The classics?

Okay, I made myself a promise that this summer I was going to go back to my college days, and read all the "classics" that I never got to read.

Where to start? Where to start? Anyone have a classic book they would like to recommend or what is a classic to you?

We all know things like...Romeo and Juliet. I have recently read Great Expectations and Catcher in the Rye (which I actually didn't care for that much!).

Ideas for what is next, anyone?

It depends on what your tastes are as far as the classics go.

I love Homer's "The Odyessey"

"The Divine Comedy" -- Dante

"Tess of the D'uberville" -- Thomas Hardy

"Pride and Prejudice" -- Jane Austen

"Jane Eyre" -- Charlotte Bronte

"Wuthering Heights" -- Emily Bronte

"The Fountainhead" -- Ayn Rand

"The Bell Jar" -- Sylvia Plath

There are so many great works out there, it is hard to know where to begin!

:D


P.S. I just recently re-read "Catcher in the Rye" and I must admit it is still a favorite of mine! I also love the 1960's best seller "Catch-22." It is hilarious!!!

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera

Flannery O'Connor - Short Stories - Collected

Ursula LeGuin - The Dispossesed

Kate Chopin - The Awakening

William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying

Fyodor Dostoyevsky- Crime and Punishment

Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man

Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice

These are a few that I've liked :)

Okay, I read Lolita and really liked it...Since both of you recommended "The Bell Jar" I will try that one next....I have no clue what to expect.

I feel so uneducated when it comes to the classics, and all the things every other college graduate seems to be able to discuss with ease. Grrrrrrr....My high school son is reading things I haven't read, and I love to read!

Desert, I have read "The Invisible Man" but not a single other book on your list. Thanks so much for your suggestions.

I have very little personal time.....and what I do have is precious. My way of getting a little "vacation time" so to speak, it to lock my bedroom door and curl up with a good book and a big glass of iced tea. Im a really fast reader, which helps.

BTW...you should all join the book club so we can read the same book, and then discuss and debate.

The Great Gatsby (which is always amazing to me that this is the favorite of many of my students) and is #2 on the best books of the 20 th century

Atlas Shrugged (I preferred this over The Fountainhead...But it is like 1000 pages!)

The Bell ; The Awakening (for women everywhere)

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (he invented the non-fiction novel)

Ethan Frome (really a novella) by Edith Wharton (or any novel by her...she is the first female Pultizer Prize winnner)

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. This is really an unknown classic and changed the face of modern fiction as there is no real protagonist. My kids either hate or love it... and I LOVE IT! (# 26 on the list)

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Now in regards to Catcher in the Rye... it is a classic, but to me mainly geared for the male psyche; however still a classic, teenage "angst" book, which also is ususally the favorite of my sudents. It is sad though, for there is a movement in NYC to get it off the "canon" list as many feel that teens no longer can identify with a rich, white kid who goes to private schools. Well, to them I say HOGWASH! I have exchange students who LOVE it! In fac, when one returned to Germany (he loved it so much, I bought him one to take back, the instructor asked him if he could recommend a book he read over here, and he told him to get Salinger's novel. Well, they got the books, but in German, and he had to translate some of the ideas, as the translation was not quite right, but his friends loved it as well. THEN to top it all off, I was chatting with my Serbian "friend" going from topic to topic, when all of a sudden he types is all caps "DIGRESSION" I nearly spit out my coke and typed back, YOU do not mean as in Catcher in the Rye, do you? And he typed back YES! I could not believe it! I asked WHEN WHERE?? He had read it ten years ago, when a friend suggested it... twice in Serbian ( Lovac u razi- this is its Serbian title!) and once in English (and yes, many messages were lost in that translation as well) and absolutely LOVED it! I just flipped out... I mean,what the heck are the chances of ME talking to someone from Serbia who knows and remembers that book and knew I would get/recognize the allusion? SO EAT YOUR HEART OUT NYC teachers, and LISTEN TO ME>>>>>DO NOT get rid of that book! I am so excited, as well, for when he sends me my "package" he is going to include his copy that is in Serbian, so I can show my students. And to top it off, while we were text messaging in bed, his last comment to me was "Salinger is awesome" SIGH.... who could not love a man like that!!!

Anyway.... have a good read this summer everyone!

There are so many. To add a few more to your already generous list...


Albert Camus The Stranger

Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye

Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Graham Greene The End of the Affair (I am about to start Brighton Rock)

Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe

Even to this day! It covers it all, he finds the girl he fights for the girl, and all along the way he goes through it all!

Published in 1819 but kicks as much butt as any new millenium movie/book today!

Ernest Hemingway -
The Sun Also Rises
The Old Man and The Sea
Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls

Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn and most of his earlier works (humorous writings, however expect predjudiced content)

Walt Whitman
O Henry
Christopher Marlowe........

Theres are so many classics to read and most are called such for good reason.

WHO will hear me? Whom shall I lament to?
Who would pity me that heard my sorrows?
Ah, the lip that erst so many raptures
Used to taste, and used to give responsive,
Now is cloven, and it pains me sorely;
And it is not thus severely wounded
By my mistress having caught me fiercely,
And then gently bitten me, intending
To secure her friend more firmly to her:
No, my tender lip is crack'd thus, only
By the winds, o'er rime and frost proceeding,
Pointed, sharp, unloving, having met me.
Now the noble grape's bright juice commingled
With the bee's sweet juice, upon the fire
Of my hearth, shall ease me of my torment.
Ah, what use will all this be, if with it
Love adds not a drop of his own balsam?

- 1789 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe