figure who endless failures at being a romantic knight errant are more heroic than the adventures of all those faultless heroes and their glittering successes. One of the greatest friendships in the whole of literature. What is not to love?

4. Shakespeare- King Lear- A patriarch whose misjudgment of his own children leads to his own tragic downfall, two treacherous daughters in a "love triangle" with one of the greatest villains in the whole of literature, the classic "mad scene", and one of the saddest deaths in the whole of literature.

5. Edmund Spenser- Amors (Sonnets) and Epithalimion - One of the greatest sonnet cycles in all literature... with the added advantages that the object of the poet's desire is not invented nor idealized, but an actual woman... the poet's future wife. The poems take us from Spenser's initial fascination with his love and her rejection of him, through their growing relationship blossoming into the full bloom of love, culminating in the magnificent Epithalimion or Wedding Song.

**********

If I may add a further 5 these would probably include:

6. Shakespeare- Macbeth/Hamlet- The shortest and longest of Shakespeare's plays and certainly the inventions of several of the most memorable characters (Hamlet, Ophelia, Polonius, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) and some of the most marvelous explorations of human psychology... desire, passion, drive...

7. Proust- In Search of Lost Time- A magnificent sensuous/sensual literary symphony exploring the passage of time and memory... memory triggered by sensory experiences that transport one back in time. Lush... poetic. In my opinion the greatest work of Modernist literature.

8. Homer- The Odyssey- "The" Epic of all Epics (well there's also The Iliad, but I prefer the Odyssey). Following the 10 years war with Troy the great hero Odysseus desires nothing more than to return to his home and wife. We are presented with a thinking hero who is not without flaws confronting a series of hurdles that amount to some of the greatest narrative adventures.

9. J.L. Borges- Labyrinths/Dreamtigers (El Hacedor)- Along with Beckett Borges may be the greatest post-war writer and the inventor of the whole of Latin American literature. He is the "reader's writer"... one who can proclaim, "few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering that Schopenhauer's thought or the music of England's words. Borges' builds his works from ideas... and from characters (real and invented) drawn from all of literature. His resulting works: short "fictions", poems, essays blur all distinction between essay, poem, fiction, fact, history, science-fiction, etc... Labyrinths may be the best introductory collection of Borges' work... buy Dreamtigers is a dazzling little collection of poems, meditations, aphorisms, essays, etc... that I have repeatedly read until it is falling to bits.

10. Wordsworth and Coleridge- Lyrical Ballads- Wordsworth and Coleridge virtually invent English Romanticism with this volume including many of their most magnificent poems including Strange fits of passion have I known, Nutting, She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways, Lines written above Tintern Abbey, and The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. The poems are a further collaborative effort in the sense that many of Wordsworth's contributions were deeply informed by his sister, Dorothy's notebooks diary which held powerful descriptions of their everyday surroundings.

***********

Another 5?

11. Lawrence Sterne- Tristam Shandy- A magnificent comic farce... a deconstruction of the very elements of the "newly-invented" novel... questioning the limitations of language in telling even one man's life story. One of the greatest tales of friendship again in literature.

12. The Arabian Nights- Again... as one attempts to get the most out of a limited number of works of literature one would be hard pressed to discover many collections with a greater array of memorable narrative... told in a manner worthy of the best post modernist: a tale within a tale within a tale... The work suggests all the magic and sensuality of a fairy-tale set in the ancient Middle-east.

13. Ferdowsi- The Shanameh (Book of Kings)- An epic collection of magic-filled narratives set in the Middle-East by the greatest Persian poet. The Epic poem of Persia to this day

14. Montaigne- Essays- A marvelous collection of wisdom beautifully written by a man of great common sense who has lived life.

15. Baudelaire- Flowers of Evil- A magnificent collection of poems... at turn decadent... macabre... erotic... and certainly Modern. One might credit him with the invention of Modernist literature... the literature of the modern city and all its alienation, beauty, ugliness, horror, and temptations.

If I allow myself one "collected" work (outside of the Bible, which has an accepted canonical form as a unified work) I would add:

16. William Blake- Collected Poetic Works- To my mind Blake is the most fascinating of the Romantic poets... an outsider who challenges even among artists and revolutionaries. A fiery visionary for whom imagination and invention all... to the degree that he would invent his own cosmogony or epic mythology... and yet could still stoop to ponder the magic in the smallest parts of nature... "a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower"...

[Jozanny]

7. Proust- In Search of Lost Time- A magnificent sensuous/sensual literary symphony exploring the passage of time and memory... memory triggered by sensory experiences that transport one back in time. Lush... poetic. In my opinion the greatest work of Modernist literature.

11. Lawrence Sterne- Tristam Shandy- A magnificent comic farce... a deconstruction of the very elements of the "newly-invented" novel... questioning the limitations of language in telling even one man's life story. One of the greatest tales of friendship again in literature.

12. The Arabian Nights- Again... as one attempts to get the most out of a limited number of works of literature one would be hard pressed to discover many collections with a greater array of memorable narrative... told in a manner worthy of the best post modernist: a tale within a tale within a tale... The work suggests all the magic and sensuality of a fairy-tale set in the ancient Middle-east.

Fought with myself about these, but we were only allowed five and I love Henry James too much. Agree entirely about Sterne and consider him the first post modernist, but Gardner is a tour de force who deconstructs and celebrates the American Empire; his little book just does too much.

[Drkshadow03]

1. The Bible (preferably the King James translation). A magnificent (albeit flawed) collection of narrative, myth, legend, history, epic, and lyrical poetry. The Book of Job, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, The Sermon of the Mount, the so-called "Book of J" and the Solomon/David narratives alone are brilliant works of literature with few peers.


Really? The King James? I've compared a couple of versions of the Bible, and I strongly dislike the King James. Language is too archaic. Compared to the JPS Tanakh the renderings into english can often be extremely different at certain crucial passages. I also like the word choices of other translations a lot better. Why do you prefer the King James?

[Leo The Lion]

I've actually just started reading the King James, though it is the only version that is readily available to me. This is actually the first time that i've read the bible in quite a long time, and now that a flame has been reinspired for literature, I too find it to be amongst the best literature available; regardless of your belief system, it is arguably cherishable.

[J.D.]

I forgot about Borges. What a stupid I am.

[stlukesguild]

Really? The King James? I've compared a couple of versions of the Bible, and I strongly dislike the King James. Language is too archaic. Compared to the JPS Tanakh the renderings into english can often be extremely different at certain crucial passages. I also like the word choices of other translations a lot better. Why do you prefer the King James?

The King James, to my mind, is by far the greatest translation of the whole of the Bible in English... as literature. Historically, the King James Bible and Shakespeare virtually invent the modern English language (and in this one should also give credit to William Tyndale who may be credited with much of the foundation of the KJV. Archaic language? Surely the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, etc... in which the original was composed is far more "archaic" than 17th century English. It is only as "archaic" as Shakespeare is archaic... and in a like manner it stands as one of the most magnificent achievements in English prose of the era. I would also add that considering the period in which the translation took place it is still amazingly accurate. Certainly there are translations that are far more literal (although most of these are literally bad)... but these can be just as inaccurate in translation as anything in the KJV in their attempts at colloquialism, earthiness, and the desire to avoid euphemism. They also fall short or miss the fact that the Biblical texts were not all written in a literal manner that was easy to read, like a newspaper.

I have come across some powerful translations of sections of the Bible: Stephen Mitchell's Job, Robert Alter's Pentateuch or The Five Books of Moses and The David Story, Robert Graves' and Ariel and Chana Bloch's Song of Solomon, and Richard Lattimore's Gospels. The KJV translation of the Psalms was recognized as problematic from the start in that while it is a magnificent translation of the Hebrew poetry into English prose... with few exceptions (especially the famous 23rd Psalm) it failed to present the Psalms as poetry. This was rectified by any number of translators including Milton, Christopher Smart, Philip Sidney and Mary Pembroke Sidney, Henry Howard, Thomas Campion, Henry Vaughan, Francis Bacon, etc... (A marvelous collection from these can be found in the book, The Poet's Book of Psalms, ed. L. Wieder). The recent translation by Robert Alter is also quite strong.

[armenian]

Notes from Underground - Dostoevsky
Nausea - Sartre
The Fall - Camus
The Metamorphosis - Kafka
Steppenwolf - Hesse

[eyemaker]

1. Austen's Pride and Prejudice
2. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
3. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina
4. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
5. Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

[Jueno]

Crime and punishment
War and peace
The Illiad
David Copperfield
Bible

[johann cruyff]

My top five... I'll give it a try (in no order):

The Death and the Dervish (Meša Selimović) - the strength and richness of Selimović's writing and the intensity of the story are inexplicable, you simply have to read it to understand. However, I doubt the English translation does it justice, so the greatness of this book can only be fully grasped if you speak Bosnian (or, Serbo-Croatian) and know a thing or two about the history and people of the Balkans. This is definitely one of the best novels of the 20th century in my opinion.

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) - I can't remember who said it (Lukács, possibly?), but it went along these lines: "whatever you need to learn about life, you can get from this book". It's Dostoevsky... need I say more?

The Divine Comedy (Dante) - actually, prose is my cup of tea, but even I have to admit that I was absolutely blown away by this book. Brilliant!

And for the last two of my Top 5 classics... Instead of giving two titles, here are two names: Kafka and Hesse. Anything by one of these two, any time of day!

[aabbcc]

1. Dante, La Divina Commedia
(There is a reason why Dante here is referred to as il sommo poeta.)
2. Milton, Paradise Lost
3. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
4. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
5. Goethe, Faust (unfortunately, the only one off this small list whom I cannot read in the original language)

[Drkshadow03]

unfortunately, the only one off this small list whom I cannot read in the original language


Show off! ;)

[JBI]

1. Dante, La Divina Commedia
(There is a reason why Dante here is referred to as il sommo poeta.)
2. Milton, Paradise Lost
3. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
4. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
5. Goethe, Faust (unfortunately, the only one off this small list whom I cannot read in the original language)

French, Italian, Russian and English! Geez, some childhood! What's your secret?

[mortalterror]

I've gone over the best books I've ever read before, and they don't differ much from everyone else's lists. I think that this time I'd rather list the books that have meant the most to me.

1.The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger): got me through high school
2.A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway): introduced me to Hemingway
3.Catch-22 (Joseph Heller): taught me how funny a book could be
4.Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West): got me through college
5.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson): I'd never seen such passionate energetic prose

[Jozanny]

4.Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West): got me through college

Eerie how disparate individuals can wind up having such similar experiences, as I can say the same about West and his understated gems.:)

[aabbcc]

French, Italian, Russian and English! Geez, some childhood! What's your secret?
Not impressive at all when you know the background. ;)
If anyone lived in a couple of countries, grew up with father in international science/business and was taught languages of global importance at school (English and French), they would be versed in a couple of languages, if assumed at least slight talent and interest.
If I had learnt those languages by myself, or under some less suitable circumstances, it would be something to be proud of; but this way, I am just the product of my upbringing (and a pretty bad one in fact, given that I am not actually fully-functionally fluent in half of the languages I supposedly "speak" - "reading competence" in a language does not equal fluency, and consider that any speaker of Italian who simply studied French at school for some years with some minor exposure to the language via pop-culture or travel, given slight interest, could read in French even if they do not actually speak it; the same goes for Croatian and Russian - native fluency in Croatian, combined with just small period of time spent in Russia, little formal instruction and just some minor "heritage speaking" in extended family very soon results in the fact you can read in Russian, etc...).

So, no secret, and no talent either - pure luck in my case. :lol: If it were my decision, I would speak Hebrew and German instead...

[JBI]

Don't, I speak Hebrew, and it isn't as important, or desirable as the others. I'd take Pushkin over the Bible in the original any day.

[Etienne]

Shalom ahi ma amatsav?

Toda,
Leitraot.

How's that?

Anastasija, if you know French, English and Russian you should have no difficulty learning German. I speak both French and English and am learning German right now and knowledge of those two languages help a lot, and the main difficulties in the grammar have a lot in common with Russian, or so I've heard (I know nothing of Russian beside troika, vodka, muzhik, and such words which we meet untranslated in literature hehe).

[Agatha]

1. The Red and the Black- It's a great story about love, passion, calculation and burning abmibition. And it gives to a reader a lot of information about period after Napoleonic times.
2. Lost Illusions- Balzac described vivdly the French society, their all indulgences, vanity, defects. I just love the style of Balzac wrote his all novels and IMO this is a quintessence of his works.
3. Jane Eyre- Mystery, young governess plus Mr Rochester- an interesting blend :)
4. War and Peace- it's a real masterPEACE ;)
5. Portrait of a Lady- Very exact and sad too, psychological portrait of a unique women. That book shows well all conventions of those times.

[bazarov]

Brothers Karamazov - pure perfection, the best book ever written
Crime and Punishment - there is no page in that book you can remove without hurting a story
Don Quijote - neither book made me think that much
Fathers and Sons - Bazarov is...ME

5th would be hard to choose - Dervish and the Death, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, 1984, Idiot, Master and Margarita, Eugene Onegin, Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame... it could be any of them

[ex ponto]

I wanted to be sincere. But not each one of these is a classic:

1. H. Ibsen ''Peer Gynt'' - A story about a man that does everything wrong, from the first page of the book to the last one.

2. ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' - pure joy of reading

3. I. B. Singer - short stories - They have something biblical in them.

4. N. Hawthorne ''A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys'' - retold Greek myths

5. H. Sienkiewicz ''Quo Vadis'' - Because of it's style, atmosphere and everything else.

[qimissung]

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Far From the Madding Crowd
The Great Gatsby
A Doll's House
Les Miserables

I would also add all of Shakespeare's plays.

These books make my list because I am deeply interested in an author's examinations of how we interact with each other, our psychological underpinnings. These are books that were important to me, that I continued to reflect on long after I put them down. (Sorry, I know I went over, but I can't bear to take any of them off)

[balehead]

My top five are ...

1. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
2. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
3. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
4. the Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
5. Portrait of A Lady (Henry James)

[k.brignell]

1. The Bible
2. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
3. 1984 by George Orwell
4. Hamlet by Shakespeare
5. The Idiot by Dostoevky

(If I could add 5 more...)

6. The Divine Comedies by Dante
7. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
8. London Fields by Martin Amis
9. Any Human Heart by William Boyd
10. Little Women by Louisa-May Alcott

[Manchegan]

1. Don Quixote - the characters are more alive in this book than in anyother. Also, it's hilarious and profound at the same time

2. Moby Dick - I'm a sucker for symbolism and brilliant prose. I also like a challenge. A lot of folks like to hate the longwinded explanations, but I loved them. They built such a magnifiscient ... cathedral. The book is like a cathedral.

3. Jude the Obscure - I've never identified more with anyone in my life. Damn you, Sue!

4. The Picture of Dorian Gray - My reasons are probably nostalgic. It was the first classic I ever read, and Lord Henry is still one of my favorite characters.

5. Crime and Punishment - Dosteyevsky understands the people better than anyone else on this list.

[Barbarous]

1. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
2. Gargantua & Pantagruel by Rabelais
3. The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
4. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
5. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

[toni]

1) The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
2) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
3) Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
4) Tess of the D'urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
5) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

[waterfallin]

i haven't read too many of the classics yet, but so far my favorites are (in no particular order):

1) Pride and Prejudice- my first introduction to classical literature outside of school

2)Gone With the Wind

3)Tess of the D'Urbevilles

4)Jane Eyre

5)Counte of Monte Cristo

[bluosean]

Something like this

Pride and Prejudice

Bleak House

The Great Gatsby

Moby Dick

Kim

but there are so many good classics.