Help with my classics reading list?

[Silver96]

Hi guys I have compiled this list of 50 works of Literature for myself to read. I have read a few at school but not many but I hope to remedy that. Can any of you guys offer advice on whether I have missed important books out or not and what I could take away from the list.


I'm worried I'm being to biased towards England at the expense of other places
I would like to keep the number of works at 50 so if you suggest something suggest what should be taken away as well.

Homer - The Iliad (Around 700BC)
Homer - The Odyssey. (Around 700BC)
Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (1308)
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales (1400)
William Shakespeare - Hamlet (1602)
William Shakespeare - Othello (1603)
William Shakespeare - King Lear (1606)
William Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey (1818)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Jane Austen - Persuasion (1818)
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield (1850)
Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables (1862)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment. (1866)
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (1877)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (1895)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
D .H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913)
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
George Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty Four (1989)
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
John Steinbeck - East of Eden (1952)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Joseph Heller - Catch 22 (1961)

[mal4mac]

Good list! Maybe there are a few too many kids classics lurking on there, I'd replace them with a few heavyweights.

I'd remove:

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)

And replace them with:

Plato - Dialogues
Montaigne - Essays
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Goethe - Faust
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Flaubert - Madame Bovary

[Lokasenna]

Wonderful though Chaucer and Dante are, they're the only medieval writers on your list - perhaps you should have something to help span the nearly 2,000 year gap between Homer and Dante? Beowulf would be an obvious choice from Western European medievalism, but if that's too Anglo-centric you could might consider Egils saga or Njáls saga (Icelandic), the Mabinogi (Welsh), the Nibelungenlied (German), Chanson de Roland (French), or loads of other possibilities...

As for who to get rid of, well, that's more subjective - though you might want to weed out multiple works by the same author: are four novels by Dickens necessary, or three by Austen (wonderful though they are)? And then there's the matter of the length of some of them - the Canterbury Tales, for example, is on a word-for-word count probably not much short of the entire plays of Shakespeare, yet it occupies one slot whilst four individual plays are given seperate entries.

[mal4mac]

It's all looking a bit Western, why not add:


Epic of Gilgamesh
Bhagavad Gita
Tao te Ching
An Artist of the Floating World - Katzuo Ishiguro


These are all quite short :)


Arabian Nights (quite long, try a selection of the best bits)


Why not replace Shakespeare and Chaucer with The Oxford Book of English Verse?

Other ideas to keep the size of works down:


Instead of Plato's complete dialogues, try just The Republic.
There is a good Penguin selection of Montaigne's essays.
Try Dante's Inferno, rather than the whole trilogy
Goethe's Faust part I may be sufficient.

[chrisvia]

I think the KJV Bible is unavoidable for approaching the ilk of literature represented here (at least for those folks after Homer). Of course, the Bible shouldn't be the only religious text, but mal4mac has attributed the right works to expand your view--I might only add the Qur'an.

The only other essential I can think of at present is Woolf. Either Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.

[Marbles]

Good list though I argue for the inclusion of, among other things, international modern classics in order to diversify your reading experience because, in my opinion, our international globalised age demands it. My suggestions would be:

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Franz kafka - The Trial and The Metamorphoses
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Milan Kundera - Unbearable Lightness of Being
V.S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Mo Yan - Red Sorghum


Good list! Maybe there are a few too many kids classics lurking on there, I'd replace them with a few heavyweights.

I'd remove:

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)

I second the removal of the above. I'd perhaps retain Of Mice and Men but I'd cross out H.G. Wells' Time Machine


It's all looking a bit Western, why not add:


Epic of Gilgamesh
Bhagavad Gita
Tao te Ching
An Artist of the Floating World - Katzuo Ishiguro


Vishnu Sharma's Panchtantra [3rd BCE] would make for a better reading than the Gita, in my opinion.



The only other essential I can think of at present is Woolf. Either Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.

Yes, definitely include To the Lighthouse. It's also short.

[R.F. Schiller]

Homer - The Iliad (Around 700BC)
Homer - The Odyssey. (Around 700BC)
Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (1308)
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales (1400)
William Shakespeare - Hamlet (1602)
William Shakespeare - Othello (1603)
William Shakespeare - King Lear (1606)
William Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey (1818)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Jane Austen - Persuasion (1818)
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield (1850)
Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables (1862)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment. (1866)
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (1877)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (1895)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
D .H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913)
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
George Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty Four (1989)
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
John Steinbeck - East of Eden (1952)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Joseph Heller - Catch 22 (1961)

Question: Are you only interested in Western Literature? Because if not, I would recommend expanding the list to be more diverse. I would recommend Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Story of the Stone and the Dao De Ching from Chinese literature alone. You are also lacking post-1960 classics. I would recommend stuff like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Money by Martin Amis or American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

I bolded the works that I don't really considering great "classics" (If you want to read Twain, Huck Finn is much better). I'm heavily (positively) biased towards European Modernists and I firmly believe that Proust's In Search of Lost Time (just read the first volume, Swann's Way if you don't want to read the whole thing), Kafka's The Trial/The Metamorphosis should be on there. I would also like to add Milton's Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Nabokov's Pale Fire , Albert Camus's The Stranger and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Maybe some short stories by Chekhov, Borges, or O'Connor (Flannery) would be nice. Some non-fiction in the forms of Emerson's essays, or literary autobiographies like Richard Wright's Black Boy or Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory would be good. Could also use some African-American literature like Frederick Douglass's slave narrative or Wright's Native Son.

Last point I'm going to make is: do you really need four works by Dickens, three by Austen (one of which I don't think is particularly great)? Important authors no doubt, but 7 total works combined?

EDIT: I lied. This is the last point I'll make. I applaud you for selecting 4 mammoth works by Tolstoy/Dostoevsky, but you could supplement 1 or 2 of them with much shorter novellas that are also great like The Death of Ivan Ilyich or Notes From the Underground.

[Silver96]

Thanks everyone! I did want to be less Western centric but my knowledge of anything non-western is abysmal and that's why I asked for suggestions.

People have mentioned lots of stuff I'd never heard of so thanks for broadening my horizons.

[mortalterror]

the Canterbury Tales, for example, is on a word-for-word count probably not much short of the entire plays of Shakespeare,

No way. Canterbury tales is maybe 1/3 as long as the complete 37 plays of Shakespeare.

[AuntShecky]

I wholeheartedly agree that the list includes The Canterbury Tales.

No 17th century literature? Milton, Donne, et al.?

Your 20th century offerings should include Samuel Beckett as well as O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night; The Iceman Cometh.)

Also, it would be great if it had some examples of Black American literature; my choice would be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

I'd dump Lord of the Flies. It's over-rated.

[mortalterror]

Drop Jules Vern, HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Tender is the Night. Pick one Austen, Dickens, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevski. Add Ovid's Metamorphosis, Virgil's Aeneid, Beowulf, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Balzac's Old Goriot, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

[Bill 42]

Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (1895)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
George Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Joseph Heller - Catch 22 (1961)

I know a lot of posters have recommended to remove some of the above entries from your list, but I would recommend reading these first. They are simple, easy reads and really good books. Start with Around the World in 80 Days and Treasure Island, since they are the easiest. In your first post you mentioned that you haven't read many of these, so I'm going to assume you haven't read a lot of books. Start with something easy...

[Paulclem]

I wonder how many have read all the list?

Just pick a few and read what you like and get some modern stuff smattered in there. The list will take years to complete anyway. And don't worry about ditching the boring stuff. Literature - unless you're tracing the history and development of it - is a very subjective term.

[Lokasenna]

No way. Canterbury tales is maybe 1/3 as long as the complete 37 plays of Shakespeare.

Well, alright, I was exaggerating a bit - but the basic point about the disparity in length between certain texts still stands!

[Lykren]

I agree with pulling out the books other people mentioned. They aren't terrible for the most part, but neither are they particularly interesting or well written. Just my two cents of course.

I've put a list together that I've been working on for a few years now. I realize it's anglocentric as well, but it does have a good deal of breadth to it.

Tale of Genji
Moby Dick
Ulysses
War and Peace
Pride and Prejudice/Emma/Sense and Sensibility
Lord Jim
Tess of the D'urbervilles
Middlemarch
Pygmalion
Atonement
Brideshead Revisited
Waiting for Godot
The Homecoming
Jane Eyre/Wuthering Heights
A Tale of Two Cities
The Good Soldier
Paradise Lost
The Importance of Being Earnest
Gulliver's Travels
The Fountain Overflows
Mrs. Dalloway/To The Lighthouse
Tom Jones
Tristram Shandy
The End of the Affair
The Way We Live Now
The Golden Notebook
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Of Human Bondage
A Passage to India
Ivanhoe
Complete Shakespeare
Oresteia
Theban Plays
Medea
Lysistrata
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Heike Monogatari (Tyler)
Kokoro
Snow Country
The Makioka Sisters
Oku No Hosomichi
The Story of the Stone (Hawkes)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Roberts)
The Plum in the Golden Vase (Roy)
La Princesse de Cleves
A la Recherche du Temps Perdue
Pere Goriot/Cousin Bette
Madame Bovary
Therese Raquin
La Malade Imaginaire
Phedre
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Red and the Black
Les Miserable
The Plague
Candide
Blindness
The book of disquiet (Zenith)
The Lusiads (Oxford)
The devil to pay in the backlands
Don Quixote
Fuenteovejuna
Life is a Dream
Blood Wedding/Yerma/The House of Bernarda Alba
One Hundred Years of Solitude/Love in the Time of Cholera
Hopscotch
The Old Gringo
Ficciones
Conversations in the Cathedral
Pedro paramo
Faust
Wallenstein Trilogy
The Tin Drum
The Trial/The Metamorphosis
The Magic Mountain
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Darkness at Noon
Hunger
Miss Julie
My Struggle (Knausgaard)
Hedda Gabbler
The Threepenny Opera
The Man Without Qualities
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Divine Comedy (Hollander?)
The Decameron
The Name of the Rose
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
I Promessi Sposi
Eugene Oenegin
Hadji Murad
Petersburg
Crime and Punishment
One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich
The Nose
Anna Karenina
Chekhov: Complete Plays/Stories (Pevear/Volokhonsky)
The Master and Margarita
Oblomov
Life and Fate
Oryx and Crake
Who Do You Think You Are
Red Doc>
Catch-22
On The Road
Atonement
Ada, or Ardor
U.S.A. Trilogy
Franny and Zooey
Beloved
Gravity's Rainbow
The Age of Innocence
The Sun Also Rises/A Farewell to Arms/Old Man and the Sea/For Whom the Bell Tolls
Portrait of A Lady/The Wings of the Dove/Turn of the Screw
The Scarlet Letter
Infinite Jest
Invisible Man
The Sound and the Fury/As I Lay Dying
My Antonia
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Long days Journey into Night
The Red Badge of Courage
The Awakening
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Last of the Mohicans
The Bridge of San Luis Rey/Our Town
Rabbit Angstrom novels
Blood Meridian
Underworld
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
In Cold Blood
Cathedral
Tender is the Night/A Winter Dream/The Great Gatsby
American Pastoral
Revolutionary Road
All The King's Men
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Stoner
Aeneid
Metamorphoses
Hans Christian Andersen
The Brothers Grimm
One Thousand and One Nights (Burton)
The Canterbury Tales
Iliad and Odyssey (Fagles)
Nibelunglied
Chanson de Roland
El Cid
Baghavad Gita
Beowulf
Njals Saga
Sinuhe
Epic of Gilgamesh


Selected poems of (I just did english-language poets here because of the translation problem):
Spenser
Donne
Pope
Milton
Gray (Elegy)
Burns
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Shelley
Keats
Byron
Tennyson
Brownings
Hopkins
Yeats
Hardy
Pound
Eliot
Auden
Thomas
Crane
Whitman
Dickinson
Frost
Williams
Stevens
Bishop
Plath
Sexton
Louise Gluck
Merrill
Geoffrey Hill
Ashbery (Self-Portrait)
Heaney (Opened Ground)

[mal4mac]

You are also lacking post-1960 classics. I would recommend stuff like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Money by Martin Amis or American Pastoral by Philip Roth.


Are there any post 1960 classics? As Harold Bloom points out, for works as recent as this there is no agreement. I've read the Amis and Roth and can think of many novels I prefer, even by them! For instance, Time's Arrow and Portnoy's Compliant.



I bolded the works that I don't really considering great "classics" (If you want to read Twain, Huck Finn is much better).


Mostly agree with you here, but I would personally keep The Time Machine and To Kill a Mockingbird. They are not heavyweight, culture defining classics, but I think they still deserve the title "classic", deal with incredibly important "single issues", are easy exciting reads, and should be on this list.



I'm heavily (positively) biased towards European Modernists and I firmly believe that Proust's In Search of Lost Time (just read the first volume, Swann's Way if you don't want to read the whole thing), Kafka's The Trial/The Metamorphosis should be on there. I would also like to add Milton's Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Nabokov's Pale Fire , Albert Camus's The Stranger and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Maybe some short stories by Chekhov, Borges, or O'Connor (Flannery) would be nice. Some non-fiction in the forms of Emerson's essays, or literary autobiographies like Richard Wright's Black Boy or Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory would be good. Could also use some African-American literature like Frederick Douglass's slave narrative or Wright's Native Son.


I'm biased towards Dickensian realism, but agree with much of this. I gave up half way through Proust, like many people, but agree Swann's Way should be on the list. I wasn't too impressed by Kafka's Castle or Trial, the confusion dragged on for too long. But I was very impressed by The Metamorphosis (and it's short!) Should Emerson's essays be in a top 50? Montaigne should surely should be there as "top essayist". Also, there are superior works from his period and place, Thoreau's Walden, for instance. What about some female moderns, Jeanette Winterson Oranges are not the Only Fruit, say.



Last point I'm going to make is: do you really need four works by Dickens, three by Austen (one of which I don't think is particularly great)? Important authors no doubt, but 7 total works combined?


And you say this with a straight face, after recommending two more works by Nabakov? Which one work would you recommend?

For the one work by Dickens, with the growing tendency to recommend short works, I'd recommend Great Expectations, although I slightly prefer David Copperfield and Bleak House.


I applaud you for selecting 4 mammoth works by Tolstoy/Dostoevsky, but you could supplement 1 or 2 of them with much shorter novellas that are also great like The Death of Ivan Ilyich or Notes From the Underground.

Russia is not the world, whatever Putin might think :)

I'd ditch the mammoth works by Dostoevsky and replace them by Notes From the Underground. For a "shorter Tolstoy" I'd recommend The Cossacks for a young person's first approach to Tolstoy. His two big novels are magnificent, of course, so it would be difficult to take them off the list - maybe add them to a next fifty list, if you like The Cossacks.

Milton's Paradise Lost is quite short, but very difficult, maybe experience a sample of it in The Oxford Book of English Verse. If you like the sample, stick it on the "next fifty" list.

[mal4mac]

Good list though I argue for the inclusion of, among other things, international modern classics in order to diversify your reading experience because, in my opinion, our international globalised age demands it.

But there is little agreement on which modern works are classics. From your list, I really liked:

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Kafka - The Metamorphoses
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness (but preferred Lord Jim, which would definitely be in my top 50)
Milan Kundera - Unbearable Lightness of Being
V.S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions
V.S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Didn't like:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Franz kafka - The Trial
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children



I second the removal of the above. I'd perhaps retain Of Mice and Men but I'd cross out H.G. Wells' Time Machine


I'd keep both, removing the two big Steinbeck's to the "next fifty" list.


Yes, definitely include To the Lighthouse. It's also short.

Yes, why not, it's one of the few modernist works I managed to read with some enjoyment :)

[mal4mac]

I think the KJV Bible is unavoidable for approaching the ilk of literature represented here (at least for those folks after Homer)..

The KJV Bible can be avoided when "approaching the literature", you can look up Biblical references on a "need to know" basis. You might want to read some of the KJV Bible *as* literature, and as the Bible is collection of Books I think we should go the route of recommending one book. Mine would be The Book of Job.

[mal4mac]

No 17th century literature? Milton, Donne, et al.?

I think this is one reason why the Oxford Book of English Verse needs to be added.

I think Lord of the Flies is fine, with as much claim to remain on this list as any modern novel.

[Poetaster]

I'd also add:

Sophocles' three Theban plays and Aeschylus's Oresteia.

[mal4mac]

I know a lot of posters have recommended to remove some of the above entries from your list, but I would recommend reading these first. They are simple, easy reads and really good books. Start with Around the World in 80 Days and Treasure Island, since they are the easiest. In your first post you mentioned that you haven't read many of these, so I'm going to assume you haven't read a lot of books. Start with something easy...

You have a point. I recently read or re-read Huck Finn, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and found them indeed to be simple, easy and very good (re-)reads.

If someone hasn't read a lot of books, or doesn't have insider knowledge, if they start reading the Iliad, in a poor translation, they might give up on literature!

Have you read Verne recently? I dimly remember enjoying him as pre-teen, but I have some doubts of him remaining interesting to an adult reader. I might be wrong! I hope so!

My experience (re-)reading kid's books hasn't all been positive. For instance, I found Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy a tedious slog. And, I'm afraid, even "Alice" didn't do it for me, overall. There were long stretches of tedium before the Mad Hatter, Walrus, Toves, etc., enlivened things with their all-to-short vignettes. I also found Frankenstein and Dracula a slog through tedious plot situations, wishing the monster would appear soon, which he didn't, and not for long enough.

[Bill 42]

I wonder how many have read all the list?

I have read all but 2: D .H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913) and Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924).



Have you read Verne recently? I dimly remember enjoying him as pre-teen, but I have some doubts of him remaining interesting to an adult reader. I might be wrong! I hope so!

I rarely go back and re-read books. The only exceptions are the Dickens Christmas books, which I read every year at Christmas time. There are so many good books that I won't be able to read them all, so re-reading a book means not reading something I haven't read yet.

I see reading literature like learning mathematics. When I was going through the various levels of school, we started learning mathematics with simple arithmetic, then moved on to algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. After studying calculus, I wouldn't be able to go back to an arithmetic book and view it in the same way I did when I was much younger. But I couldn't study calculus without arithmetic. I had to start at the beginning. Books like Around the World in 80 Days and Treasure Island are like simple arithmetic, and books like War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time are like calculus.

[mande2013]

So does that make Crime and Punishment or Light in August trig?

[Bill 42]

So does that make Crime and Punishment or Light in August trig?

That would be Ulysses - occasionally acute but mostly obtuse. But please don't go off on a tangent.

[R.F. Schiller]

Are there any post 1960 classics? As Harold Bloom points out, for works as recent as this there is no agreement. I've read the Amis and Roth and can think of many novels I prefer, even by them! For instance, Time's Arrow and Portnoy's Compliant.

Definitely agree that post-1960 classics are much less well-defined and less agreed upon, but I think they still exist, though with a degree of uncertainty. Infinite Jest is about as close as a "modern" book to have gotten universal acclaim from wide ranges of critics. When I tried to come up with a list of classics, I tried to incorporate my own preference along with critical scholarly consensus. I haven't read Time's Arrow yet, but Amis's most acclaimed works are probably Money and London Fields. My favourite Roth novel is actually The Counterlife, but it isn't considered a "classic" as much as American Pastoral, which I enjoyed nearly as much. Portnoy's Complaint is his most famous novel, but a large part of that is due to its scandalous nature and importance in loosening artistic censorship in American history. At that time, Roth was still a young, developing writer, and I don't think his prose reaches its peak until the 1980s. I think more "serious" readers of Roth praise his later work more. Besides, American Pastoral was published in 1997 so I wanted to give the OP some more modern things to read. Other post-1960 "classics" may include works by Pynchon, Bellow, Morrisonn, (I personally don't like her but many do), maybe Atwood and Alice Munro as well. And that's just U.S./Canadian Fiction; I don't follow contemporary literature of other nations quite as closely.


Mostly agree with you here, but I would personally keep The Time Machine and To Kill a Mockingbird. They are not heavyweight, culture defining classics, but I think they still deserve the title "classic", deal with incredibly important "single issues", are easy exciting reads, and should be on this list.

Eh, I think Harper Lee's book is one of the most overrated "classics" out there but that's just me. It feels overly sentimental and appeals too greatly to raw emotion. I recommended in my other posts two other authors who I think are better, yet cover the same issues. Flannery O'Connor (who incidentally called Lee's novel "a children's book"), another female Southern Gothic writer who brilliantly details Southern American Life around the same timeframe and Richard Wright, who deals with racism also around the same timeframe. H.G. Wells I've always considered just a writer of imaginative plotlines but not much else. The Time Machine is the best of the three novel(las) of his I've read though. It's not that I'm against easier works, just not some of the ones listed. The Death of Ivan Ilyich or Animal Farm are also quite simple, but better, IMO.



I'm biased towards Dickensian realism, but agree with much of this. I gave up half way through Proust, like many people, but agree Swann's Way should be on the list. I wasn't too impressed by Kafka's Castle or Trial, the confusion dragged on for too long. But I was very impressed by The Metamorphosis (and it's short!) Should Emerson's essays be in a top 50? Montaigne should surely should be there as "top essayist". Also, there are superior works from his period and place, Thoreau's Walden, for instance. What about some female moderns, Jeanette Winterson Oranges are not the Only Fruit, say.

I'm embarrassed to say I haven't read anything by Montaigne yet, so Emerson is the best essayist (and "Self-Reliance" the best essay) that I've actually read.


And you say this with a straight face, after recommending two more works by Nabakov? Which one work would you recommend?

For the one work by Dickens, with the growing tendency to recommend short works, I'd recommend Great Expectations, although I slightly prefer David Copperfield and Bleak House.

1) Yes I'm a Nabakov nuthugger. ;)

2) Furthermore the OP listed an average of 3.5 novels by both Dickens and Austen. I've read 4 of the 7 listed and although I thought 3/4 were quite good, they don't seem to be too different in style/innovation (but that may be just me, I'm somewhat ignorant regarding 19th-Century British Literature). Obviously interesting new stories in each and some difference in techniques by nothing compared to Lolita/Pale Fire. Lolita is a late modernist novel that draws largely from European Modernism (Proust, Kafka, Joyce) and is an expression of style and beauty. Pale Fire, although only published six years later is radically different, is more of a puzzle, and shows Nabokov creating something entirely new, breaking off from tradition. It is considered one of the first post-modern works, has more of an American texture and directly led to/influenced Pynchon's works (who was Nabokov's student at Cornell) as well as those of Updike and Amis. Nabokov is a bridge author in a sense that his texts are vastly diverse (they have the texture of three languages that he wrote in: English, Russian, French) and have the colour of European Modernists as well as the American post-modernists which is why I choose two, quite different novels. Speak, Memory is another, different type of work, a brilliant literary autobiography that is in a group of its own. It at times reads like short fiction and at other times reads like an essay. But if I could only recommend one work by Nabokov to a new reader, it would be Lolita. Much more accessible in difficulty than Pale Fire, much more interesting plot to follow and is the pinnacle of Nabokov's trademark style.

[Marbles]

But there is little agreement on which modern works are classics. From your list, I really liked:

Yes, you are right. It's difficult to say which modern works would retain their appeal in the future. To overcome the difficulty I believe one can choose some good contemporary fiction by considering the generally positive reviews from the purveyors of "literary fiction." In my opinion, this is a better approach to book selection than picking stuff randomly by reading backflaps without doing proper research. There's so much out there that it's becoming harder and harder to select the right books. Voltaire back in his day had said, "the multitude of books is making us ignorant." I wonder what he'd say, or do, if he took a look on modern bookshops.

[mal4mac]

I have read all but 2: D .H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913) and Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924).

I'm sure that most people making recommendations in this thread have read nearly all the books on this list.

I really like Thomas Mann and think The Magic Mountain should be on this list, although Buddenbrooks is also superb, and is perhaps best tackled first. I think there'a lot to be said for starting with an author's earlier works - this certainly applies with Joyce, I would start with Dubliners and follow up with Portrait before trying Ulysses (I gave up on Ulysses - if Tolstoy's works are Calculus, then Ulysses is String Theory.)



I rarely go back and re-read books. The only exceptions are the Dickens Christmas books, which I read every year at Christmas time. There are so many good books that I won't be able to read them all, so re-reading a book means not reading something I haven't read yet.


If you enjoy Dickens' Christmas books every year, you must enjoy the experience, so why wouldn't you re-read David Copperfield? Harold Bloom re-reads Pickwick Papers several times a year! There are many good books, but not many great books. I re-read great books to keep greatness in my life! It would be rather sad if I was only to live on a diet of good books for the rest of my life.

[mal4mac]

Definitely agree that post-1960 classics are much less well-defined and less agreed upon, but I think they still exist, though with a degree of uncertainty. Infinite Jest is about as close as a "modern" book to have gotten universal acclaim from wide ranges of critics...

Not universal acclaim. For instance, it really got panned by Harold Bloom:

http://www.wwd.com/eye/people/the-full-bloom-3592315?full=true

I really like Roth and have read several of his novels in the last few years, including American Pastoral, which I didn't dislike, but it was the one I liked least. I think it's been over-praised by recent critics because it deals with a large theme with lots of resonance to events in today's world. But I thought it was over long and needed a good edit, something I didn't feel on my re-read of Portnoy. Harold Bloom is an avid fan of Roth, and has 8 of his novels on his list, including Portnoy, but not American Pastoral. Are you saying Bloom isn't a serious reader of Roth?

I recently read Flannery O'Connor's complete short stories, and wonderful they are, and agree she should be on the list. Also, Alice Munro deserves to be on there (I really liked The View from Castle Rock.)

I think H.G. Wells captures late Victorian England quite well, and his characters are reasonably well drawn. These qualities combined with imaginative plotlines, wonderfully fast moving stories, and great prose style should get him on the list, I feel. I found Animal Farm a bit unreal, a bit Disney with all those talking animals, a bit preachy, a bit draggy, so I'd rather see that ditched (1984 should be kept!)

[R.F. Schiller]

Not universal acclaim. For instance, it really got panned by Harold Bloom:

http://www.wwd.com/eye/people/the-full-bloom-3592315?full=true

I really like Roth and have read several of his novels in the last few years, including American Pastoral, which I didn't dislike, but it was the one I liked least. I think it's been over-praised by recent critics because it deals with a large theme with lots of resonance to events in today's world. But I thought it was over long and needed a good edit, something I didn't feel on my re-read of Portnoy. Harold Bloom is an avid fan of Roth, and has 8 of his novels on his list, including Portnoy, but not American Pastoral. Are you saying Bloom isn't a serious reader of Roth?

I recently read Flannery O'Connor's complete short stories, and wonderful they are, and agree she should be on the list. Also, Alice Munro deserves to be on there (I really liked The View from Castle Rock.)

I think H.G. Wells captures late Victorian England quite well, and his characters are reasonably well drawn. These qualities combined with imaginative plotlines, wonderfully fast moving stories, and great prose style should get him on the list, I feel. I found Animal Farm a bit unreal, a bit Disney with all those talking animals, a bit preachy, a bit draggy, so I'd rather see that ditched (1984 should be kept!)

Hence the use of the words "close" and "most" in my posts. No literary work has, or will ever be 100% accepted as great by the scholarly community. Harold Bloom, as influential as he is, is one "serious reader". Shakespeare was famously criticized by Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, Woolf, Mann, Faulkner, Hemingway, James are just a few examples of acclaimed authors that are despised by Nabokov (particularly Dostoevsky). Also, despite his long-standing friendship with Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, the most influential critic of his time, panned Lolita while heavily praising another of Nabokov's obscure novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. As for Roth, I wrote my final paper on him for my Post-WWII American Literature course two years ago and of the articles and texts I read for reference, the novels of his that got the most acclaim were probably American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Ghost Writer and Operation Shylock (I actually didn't like this one that much). Portnoy's Complaint was praised, but is considered by many to be the work of a still-maturing Roth (my professor at my University shared this opinion as well in our conversations). I'm actually shocked by the praise for Operation Shylock:


In 2006, when New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus mailed a short letter to "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors," asking that they identify the best work of American fiction published in the preceding quarter-century, several respondents named Operation Shylock.

[mande2013]

As for noteworthy post-1960 works, there's also Blood Meridian and Underworld. In the case of Rushdie, Amis, McEwan, and even Toni Morrison I get the sense their work is tailored to upper middle brow haut-bourgeois consumption. In the case of Rushdie I feel he's just playing a role of "sophisticated man of letters" which the bourgeoisie eats up like candy, but he's not actually breaking any artistic round like Faulkner or Joyce. It's as if we've regressed from high modernism or even the post-modernism of Nabokov and Pynchon. To me, Rushdie's like the Picasso or the Fellini of literature, and I don't mean that in the positive sense. I compare him to those two as he serves as a 'grand standing ambassador of 'high culture' to flatter the urban bourgeoisie' and is anything but divisive among Western readers.

These days we have too many Gore Vidals and Rushdies but not enough Sartres or even Henry Millers.

[mal4mac]

No literary work has, or will ever be 100% accepted as great by the scholarly community. Harold Bloom, as influential as he is, is one "serious reader". Shakespeare was famously criticized by Tolstoy.


If only Bloom had panned Infinite Jest, I might have taken the plunge. But several other influential critics give it a thumbs down:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest#Critical_reception

[mal4mac]

In the case of Rushdie, Amis, McEwan, and even Toni Morrison I get the sense their work is tailored to upper middle brow haut-bourgeois consumption. In the case of Rushdie I feel he's just playing a role of "sophisticated man of letters" ... but he's not actually breaking any artistic round like Faulkner or Joyce. It's as if we've regressed from high modernism or even the post-modernism of Nabokov and Pynchon.

For me, with writers like Amis, McEwan, Eggars, and Franzen, it's as if we've shrugged off the obscurities of high and post-modernism, returned to the Dickensian mainstream, and made serious reading enjoyable again.

I also feel that Rushdie is playing a role of "sophisticated man of letters", but I consider him to be following in this experimental, and rather tedious, pursuit in the company of Faulkner and Joyce. I don't want any of them on my list!

One good idea that came with post-modernism is that there is no "one tradition", that different pools of readers live in totally different environments, separate from each other, finding totally different things enjoyable, and forever disagreeing on "what's best". This seems to agree with my experience.

This divergence of opinion, of course, makes it very difficult to agree on a top fifty list!

In any case, thanks for reminding me about McEwan, I think he should be on the list with Saturday.