book list

[redwing]

I know there have been plenty of 'what should i read next' threads but i wanted to start one that (well from my knowledge) hasn't been done before. I wanted to have everybody list what they consider "the classics" or "books that should be read before i die list"

This does not have to be fantasy. Actually this can be any literature from short stories to poems to a ten book series.
Ill throw out the first one that i know everybody is going to mention:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

[Crothian]

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

 

[Tsyr]

Ender's Game

And this really should be in the fantasy/sci-fi/media forum.

 

[Silver Moon]

Book List

Some "classic" favorites of mine:

The Prince by Machiavelli

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Illusions by Richard Bach

and a few that may not be considered "classic literature" that I have always enjoyed:

The first Dragonriders of Pern trilogy (Dragonflight; Dragonquest; The White Dragon) by Anne McCaffrey

First Blood by John Morrell

Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler

 

[darkbard]

[in no particular order]: moby dick [melville], ulysses [joyce], crime & punishment [dostoevsky], walden [thoreau], hamlet /sonnets [duh!], to the lighthouse [woolf], tropic of cancer [miller], leaves of grass [whitman], the loser [bernhard], the trial [kafka], songs of innocence & experience [blake], on the road/dharma bums [kerouac], the wasteland [elliot], the sun also rises [hemingway], canterbury tales [chaucer], odyssey [homer], the magus [fowles], in the spirit of the earth [martin], a people's history of the united states [zinn], i could go on and on and on but will spare you. if you read all the books on this list you're making good headway!

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I'll second Catch-22, The Odyssey, Ulysses, Walden, The Sun Also Rises, Hamlet, and the Canterbury Tales. I'd add:

1. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.
1a. Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov (but only after Lolita).
2. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, but specifically Inferno.
3. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
4. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov.
5. The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis.
6. Paradise Lost, John Milton.
7. In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
7a. Idylls of the King, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
8. Bleak House, Charles Dickens.
8a. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens.
9. King Lear, Shakespeare.
10. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
11. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco.
12. Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud.

Best,
tKL

 

[Ran]

but I would say that

1. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

 

[darkbard]

yeah, lolita's a pretty special book. dante and milton are seminal but not everyone will enjoy them. the great gatsby's a great [hah!] book but i actually prefer tender is the night. my wife's horrified that i still haven't read great expectations.

 

[darkbard]

how could i forget frankenstein!?! great book!!!

 

[Old Fezziwig]

yeah, lolita's a pretty special book. dante and milton are seminal but not everyone will enjoy them. the great gatsby's a great [hah!] book but i actually prefer tender is the night. my wife's horrified that i still haven't read great expectations.

Tender is the Night is brilliant, too, but if someone can only read one Fitzgerald, I'd run with Gatsby. I agree on the Milton and Dante, but they reward the effort put into their reading (a lot like Moby Dick, actually, IMO). As for Great Expectations, I read it for the first time this fall (I'm a grad student in English and it kind of just fell through the cracks until now — which is mostly horrifying because Victorian lit. is my period ).

Best,
tKL