What "classic" book to read?

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If you're gonna go back to actual classics, try Xenophon's Anabasis.

Or maybe Ceasar's Gallic Campaigns.

 

1984 and Animal Farm. I'm studying 'A Passage to India' now, and pretty good. Very political, but of course, what isn't?

 

E.M. Forster - great writer. A _Passage to India_ is a great book. So is _Room with a View_ and _Howards End_. They were also good films as well. But David Lean reworked the ending of Passage considerably. His ending is much more optimistic than Forster's.

 

1984 is one of my all time favorites

The Natural is another modern American classic.

Toni Morrison's novels are considered classic by a lot of modern people. I think she's a whacko, though. Same for Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo.

Moll Flanders by Defoe is rather amusing.

Pamela by . . . shoot, I forgot. It's weird but it has it's moments.

Middlemarch by George Eliot (actually a woman using a pseudonym, makes the feminists happy). IMHO, this is THE best written novel ever.

People have already mentioned Hemingway.

Anything at all by Kipling, even if you think it's too kiddie.

Call of the Wild by Jack London

And finally,

Disciplining Jane -- a pornographic / S&M re-telling of the story of Jane Eyre (this is a joke, this last one, I've never read it and it's by no means a classic, but it IS a real book that makes me laugh every time I hear the title.)

 

I extremely disliked 1984. It was required reading in High School and I found it exremely boring. Really, there was a book within a book.

I have a few favorites that I still read.

Lord of the Rings (all 4) is still a classic.

Far North by Will Hobbs is a great adventure into the North West Territories.

Also, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass is a great trilogy written by Phillip Pullman.

 

Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino is a great introduction to some of our literary classics - and the first essay, also called "Why Read the Classics", offers an interesting definition of the concept 'a classic': link

Here are some of my personal favourites:

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Catcher In the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Stranger by Albert Camus

... and of a more recent date:

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

 

Jaguar - I don't think the His Dark Material series, good though it is, qualifies as a 'classic' just yet as it has not a chance to stand the test of time.

 

Victor - I like what I've read of Calvino. _If on a Winter's Night a Traveler_ was an interesting read. Good stuff. Thanks for the link.

 

@HB - Why does time have to determine what is classic? On second thought, what does determine what is classic?

 

One of the points which would make a book (or a movie etc) more than just great, but become "classic" would be if it survives the "test of time". That is, that it still looks good several years down the track after you've had time to digest it and re-read it. Just being good when you first read something does not make it "classic" - in my opinion.

 

@ Jaguar

Check out my link. One of Calvino's points is that a classic is a book that people are always re-reading, partly because they won't admit they haven't read it before, but more importantly because the classics have had such a great influence on later works (and our cultural heritage as a whole) that when you're reading it for the first time it actually feels like you're re-reading it. For instance I felt I already 'knew' the narrator (his unique tone of voice) when I read Salinger's The Catcher In the Rye because 'the angry young men' in Danish literature - and the narrator in Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo by the way - seem to have a bit of Holden Caufield in them...

Another point is that a classic has to be able to exist both in the roar of present time - and despite it. This means that a classic is both a dynamic and a static entity: We have to be able to reinvent it by re-reading and re-reading and re-reading it but at the same time it essentially has to remain the same.

Being a student of literature I think this applies to the different methods we use 'on' literature: New Criticism, psychoanalysis, (Marxist) ideology critique, deconstruction, phenomenology and so on are all part of a dynamic process in time and a classic has to be able to 'absorb' the everchanging methods/literary strategies but it also has to be able to 'resist' any method/literary strategy - otherwise it will fade out along with it. For instance: Most of the Danish literature in the 1930's is socialist realism (mainly due to the economical world crisis) and as such it is obvious that a Marxist reading/analysis is quite useful on a work of art from this period of time - but if this is the only way to analyse the text and actually bring some aspect of it to light then the text isn't a classic. Or if the only way to read/analyse a modernist piece of art succesfully is, for instance, psychoanalytical. Both text can, of course, be interesting from, for instance, a cultural point of view but that doesn't constitute a classic.

Comments anyone...? I could write more but for now I'll wait and see.

@ Chandos

I agree... But it's also very postmodern/post-modernistic and in my experience people either love or hate that kind of literature. Having Auster and Kundera on my list of classics is a dead give away from my part

 

I spent an entire "American Literature in the 19th century" course arguing with my professor about the whole idea of greatness.

He was a pathetic little gimp who was always sucking up to feminazis and minorities. He said that there IS no such thing as greatness because men are evil pigs who controlled everything including the publishing business and all white people are racists and all men are rapists and all Europeans have a secret desire to kill anything with a skin tone darker than a .75 refractory index and homosexuals are superior to all others because only they understand the "real world" and nothing really matters anyway because we're all stupid animals anyhow so why bother?

That's pretty well how he talked. Made no sense to me either -- failed the logic test (heck, he failed the coherency test most days) and really aggravated me. We didn't study any of the "dead white guys" (as in Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, Twain, etc; his terminology, not mine) as they were, of course, men, and WHITE men to boot. So we read some absolute trash written by people no - one had ever heard of that was written VERY POORLY and talked about repression a lot.

Hey, at least I got my credits!

 

Agree with all those who recommended 1984, awesome book.
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves is a classic although it is based on fairly modern events (compared to the other books people have mentioned)
I, Claudius is also damn good

 

This is going to sound a bit strange, but I have to agree with LKD, up to a point. Any large university is going to have a pretty good cross section of instructors on its faculty. As a literature major also, I often looked over the reading list of an instructor in advance, and asked around about what kind of instructor was teaching a class. With some luck, and some diligence, I did really well in this area, and mostly had great instuctors, many of whom I learned a great deal from.

I beat the system by taking the survey classes first, then I did my concentration, which was Medieval and Renaissance literature; then I did the introduction classes to literary studies LAST. Those few intro classes taught everything that LKD listed, in almost exactly the same manner.

My point in all this is that those intro classes were supposed to "color" all the literature classes that I would have normally taken after them(Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, etc.), and then seeing the authors and the literary tradition through four different "lenses:" Marxist, homosexual, feminist, and alternative cultures. No joke. LKD is quite correct in this. It was appalling, IMO.

 

Chandos, I thought we were friends -- is our agreeing that "strange"?

I kept telling my prof: "The reason no one ever read "the life and times of Joaquin Murieta" is that the book is crap. It was poorly written, poorly plotted, had no profound theme, and was internally incoherent. The fact that it is not remembered (whereas "Moby Dick" is) does not indicate some sort of white plot to keep non-whites out of the publishing business. It indicates that Melville was a better writer. End of story!"

 

Of course, we are friends - it's just that we don't often agree.

 

Currently reading:

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald.

About to read Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald again.

Theres my English Literature course set out right there...

 

You can never go wrong with Russian literature. I have read quite a bit of it. Here are some:
"The Demons" Dostoievsky.
"Brothers Karamazovi" Dostoievsky.
"Crime and Punishment" Dostoievsky.
"Idiot" Dostoievsky.
"The Hero of our Time" Lermontov.
"Fathers and Sons" Turgeniev.
"Dead Souls" Gogol.
Tchekov's short stories.
Non Russian:
"With Fire and Sword" Henryk Sienkiewicz - this one is pretty epic.
"Lord Jim" Conrad - ok, this was a boring reading, but very profound and meaningful nonetheless.
"Faust" Goethe.
Poe's tales.