Ten Favorite Novels

Hello, I'm new here and also recently renewed my interest in literature. I would love to hear some recommendations from you pros on the classics. List ten that you think everyone in world should read.

My Top 10

Jude the Obscure and The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
:banana: :banana: :banana:

Well I cant really tell, the list may be change in times..cause it can happen that when i read it at the first time i dont really like it, but when i read it again it may happen that i'm beginning to like it..
so no list for me

Ferber: Giant
Camus: The Stranger
Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
Dickens: Tale of Two Cities
Mishima: Forbidden Colors
Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Kingsolver: Poisonwood Bible
St.-Exupery: The Little Prince
Salinger: Catcher In the Rye
Steinbeck: Grapes of Wrath
Maugham: Of Human Bondage
Boyle: Tortilla Curtain

Not a Top Ten list, but some books that I have greatly enjoyed which come to mind.

I appreciate the lists and look forward to discussing them with you.

HMac

well... here goes: stuff I think people should read (I'll try and stick to what are classics as much as possible)

- The Island of Dr. Moreau (H.G. Wells)
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Dune (Frank Herbert) (it's a sci-fi classic, hehe)
- Rurouni Kenshin vol. 1 (Nobuhiro Watsuki)
- The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman)

Here are 10 mainstream classics:

- The Catcher in the Rye
- 1984
- Great Expectations
- Wuthering Heights
- Crime and Punishment
- Heart of Darkness
- The Republic
- The Great Gatsby
- War and Peace
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

hm..I just didnt get hte Grapes of Wrath, all that anger growing at their maltreatment, throughout the entire book, and you think, yes! now they will finally rebel, and do they? no, its ends like that. lame.

My top 5 (cant remember enough)

Gone with the Wind
Catcher in the Rye
I am David
Lord of the Flies
Heart of Darkness

I'm really enjoying this topic, and while I agree with most, I'll add a few more classics that haven't been included yet.

French lit:

by Jean Jacques Rousseau:
The Social Contract
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

by Albert Camus:
Caligula
The Fall
The Myth of Sisyphus

by Jean-Paul Sartre:
Nausea

English lit:

by Aldous Leonard Huxley:
Antic Hay
The Perennial Philosophy

Canadian lit:

by Margaret Laurence:
The Stone Angel
The Diviners

by Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient

by Leonard Cohen:
Beautiful Losers

American lit:

by Paul Bowles:
The Sheltering Sky

by Hunter S. Thompson:
Hell's Angels
Generation of Swine
(ok maybe not `classic' yet but great contemporary American stuff)

Oh jeeze, and forgot to add:

Japanese lit:

by Yukio Mishima:
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Chinese lit:
by Lao-tzu
The Art of War

and:

English lit:

the poetry of Ted Hughes (husband of Sylvia Plath)

and

by Sylvia Plath:
The Bell Jar

Uhm, everyone in the world? I'll try to spread the experience of my wee bit of reading out as well-roundedly as I can then. Haven't read as much from around the world as I'd have liked, nor as much from any given genre or style, so here goes...



Chinua Achebe; Things Fall Apart
African life was not "simple" or "savage" before stumbled upon by the rest of the world, and its rich heritage was irreparably strangled by those trying to "help".

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man
If you're black and someone's paying attention to you, then you're probably in trouble.

Josepeh Heller; Catch-22
War is ridiculous, life is ridiculous. Have to match the number of missions to get out of there anyways. Oops, it went up again.

Aldous Huxley; Brave New World
The efficient future is loveless; removal of the low points of life make the highs that much less defined.

George Orwell; 1984
The government's a wee bit out of control. Free will was only holding you back, anyways.

Erich Maria Remarque; All Quiet on the Western Front
From the German side of WWI, war wasn't any better, nor were the reasons that the soldiers were fighting it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Ivan's in a Russian work camp in Siberia, which may or may not be worse than being outside of the work camp.

John Steinbeck; The Moon is Down
A town surrendering to you doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy going from thereon in.

J.R.R. Tolkien; The Lord of the Rings
If you're going to dip into the world of fantasy, you may as well start here. Plus you'd be the only one that hadn't...

Elie Wiesel; Night
A son recounts he and his father's struggle to survive concentration camps in WWII.

Oooh Capnplank, good choice on The Moon is Down, I don't think most people know that Steinbeck wrote a war novel, but it ranks up there with All Quiet... Have you ever read A Midnight Clear? This is also a good work about war in which two sides stage a surrender that goes terribly wrong.Steinbeck also wrote one political farce of types, in which a lowly man in france, I beleive, is momentarily in power of the country.

Gogol - Dead Souls
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita & Pale Fire
Turgenev - Fathers and sons
Zola - Germinal
Zola - The Earth
Kafka - The Trial

my suggestions:

1. The Catcher in the Rye
2. Foucault's Pendulum by Eco
3. Clockwork Orange
4. stories by EA Poe
5. The Master and Margarita
6. 1984
7. Crime and Punishment
8. Ulisses by Joyce (at least one third of the book if you can't stand it)
9. The Trial
10. Lord Jim

I can only say that I agree on that I agree on that Catcher in the Rye has to be on that list. I have hardly read any of the other books reguested. Guess I should. Well, but a classic I HAVE read and which is nor yet reguested is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. That I think every1 should read atleas once in a life time. Oh, and Lord of the Rings is also woth getting trooth (I havent yet finnished it. I have like 100 pages left and have been reading it ever since the first movie was out, and I have problems making myself finnish it, but I think I should.)