Please recommed some books to me

[Obloo]

I do not understand literature works in America or English.Could you recommed some good novels that can be find in the Literature Network to me . If it is intresting and classic , i will be very happy. In addition , if you want to learn Chinese , i am glad to answer your questions .Thank you!

[LitNetIsGreat]

Hi, I’ve looked at what’s available on Litnet and the following novels are good classic texts which might not be too challenging for a non-native speaker. They’d be a good place to start anyway. All of these are on the shorter side too:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle
The Moon and the Sixpence Somerset Maugham
The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift

In terms of poetry you could try the following:

John Keats
John Dryden
William Wordsworth
Robert Browning

Good luck, just dig around and see what you fancy.

[Obloo]

Hi, I’ve looked at what’s available on Litnet and the following novels are good classic texts which might not be too challenging for a non-native speaker. They’d be a good place to start anyway. All of these are on the shorter side too:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle
The Moon and the Sixpence Somerset Maugham
The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift

In terms of poetry you could try the following:

John Keats
John Dryden
William Wordsworth
Robert Browning

Good luck, just dig around and see what you fancy.

many thanks to you

[kelby_lake]

The Great Gatsby is short and the language is not too complex.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I don't know, the Great Gatsby never came off as an easy read. Not hard, but there is a lot of figurative language, complex imagery. Might be difficult for an English learner.

I'd suggest, maybe, Hemingway. Very easy to read.

[kiki1982]

I'd say Dickens is definitely the easiest for a learner...

Jane Eyre, I don't know... The speech in it was ok, but the descriptions I found quite hard looking back at what I used to be able to read in English...
Agatha Christie is one which is short and I believe quite alright...

Maybe George Eliot is something, although I found that quite a toil until it FINALLY got going... (after 200-odd pages...)

[Seasider]

We don't know what age the poster is but to someone new to English Lit I would recommend Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Death on the Nile The Mysterious Affair at Styles and actually almost anything by Agatha Christie. Any of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Good stories would fill the bill I think.

[Emil Miller]

I'd say Dickens is definitely the easiest for a learner...

Jane Eyre, I don't know... The speech in it was ok, but the descriptions I found quite hard looking back at what I used to be able to read in English...
Agatha Christie is one which is short and I believe quite alright...

Maybe George Eliot is something, although I found that quite a toil until it FINALLY got going... (after 200-odd pages...)

I think that George Eliot might be a bit lengthy for the poster, Jayne Eyre has been on the curriculum in China for years and most of the Chinese I know have read it. I doubt that Agatha Christie meets the 'classic' status the poster is seeking although it might be a fun read. Dickens would seem to fit the bill but perhaps something relatively short like a Christmas carol would suffice and I think Neely's suggestion of Gulliver's Travels would also meet the criteria.

[Emil Miller]

Double post

[kiki1982]

I know that Christie is not 'classic' per se, but one needs to start somewhere.

As for Jane Eyre, it is not because it is on the curriculum that it is not actually too difficult in some places, is it... From my point of view, my English got better reading that, but I left from a level where I could watch the BBC at leisure and spoke English all the time. According to my hubby, I had passed the levels for teaching at the EU institutions. And I was still having slight trouble with some things, though not many. I had been reading French and through that was able to cope with certain words. I just mean to put it in perspective. Although it probably depends on just what you have learned.

If Gulliver's Travels is not too difficult, I would say Defoe is also worth a try. He was surprisingly easy, considering he wrote in the 18th century.

[Obloo]

^_^ thank you!!

[JBI]

Hmm, well, if you want to understand, you need to really get into critical work, that way you can develop a sort of taste for things, and see why they are special - either way, for books on here, since I assume your ability to read English is better than my ability in Chinese, I would recommend looking at a book you are probably familiar with, such as Pride and Prejudice, or some fairy tales or something, to try and give a closer understanding to how the culture works - otherwise it would be like me trying to understand 紅樓夢（Dream of Red Mansions） without knowing much about how to appreciate what is inside it.

[Obloo]

Hmm, well, if you want to understand, you need to really get into critical work, that way you can develop a sort of taste for things, and see why they are special - either way, for books on here, since I assume your ability to read English is better than my ability in Chinese, I would recommend looking at a book you are probably familiar with, such as Pride and Prejudice, or some fairy tales or something, to try and give a closer understanding to how the culture works - otherwise it would be like me trying to understand ¼t˜Ç‰ô£¨Dream of Red Mansions£© without knowing much about how to appreciate what is inside it.
Thanks for your advices.Do you have read Dream of Red Mansion ? I think your ability in Chinese is better than my ability in English.I will get a headache when i was reading this kind of book that it is so thick. In addition,the book is written by classical Chinese.If you want to learn something to communicate,i would recommed that some modern literature works are fit for you.I think it's cruel to let a foreigner to read classical Chinese. I am in Beijing , too.I have been here for four years.

[Seasider]

You and JBI can help each other!!!

Daphne du Maurier might be good for you.
Rebecca is good as is Frenchman's Creek My Cousin Rachel and Jamaica Inn. She wrote some very good short stories too including
The Birds which Hitchcock made into a film.

[JBI]

Thanks for your advices.Do you have read Dream of Red Mansion ? I think your ability in Chinese is better than my ability in English.I will get a headache when i was reading this kind of book that it is so thick. In addition,the book is written by classical Chinese.If you want to learn something to communicate,i would recommed that some modern literature works are fit for you.I think it's cruel to let a foreigner to read classical Chinese. I am in Beijing , too.I have been here for four years.

I confess I have not finished 紅樓夢 in Chinese, and only read parts of it - either way though, from my personal feeling, the 白話 of 紅樓夢 is easier than the 白話 of 三國演義（Romance of the Three Kingdoms) - the difficult part is the poetry and the cultural nuance to me - the rest I can rely on my dictionary for.


That's generally the idea anyway - for instance, my point was not in the difficulty of the prose, but rather of the culture and ideas contained within it - reading even something simple like Jane Eyre makes a lot more sense when you know something of the Gothic, and of Byron (even more so with Wuthering Heights). Our perception of fiction is also rooted in a thick tradition (less so in novels than in poetry, but it is still there) and to truly begin to appreciate works, and read them on a level where they aren't just words and stories, but ideas, and expressions and have an aesthetic value, one needs to have a sort of understanding of them that is acquired from seeing them in a context.

That is why, generally, people who have not read the classics will eventually suffer in trying to understand anything modern - or at least will rely on an interpretation of them somewhere - simply put, Ovid, the Bible, Dante, Homer, Virgil and Sophacles, not to mention Plato, Horace, and a few others that cannot be ignored, pop up everywhere and everywhere, across language and space - across time and traditions.

To respond to the original post, how much more potent is Du Fu's line, 會當凌絕頂，一覽眾山小， (when I reach the highest, soaring peak, [glancing] all around all other mountains look small) when read in the idea of what (泰山）Taishan is, or better yet, thinking of the lines as you look off of the mountain into the vast peeks and fog?