Help with my classics reading list?

[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-fu...2315?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-fu...2315?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.