There’s plenty of good discussion to be had around sf/fantasy fiction, and you’ll probably find more people who’ve read Bradbury and Wolfe than Roth and Updike. Or maybe not.
From a NY Times list of the 100 best novels , I’ve only read a few but I can say that they’re not only well-written and “important”, but also enjoyable and entertaining:
Lolita, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, The Way of All Flesh (yep), 1984, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Good Soldier, Animal Farm, As I Lay Dying, All the King’s Men, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Lord of the Flies, Deliverance, Death Comes to the Archbishop (loved it!), Main Street, Ironweed, and The Magnificent Ambersons.
I’ve tried some others but I think I was too young, and I couldn’t appreciate them: Angle of Repose, Catch-22, Sons and Lovers, Slaughterhouse Five, Sister Carrie, Tropic of Cancer, Of Human Bondage, Kim, Ragtime, and Wide Sargasso Sea.
Your enjoyment of “Frankenstein” will depend upon your tolerance for its overwrought and florid prose.
Agree on the recommendation of Twain. Also, you may want to check out Voltaire’s “Candide.” It’s engrossing, darkly amusing, and a surprisingly easy read.
This is probably too recent to be called “classics”, but I love the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and his novel “Of Human Bondage”.
See this (Everyman’s library) for a good selection of his short stories. Simple, clear prose, but funny, sometimes suspenseful stories. I think he gets a bad rap for not being profound enough. I have reread the stories many times.
I second Jane Austen except that I woudl start with Emma instead of Pride and Prejudice.
Alexandre Dumas’ is another good call. Start with the Count of Monte-Cristo, if you look it move on to the Three Musketeers and then its sequels.
If you don’t mind depressing stories, I am a big fan of Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or The Return of the Native.
I’ll second Twain. I love his stuff. Try A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or ** Life on the Mississippi**, or his other travel books.
Some Charles Dickens gas aged well. Anyone who doesn’t like A Christmas Carol has no soul. I can forgive you not liking Hard Times, but others, like A Take of two Cities, are wonderful.
I disagree with those who dislike Swift – Gulliver’s Travels caught me in grade school.
Voltaire is great – I loved Candide and his Philosophical Dictionary.
From way back, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the surprisingly modern works of Lucian.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems, especially The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Jules Verne continues to sell well, at least the few of his books that they continue to publish and stock.
John Steinbeck – I loved Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men and his overlooked King Arthur.
I’ve found this to be really, really true. For example, avoid the Barnes & Noble translation of “Dangerous Liaisons.” It’s a waste of paper. (Other translations make it a page turner).
It’s short, and I found it in the children’s section - but Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” was one of the more fun reads I’ve had this year.
Heh. I’m winding down my graduate course in the Romantic era, and “Frankenstein” is downright homey in comparison to “Emma” (and let me just state that I loathe Jane Austen) and “Waverly”. Since I’m thinking about the Romantic era, I’d also recommend “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” which is very, very good.
I’ll add a +1 to Wilde, with “The Portrait…” being my favorite. “The Importance of Being Earnest” is great, too, if you don’t mind reading plays.
I thought Evelyn Waugh was one of the boring British writers instead of one of the good ones - I was wrong. Brideshead Revisited is amazingly awesome. (Ditto M. Somerset Maugham.)
Have you explored the true classics of sci fi? Alfred Bester will knock your socks off if you haven’t read him. People seem to love The Demolished Man because of the accolades it received, but while it’s good I’d really suggest The Stars My Destination, which is one of my favorite books. Also, Cordwainer Smith has aged shockingly well. I don’t think some of the other “western canon” sci fi books have done the same, go ahead and shoot me. I don’t particularly care for the Foundation books or Ringworld. However, if you haven’t read A Canticle for Leibowitz, get thee to a bookstore.
Some of Hawthorne’s short stories are OK, though. I recently read Drowne’s Wooden Image for the first time, and enjoyed it, and many of the stories from Twice-Told Tales are quite entertaining.
I wouldn’t call it an easy read (maybe it depends on the translation) but a lot of the wry humor of Don Quixote (1605) holds up (and translates) surprisingly well.
If you don’t like that, try the John Ciardi translation.
And speaking of medieval Italian classics, Boccaccio’s Decameron is still a great set of stories. Six and a half centuries later, they still evoke the passions, despair, joy and disappointments of life in the midst of death.
If you are going for “cocktail party” - sometimes the prose is easier to get through if you use an audio book - if you don’t consider it cheating. I love audio books - makes my commute more pleasant.
I’m an Austen fan and a Harper Lee fan (I’d start with Pride and Prejudice - even Austen didn’t think people would like Emma). I’m not a Steinbeck fan, but even seventh graders can get through “Of Mice and Men” - and there are lots of people who love him. Start there and see what happens.
Lolita may be one of the greatest American novels written by a Russian expatriate who got his American citizenship then hightailed it to Switzerland at the first opportunity. Even without the disclaimer, Nabokov NAILS America (if you can get past the subject matter).
Henry James isn’t bad. Thomas Hardy is depressing (Tess is better than Jude the Obscure), Joseph Conrad I found unreadable (apparently, he wrote in English but his native language is Polish). E.M. Forester is poetic and actually interesting (I liked Room with a View best). I like Edith Wharton - but don’t read House of Mirth on vacation (I liked Age of Innocence best).
If you are already a SF reader, start with Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, if you’ve never read them.
Great Gatsby is actually pretty darn good.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood - can’t read it anymore - its a book I had to give up when I had kids.
You could try some genre classics - Dashiell Hammett’s Continential Ops or some Raymond Chandler. Horror (Dracula and Frankenstien have been mentioned). Mysteries (Christie).
Holding up well is difficult - reading fiction of a different time you need to be willing to step into that time. Gatsby, Mockingbird - they are successful novels because they transport you to a time and place that is other.
That’s what I was going to suggest. It also moves along at a pretty swift pace, too, despite the digressions mocking the popular “romantic” novels and authors of the day.
Denisovich is great but if you want to talk Russians, I recommend Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita first and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago a close second.
As far as Americans go, I really love Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby, as well as Hemmingway’s Moveable Feast (true story) and The Sun Also Rises.
Characters in all four American recommendations are pretty much alcoholic idle rich, but I find them compelling.
I’ll enthusiastically second Dorian Gray, Around the World in 80 Days, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Mark Twain is great, too, though even he can get verbose occasionally.
The Wilkie Collins novels Struan mentioned were, I seem to recall, pretty good.
I, personally, found Pride and Prejudice a page-turner (the most so of all Jane Austen’s books), but opinions of Jane Austen vary wildly, from love to hate.
Ditto for Dickens.
And one more that hasn’t been mentioned yet: Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. The language is clear and concise, most of the humor is still as funny today as when it was written, and I see the influence of Lewis Carroll in virtually all English humor written since.
I forgot to mention “The Great Gatsby,” but it has become one of my favorite novels ever. Actually, it may be my favorite novel ever. The prose might take a bit to get adjusted to - it’s hard to describe it, you almost have to read a page or two aloud to get what I’m saying…it’s almost like linguistic acrobatics, but it’s perfect.
And let me just back off my original statement about Austen. I’m judging her based only on “Emma,” and that is likely unfair. If I judged Stephen King on “Cell”…
