I have some older and more contemporary literary fiction novels sitting on my bookshelf, most widely considered classics or at least very highly acclaimed, that I’m looking to pick for my next read. Which one should I go with? Will pick the one with most upvotes. Here’s the list:
- 2666 by Roberto Bolano
- Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
- If On a Winters Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Swanns Way by Marcel Proust
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Which one should I go with?
by Monkey-on-the-couch
6 Comments
I enjoyed Jane Eyre and Invisible man!
Carson McCullers
North and south is in my opinion a reasonable good description of the industrial revolution in England and how it affected people in different classes of society. I don’t know how historically accurate it is but it made me think about how life might have been for them
I have started Middlemarch, but I probably should have read it when I was younger. Some of the young characters are getting on my nerves now
The Grapes Of Wrath is really good
Wow. None of these is what anyone would call an easy read. I’ll second Grapes of Wrath, although you probably can’t go wrong with anything on this list.
All are good. I loved 2666. It takes some getting into though–not your typical novel with the typical story, so beware.