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The idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
A clockwork orange - Anthony Burgess
1984 - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Koran
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
My top 10:
1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
2. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
3. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. Tess d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
8. A Pair Of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
9. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Paradise Lost by John Milton
My top 10:
1) The Wars by Timothy Findley
Absolutely breath-takingly stunning. So emotionally powerful that it'll leave you gasping for air at the end. A must-read for everyone. The story is set in WWI, but it's so much more than a typical war story. As obvious from the title, there's more than one "war" going on.
2) 1984 by George Orwell
3) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
4) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
5) The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
6) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Henriette Beecher-Stowe
8) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
9) To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolfe
10) The Outsider by Albert Camus
My top 10 "classics" that ppl should read..
The outsider (or anything by camus)
After Rain:- William Trevor
Eugene Onegin
The Women In White :- Wilkie Colines
Great Expectations:- Charles Dickens
Anything by Edgar Allen Poe or Beaudelaire
Les Miserables
Phantom of the Opera - Kay and Leroux
The Three Musketeers
The Count of Monte Cristo
Also "Scissions" by Tim Winton its about Australian identity, so yeah, not one for everyone but i like it..
I know some of these aren't classics but these are my favourites and some reasons why:
1) Papillon by Henri Charriere because it's an amazing true story that brought me to tears most of the time reading it.
2) Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo due to the love story and although some chapters seemed to inturrupt the story, it was a fantastic read.
3) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson because I thought the whole concept was great.
4) The Iliad by Homer. I love Greek mythology and thought this was so magical with a great story behind it.
5) Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. My dad got me into this book, I think it's so amazing and one of those books that I've read 4 times and still find stuff in it that I didn't notice the time before.
6) Tale of Two Cities by Dickens was so good and the ending so emotional.
7) Jane Eyre by Bronte. It's not like normal classics and gave you a real sense of the past behind this woman and how she grew to be a woman.
8) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I was forced to read this at school and found it so good. The way things were described you could really picture it in your head and the change of narrative was great.
9)Pride and Prejudice by Austen was a great love story that was hard to follow in some parts but I could not read again but a book that will stay with me.
10) Catcher in the Rye by Salinger was really good, it was a quick read for me but it had a lot of hidden meaning and when he's describing his brothers glove it's the only time that you really see emotion, but it really keeps you hooked.
One hundred years of solitude - Marquez
Kassandra - Christa Wolf
Wellen - Eduard von Keyserling
Malina - Ingeborg Bachmann
Dr. Faustus - Thomas Mann
Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Der Prozess - Franz Kafka
Mutter Courage - Bertolt Brecht
Demian - Hermann Hesse
The Enuma Elish (The Gilgamesh Epic), Anon
The Odyssey, Homer
Ulysses, Joyce
Lolita, Nabokov
The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, Edmondson
Monkey, Wu Cheng en
The Lord of Light, Zelazny
Boat of a Million Years, Anderson
Bored of the Rings, Beard & Kinney
Don't get me started -- just 10? I'll try:
Don Quixote de la Mancha - Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Portrait of a Lady - James
Ulysses - Joyce
The Bible
Some of the best classics are collections of short stories:
In Our Time - Hemingway
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Carver (ok, maybe more of a contemporary classic?)
Jane Eyre - Bronte
Middlemarch - Eliot
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Chabon (another 'not-yet' classic, at least by definition, but I bet it will be one day)
That's 10 so I'll quit.
Excellent! Just registered and put in search term 'Bukowski'. Very impressed with the calibre of books chosen here. My ten could be made up of many of those, but I'll go for:
Post Office - Bukowski
A Clockwork Orange - Burgess
Cannery Row OR Tortilla Flat - Steinbeck (the ultimate feel good books!)
Ask the Dust - John Fante
Love is a Dog from Hell - Bukowski (Poetry - just about any of his collections are mint)
The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe (but steel yourself- V. sad)
The Outsider (or L'Etranger) - Camus
Portrait of an Artist... - Joyce (Everyone says Ullyses, but beautiful as it is, its a toughy!)
Homeboy - Seth Morgan
1984 - George Orwell
;)
Though if we can have plays it's a whole new ball game! Anything by the the bard, obviously. If you haven't ever got into Shakespeare, or had it destroyed for you at school, take the time to read some. Magic. Can I swear on this site? It's sort of part of my idiolect, but hey, don't want to get hossed off.
Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
Blood and Guts in Highschool - Kathy Acker
Lolita - Nabokov
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Summer Rain - Marguerite Duras
On the Suffering in the World - Arthur Schopenhauer
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Molloy - Samuel Beckett
The Story of the Eye - George Bataille
[and number 1 with a bullet]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
my recommendation:
shakespeare:hamlet
charles dickens:great expectation& oliver twist
jane austen :pride and prejudice
agatha christie: death on nile & murder on the orient express
thomas hardy:tess
mark twain: tom sauyer
o.henry:short stories
In no particular order:
1. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
3. The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway
4. Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
5. Lord of the Flies and/or Free Fall by Golding
6. The Crucible by Miller
7. Decameron by Boccaccio
8. The Plague by Camus
9. The Trial by Kafka
10. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde
Here are some other books in contension (for me):
The Stranger by Camus, Pygmalion by Shaw, Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, Pride and Prejudice by Austen, Brave New World by Huxley, Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
1. Atomised by Michel Houllebecq
2. History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist
3. Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
4. Last Orders by Graham Swift
5. Atonement by Ian McEwan
6. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
7. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
8. The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks
9. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
10. Austerlitz by W G Sebald
Not in any particular order. Liable to change.
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
The Lord of the Rings by J. R R. Tolkien
One discworld novel by Terry Pratchett
Here are my favorite reads (some I've delved into numerous times), in no particular order:
War and Peace - Leon Tolstoi
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
Bleak House - Chas. Dickens
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco