[Closed] Your favourite 'classic' read

As pertinent now as when it was published - Woodward & Bernstein's "All the President's Men

Gold Star:

Dostoyevsky - Brothers Karamazov

Honourable Mentions:

Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Illych
Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Kafka - The Trial

Written by a rather distant relative, my pick would be Tom Jones.
Rollicking good fun.

Honourable mentions to;
The Rieu translation of the Odyssey. (Penguin Clasics)
Manon Lescaut - Abbé Prévost
The Power and the Glory - Grahame Greene
And, if it counts and doesn't break too many rules, pretty much anything by PG Wodehouse.

The Rieu translation is the one I've read

Dawn: 'warm and rosy fingered'. There's a whole new thread there!

Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck.

Most read book though is Weaveworld by Clive Barker.

Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck.

That, or Of Mice and Men, was one I might have added to my list on another day.

For sheer pride in having completed it,
Ulysses - James Joyce
Down and out in Paris and London made a big impression on me when I was a lad (or is that cheating as i's not really a novel) (Has anyone read Ripley Bogle? it's reminiscent IMO)

Define "classic".

Mikey needs to read a dictionary 🙂

I have always preferred Trollope to Dickens, mainly because he does politics so well. Having said that I have to be unpatriotic and say Germinal by Emile Zola, which provides an extraordinary description of extreme poverty, the hope of political protest and its ultimate suppression. But there are loads of great books and with classics you can load your Kindle up with them for nothing.

The crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon. The shortest and easiest-to-read book of the postmodern master is also his best, IMHO.

Others:
1. Crime and Punishment. Not his best, but my favourite for personal reasons - just read SF and fantasy as a kid and this was the first 'proper' literary book I ever picked up voluntarily. Couldn't believe how good it was.
2. A la recherche du temps perdu. Cheating a bit here as I've only read two volumes, but simply not read anything like it. Don't think there is anything like it. Mesmerising.
3. Collected stories of Borges. He never wrote a novel, but Goddamn he wrote some short stories! Hugely influential on the form - if I wanted to learn how to write fiction, this would be my place to start.

EV Rieu is my great great grandfather 🙂

Gold Star: A Tale of Two Cities

Mentions to:

Wodehouse - esp Uncle Fred
Powell - A Dance to the Music of Time series
Kipling - Kim

mikey74 - Member
Define "classic".

Olden-days stuff like the bible and the doomsday book innit. And that book out of The Evil Dead.

EV Rieu is my great great grandfather

This place never ceases to amaze!

Powell - A Dance to the Music of Time series

Another on my long list!

Stand on Zanzibar or Flowers For Algernon. And though Oscar Wilde's plots and characters often don't hold together I love his [i]lines.[/i]

“Children begin by loving their parents. As they grow older they judge them. And sometimes, they forgive them.”

scaredypants - Member

Down and out in Paris and London made a big impression on me when I was a lad

While I did enjoy it, it also made me conclude that Orwell was an utter bellend and the worst sort of tourist.

2. A la recherche du temps perdu. Cheating a bit here as I've only read two volumes, but simply not read anything like it. Don't think there is anything like it. Mesmerising.

While I did enjoy it, it also made me conclude that Orwell was an utter bellend and the worst sort of tourist.

I took my daughter to the library on Saturday to get a book of poems, as she is studying them at the moment. She duly choose one and I said that the editors were both English teachers of mine, albeit I was bottom of the class in both cases. She had no problem believing I was bottom, but didn't believe they were my teachers. Bloody kids.

Of Mice and Men, was one I might have added to my list on another day.

Any Steinbeck list should also include Cannery Row, Travels with Charley and Tortilla Flat.

Olden-days stuff like the bible and the doomsday book innit. And that book out of The Evil Dead.

Hmmm I don't read the bible, the Doomsday book, or the Necronomicon. However, if we're talking about non-contemporaneous stuff, then these:

- In Cold Blood: Truman Capote
- Lord of the Rings trilogy
- The Hobbit
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Is Cormac McCarthy "classic" yet?
- Does Lovecraft and Poe count?
- Hells Angels by Hunter S Thompson

Dracula was dull as ditchwater, but generally, I don't bother with "classic" fiction these days.

Powell - A Dance to the Music of Time series

Widmerpool - how often have characters like him arisen in life - fantastic - there was a very good Radio 4 dramatization.

Homage to Catalonia or Burmese Days. Orwell set the standard for prose.

+1 'The Old Man and the Sea'

Also:

Saki - 'The Chronicles of Clovis'

Dickens - 'A Tale of Two Cities'

Bulwer-Lytton - 'Eugene Aram'

Balzac - 'Wild Asses Skin'

Shelley - 'Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus)'

'

crime and punishment springs to mind.

Read the 39 steps recently as well, thoughts it was going along great, though the end was a bit rushed though. But good enough that, now ye mention it, I've got the complete richard hannay series to get through, will need to pick those up! 🙂

Post Office, Bukowski.

Anything by Zola and I reckon Rogue Male by Household just about sneaks into the 'Classics' genre.

Anna Karenina probably

Alone in Berlin, read that recently, enjoyed it.
For Whom The Bell Tolls is rather good too.
Our Man in Havana & The Quiet American are both great
100 Years of Solitude

Sorry thats 5 honourable mentions, plus

If we're going for someone like Pynchon (one day I will manage Gravity's Rainbow) then I'd include Vonnegut & Slaughterhouse 5

Old: Moby Dick
New: Cryptonomicon

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, I think, with Titus Groan probably edging out the others for top spot. Not an easy group of books to define but the general "feel" of them makes me think Iain (M) Banks was a fan.

Special mention to The Mahabharata. If you want tales of derring-do, love, hate, treachery, magic, war, peace, gods, devils, and everything inbetween, you'll not get much better. I'm only a small part way through, but it's brilliant. It's also old enough should Mervyn Peake be considered too contemporary to be classic.

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon - probably my most reread book (and all time favourite despite it being a school text book 😆 )
Young Art & Old Hector/The Green Isle of the Great deep - Neil Gunn

I preferred Gravity's Rainbow to Lot 49 (but admit it wasn't easy to read for the first 100-odd pages.... 😳 )

Modern modern I'd have to plump for some thing by Bill Gibson. Or maybe Neal Stephenson (who I love but he does tend to ramble at times, he should probably get a better editor....)

Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A captivating book I use to show some students that 'old' literature can be great.

Crime and Punishment. I bought it at the train station when at the start of a month where I'd be travelling Soton to Birmingham 18 times and it was the best value per page. I finished the bugger! It was a great book but I felt a sense of achievement more than anything else.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Is that a classic? It's the finest book ever written so it should be. Funny, poignant, exciting, interesting... a spectacularly great novel.

[img] [/img]

The Hobbit

Im gonna start reading to my 4 yr old soon

Technically not a book I suppose but I read it rather than saw or performed in it. Androcles and the Lion by G.B.Shaw will always stick with me as it was one of my first books and I read it numerous times.
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn is my other choice. Unremittingly bleak, I read it when in 2nd year senior school & remember my English teacher being surprised when he found out; we were 'studying' something eminently forgettable at the time.
Kestrel for a Knave will always stick with me. Partly because it resonated as a story, as I grew up in an ex mining village on the outskirts of Barnsley in the 80s and also because of my mum's stories of the filming of it at her school & the other kids who ended up in the film...

For sheer pride in having completed it,
Ulysses - James Joyce

No you didn't. It is a well known fact that no one has ever finished Ulysses.

"You cannot learn too early in life that most classical literature is both dull and unimportant." Kyril Bonfiglioli.

I've never read Under Milk Wood but listened to it countless times, it's superb.

More recently

Catch 22 by Heller
Neuromancer by Gibson

Great thread idea, fills me with inspiration. I went through a phase of alternating 'my' choices - autobiographies, thrillers, etc., with classics, and if I'm honest found it very hit and miss.

Steinbeck was great - Cannery Row probably edges Mice and Men for me.
Moby Dick - was an absolute trudge but I finished it
Mockingbird - brilliant; even better my eldest daughter read it at the same time as me so we could discuss it.
The Time Machine - dragged a bit for me but good ending
War of the Worlds - and genuinely hadn't seen film / radio play, etc. so didn't know the ending - thought the ending was 'Oh, is that it?'
Hemingway - Death in the Afternoon; fascinating if not really a novel
Frankenstein - great

Really haven't read much Dickens, sounds like I should try. Read a few classics at school obviously; 1984 is next one cued up for me given we seem to almost be back there! but also Lord of the Flies, 39 Steps, etc.

And I do like a good Holmes story, but they're short stories rather than novels in the true sense.

Definition of "classic":

judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind.

Somewhat ambiguous, no?

I'd also add I am Legend

Gold star:

[i]Heart of Darkness[/i], Joseph Conrad

Honourable mentions:

[i]Rogue Male,[/i] Geoffrey Household
[i]Metamorphosis[/i], Franz Kafka
[i]Nausea[/i], Albert Camus

Also ran: [i]Ghormenghast[/i], Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, [i]Billy Liar[/i]

EDIT: [b]@user-removed[/b]: Houseman is definitely a classic! 🙂

My favourite book in the world is Homer's Odyssey.
I really enjoyed Fyodor Dstoyevsky's The Idiot much, much more than Crime & Punishment.
Mikhail Bulgakov's ,The Master and Margarita is a classic imo.
Sadly , since parenthood arrived I haven't had chance to read anything other than childrens books. ha.

The Alchemist, To Kill A Mockingbird and some Hemmingway.

The Magic Faraway tree - Enid Blyton.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

To be honest, everything De Bernierres has written is gold. His South American Trilogy is utterly captivating.

I have Flying_Ox. My 5 year old recently saw a Top Gear with Clarkson and told me, "That man or bikes are on the front of all your stories Daddy". It's true. I'm a magazine-on-the-bog man. I do love everything LDB ever wrote and that's an exception to someone who generally sees novels as a bit of a chore.

The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman comes a close second to CC's Mandolin, but there's just something about the latter that makes it perfect IMO. Birds Without Wings was excellent: perhaps just a little too dense for me.

Anything by PG Wodehouse.

Intereted to see someone listed Moby Dick - I've just read that. Had great moments, but is padded through most of the middle of the book with information about fish/whales/whaling which, though interesting, doesn't make for an exciting read. The language is also so far removed from modern day writing that I couldn't call it a favourite.

I'd list:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Lord Of the Flies
The Fight (Norman Mailer)
Long time since I read any Hemingway, so hard to pick a favourite.

Just thought of another couple -

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Brighton Rock

The Snail and the Whale.

Gold star:

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

And written in his third language, utterly extraordinary

As for Steinbeck it's very difficult to choose a favourite or a best, I thought I'd never read anything to match Grapes of Wrath but then I read East of Eden. The only conclusion I came to was that for me he's the best writer I have ever read.

Catch 22 by Heller

The Snail and the Whale

Grapes of Wrath is a one time read, all be it a great one...it actually got to the point where I was dreading the next page.

Grapes of Wrath is a one time read, all be it a great one...it actually got to the point where I was dreading the next page.

1 – Thank god I have got through that, it was rubbish.

or

2 – Ohh please don't let this be the end, I want it to carry on forever.

But with Grapes of Wrath you know that the story has reached a perfect conclusion and there is nothing left to say.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Honourable mention:
Catch-22

Both "modern" classics, but important nonetheless.

Oh gawd, how could I have forgotten:
Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor)
and The Harder They Fall (Budd Schulberg)

OP said pick 1 - so: Cuckoo's Nest. The rest very honourable mentions 🙂

Fwiw most of the 'classic' classics listed above I read decades ago. I feel no compunction to go back. But these I do:

Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis. Probably gets it. Most reread book.

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess. Too prolific, needs reappraisal.

The Witsun Weddings - Philip Larkin. It's a book. Also a classic.

And I dunno

The High Window - Raymond Chandler, or
Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut or some
Mid-period Elmore Leonard

Hang on, late entry...

The Goldfinch - Donna Tart. Might actually displace Lucky Jim, disrupting the emergent middle-aged misanthrope white guy theme...

If This is a Man, Primo Levi

[i]Mid-period Elmore Leonard[/i]

Love him, but I don't think he's regarded as a classic writer, yet.

I thought we'd settled it that classic means classic?

The Snail and the Whale

Pffft, not even the best book by that author.

It so is. It's a perfect, beautiful, poetic nugget of loveliness.

You've been snared by the crass commercialism and populist thrills of the authors other works.

You've been snared by the crass commercialism and populist thrills of the authors other works.

I have a signed copy of Cave Baby. 🙂

pfftt, if we're talking of her works, then the clear winner is the one about the disparate group seeking accommodation on the main protagonist's perambulatory device, and how such a disparate group all contribute to the overall success and ultimately demise of the journey.

A Clockwork Orange in first.

August 1914 - Solzhenitsyn.
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway.
Three Men In A Boat -JKJ.

Just read, for the first time, To Kill a Mocking Bird. Really enjoyed it, beautifully written.

Plus 1 for catch 22.

Just finished reading The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick, (of Bladerunner fame).

Very interesting read set post WW2 where Germany and Japan have won and split the US into three differently controlled zones.

Everything else by him is dross though – that was clearly a fluke.

To kill a mockingbird and M*A*S*H are my other two. All first read in my teens and are the only books I'll return to again and again to read

johnx2 - Member
Fwiw most of the 'classic' classics listed above I read decades ago. I feel no compunction to go back.

I've stuffed my Kindle with lots of the dirt cheap/free 'Complete Works'.

It's freed a lot of shelf space and I've reread much I've not read since a teenager.
Dickens I prefer as an adult, still can't stand Hardy and Chesterton, in hindsight, is a bit of a windbag.
Rereading and enjoying Margaret Atwood at the mo.

To Kill a Mockingbird
Catch 22
Lord of the Rings.

honourable mentions to most of Kafka's short stories, and a lot of Gunther Grass plays.

Moby Dick was entertaining enough, despite the padding. I tried some Solzhenizyn, but I think Cancer Ward was a bit too daunting for a 16 year old. Might try it again now I'm in a better position to understand it.

Got put off Dickens by a dull English teacher who managed to make Bleak House a chore. Might give him another go.

Oh, and I need to read some Steinbeck.

Aye absolutely, Catch-22 is my favourite book ever though so he nailed that one in my eyes

Best book ever written, by a country mile IMHO. We were chatting about our favourite books the other night, and I was only thinking how I've not read it for a few years, so its due for its periodic re-reading 🙂

Are we classing JG Ballard as 'classic'? Anything he's ever written is worth a read, and will definitely stand the test of time, I would think

But with Grapes of Wrath you know that the story has reached a perfect conclusion and there is nothing left to say.

perchypanther - Member

The Snail and the Whale

Pffft, not even the best book by that author.

It so is. It's a perfect, beautiful, poetic nugget of loveliness.

If we're talking childrens books, my favourite is 'some dogs do'.

Agreed.,, It's a belter.....His dad turned out be a bit of a dark horse, didn't he?

#plottwist

There are so many fantastic children's books. Unfortunately my two are having Emily Feather read to them as their bedtime book right now – bloody awful, barely readable.

Puckoon - Spike Milligan

I've never read Under Milk Wood but listened to it countless times, it's superb.

Enjoy

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Color Purple - Alice Walker

I have read all of these over and over again ! I like epistolary novels, it seems.

I've always liked:

3 Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jarome
Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
Coming Up for Air - George Orwell

For sheer pride in having completed it,
Ulysses - James Joyce

No you didn't. It is a well known fact that no one has ever finished Ulysses.

"You cannot learn too early in life that most classical literature is both dull and unimportant." Kyril Bonfiglioli.

Homer finished Ulysses. Whereas Nobody has heard of Bonfiglioli, which is obviously a made-up name.

So, "To the lighthouse". I'm not afraid of her.