I’m trying to get into Classic books after reading a few, but I’m not sure where to continue.
These are the ones I’ve read so far:
– The Stranger by Albert Camus, my rank 9/10
– 1984 by George Orwell, 9/10
– To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 7/10
– The adventure of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 7/10
– The Great Gatsby by F. Scott. Fitzgerald, 8/10
– The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 8/10
– The Catcher in The Rye by J.D Salinger, 9/10
– To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 9/10
– Lord of The Flies by William Golding, 9/10
Any suggestions?
by Bee_Asteria818
8 Comments
On the basis of that list you might like ‘Nostromo’ by Joseph Conrad, ‘Daniel Deronda’ by George Eliot and, as a total wild-card, ‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson
The Fall, Camus
Frankenstein, Shelley
The Trial, Kafka
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde
Suspect you’ll enjoy all of those.
Some of my top picks:
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas
Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck (Alternately, Grapes of Wrath)
Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway (Alternately, A Farewell to Arms)
Brave New World, Huxley
The Call of the Wild (and White Fang), London
The ScrewTape Letters, Lewis
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There), Carroll
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Edit (forgot some other good ones):
The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
Gulliver’s Travels, Swift
Complete Sherlock Holmes, Doyle
Flatland, Abbott
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Edit 2:
Various Short stories from Poe (The Telltale Heart, Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado)and O’Connor (A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People)
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Edit 3 (Modern? Classics)
Flowers for Algernon, Keyes
Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, Suskind
The Left Hand of Darkness, LeGuin
Dune, Herbert
1. Mill On The Floss – George Eliot
2. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
3. A Brave New World – Alduous Huxley
4. The Old Man And The Sea – Ernest Hemingway
5. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
6. The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov
7. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
8. Dracula – Bram Stoker
Have you read Brave New World?
I’d suggest Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. It’s a wonderful introduction to his writing and at the same time it’s haunted me for decades since I read it. The central dilemmas faced by the main character are rooted by Conrad in the places and situations he himself experienced, so they feel real and vivid, but they’re also versions of situations and mistakes that everyone faces and makes at some point in their life.
At some point you’ve got to try some classic Russian lit. My favorites: Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky).
AK is often cited as one of the greatest novels (if not the greatest, but who really wants to split hairs) of all time. It has everything: love, revenge, betrayal, death, birth, politics, horse racing, pheasant hunting, truffles, agriculture…..
I would definitely add Dickens. If you haven’t read Tale of Two Cities already in school or if you did and hated it because it was a school assignment then definitely read it. If you have then Great Expectations is great.
Sherlock Holmes by Doyle is great, any of his novels (I think there are four and a ton of short stories). I’ve actually read the complete works which is excellent.
Verne or HG Wells. “20,000 leagues under the sea” or “From the Earth to the Moon” for the former, and “War of the Worlds” for the latter.