Classics of literature?

[Agback]

G'day

Here are a couple to get you started:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The War of the Worlds - HG Wells

Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Jurgen James Branch Cabell

A Fish Dinner in Memison ER Eddison

Kim Rudyard Kipling

Thank You, Jeeves PG Wodehouse

1984 George Orwell

The Last of the Wine Mary Renault

The Convenient Marriage Georgette Heyer

Three Men in a Boat Jerome K Jerome

Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll

The Moon and Sixpence W Somerset Maugham

Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle

Murder on the Orient Express Agatha Christie

The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett

The Kraken Wakes John Wyndham

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Robert Heinlein

The Broken Sword Poul Anderson

The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway

A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K Leguin

Araminta Station Jack Vance

Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson

Regards,


Agback

 

[KenM]

Animal farm- Orwell(SP?)

Les Miserables- Victor Hugo.

Watchmen graphic novel- Alan Moore.

 

[Eridanis]

My favorite novel of all time:

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.

Magic, love, sacrifice, terrible doom, life reaffirmed, flying horses, time travel, poker games, blizzards, honorable and dishonorable men of epic scope, fortunes lost and won, evil, good, and the fate that awaits us all. All framed in a New York City that exists only in the mind of those who love her, but is so close to reality that it gives one pause.

Check out Amazon's description.

 

[Assenpfeffer]

I am not a Stephen King fan. The Gunsligner was possibly the dullest thing I've ever actually managed to finish reading. But The Stand is a great book.

I'm a genre guy - I don't read a lot of "great literature." I would sooner be kicked in the package than have to read, say, The Catcher in the Rye.

But I do like Steinbeck. Start with The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men. And Mark Twain is, IMO, the greatest writer ever to come out of America.

I'm not much on Hemingway, though I liked For Whom the Bell Tolls more than The Old Man and the Sea.

He's British, but George Orwell's 1984 should be required reading. It's not only a classic that also appeals to fans of genre literature, it's also probably the most frightning book I've ever read.. truly chilling.

Also, everyone who is remotely interested in SF/fantasy/horror should drop whatever they're doing and read Dracula. Now.

 

[WisdomLikeSilence]

Check out the link below for a great list of modern classics. The Modern Library also compiled a list of the top 100 books of the last century, but the Radcliffe Publishing list is generally considered to be better.

http://www.lesekost.de/HHL102.htm

I am particularly fond of To Kill a Mocking Bird and Lolita, although I'd recommend an annotated version of anything by Nabokov.

Good Reading!

-WLS

 

[Mistwell]

My favorite novel of all time:

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.

Magic, love, sacrifice, terrible doom, life reaffirmed, flying horses, time travel, poker games, blizzards, honorable and dishonorable men of epic scope, fortunes lost and won, evil, good, and the fate that awaits us all. All framed in a New York City that exists only in the mind of those who love her, but is so close to reality that it gives one pause.

Check out Amazon's description.

Good or bad, I don't think you can call this book a classic yet...

 

[Dr Midnight]

The following has nothing to do with classic literature, so pass on by if that's what yer a-hankerin' fer.
-----------------------------------------------------
Just because everyone's talking King, I'll jump in with some stuff. I began reading him around twelve, and for the age, it was just scary enough. I burned through pretty much everything he had in a year, and then started from the beginning.

An odd thing, as a fantasy reader- I really like The Eyes of the Dragon when I was young, but I read it again this year and found it to be pretty dull. I mean, the story's okay, but as a genre tale I thought its excitement was far too boring and the danger too "meh".

Salem's Lot (and the short stories about the town) still hold up for me as exceptionally effective and creepy, and I've been meaning to re-read those lately. King does vampires the way I like 'em... monstrous cockroaches. They move in and take over your damn town, killing everything in sight. They don't wear ruffled silk doublets and lie about, whining about in-undead politics.

Pet Sematary scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. The line about the gibbering goat head floating in the air haunted my head for years.

The short stories are great, because the protagonists aren't at all like your typical King proties... they're not so witty, they can die, you get the feeling that not every one is just a slight bit different from another. Pretty much everything in NIGHT SHIFT or SKELETON CREW has seen four or five reads from me... THE LEDGE, STRAWBERRY SPRING, the miniature soldiers story, and the giant rats story stand out to me now... very much like Twilight Zones or great EC comics that never were.

I read MISERY once in a while, and it's just a little airborne, it's still good, it's still good.

I haven't read much King since I read TOMMYKNOCKERS. Most of his recent (Which to me means since IT) stories, IMO, have been all about creepy things leading up to a confrontation between good and evil, with good winning out. I don't like that- finding out that whatever was creepily doing something can be attacked when the protagonist(s) turn the tables and bum rush the show.

I recommend THE LONG WALK, from THE BACKMAN BOOKS, for no particular reason. I just always liked it.

 

[Olive]

I really like the following (and some might be flavour of the month):

Homage to Catalonia - george orwell
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
The Corrections - Johnathan Franzen
White Boy Shuffle - Paul Beatty
The Crow Road - Iain Banks
The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks
The Disposessed - Ursela LaGuin
The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro

If I read all of those in a row, I'd be a happy man.

 

[Claude Raines]

The stories of Raymond Carver --I don't like them, but they did have a really big impact on short fiction.

I found his short fiction to be possibly the best I've ever read. There was a time when I kept trying to write short stories in his style. If you do want to pick up his work, I suggest the collection titled "Where I'm Calling From."

Ray Bradbury has been mentioned before but I will second his work. And I consider John Irving to be one of the greates novelists alive today. "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is one of the best books of the last century. Since the taboo on mentioning non-english/american authors has been broken (Umberto Eco is Italian), let me also add Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The Book of Laughter And Forgetting." These are great although I really disliked his other work that I read.

Finally, let me put in a plug for James Michner. "Centennial" is a classic book and one of the best examples of the sprawling american historical novel. His other works are well worth reading as well.

 

[Sagan Darkside]

Re: Re: Classics of literature?

Run, don't walk, and find yourself a copy of The Stand. Make sure it's the uncut version circa 1990. This is King's finest book, IMO, and one of the best ever written in the fantasy/horror genre.

Agreed. Then, when you are finished, go rent the Storm of the Century. It was a tv movie that is a good companion for the Stand in that it follows a similar theme, but to a different end.

Most of my favorites have already been mentioned-
so I will just second:
Poe - almost anything, but the Black Cat is great (The Bells is my favorite- a poem showing a man going insane)
Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary
Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Lee - The first couple years of Fantastic Four

SD