The Iliad
The Odyssey
Gulliver’s Travels
A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, a Tale of Two Cities (but not Hard Times)
The Sherlock Holmes novels and collections
The Grapes of Wrath*
My criteria: I could read these over and over; they continue to sell well, and are acknowledged as classics by several authorities. (I group the Doyle works together and the Dickens works. Forgive me)
There are many works, both early and late, tat I’d include because I love them, but know that not everyone does. Also, although I love Twain, I don’t feel the compulsion to re-read Huckleberry Finn (the Great American Novel if ever there was one), Tom Sawyer, and others. And I think too many would regard A Connecticut Yankee – which I DO re-read – as too puerile.
Wilkie Collins holds up very well overall, and The Woman in White is especially good. Many of Collins’s female characters come off as very smart and very competent, and Marian Halcombe from The Woman is one of the top female characters in literature (and Count Fusco is one of the best villains).
I’m having a bit of difficulty with this question. I tend to think an individual ought to read some amount of the “classics” if they wish to be “intelligent.” But I’m not sure that holds up for the vast majority of folk who are not somewhat avid readers.
I’ve only read 4 of the classics on the list,
and don’t think I’d recommend any of them. If I had to, probably Moby Dick (which coincidentally my wife is reading right now.)
Instead, I’d probably recommend something more accessible, like Madame Bovary (which I don’t really LIKE, but think important.). Or Pride and Prejudice. One of my personal faves is Alice in Wonderland. But I understand many folk may not appreciate the humor. Probably some Steinbeck. My fave is East of Eden, but coudl recommend something shorter like Of Mice and Men. During Covid, I made a point of re-reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. I’d suggest everyone ought to read at least a couple of them - Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer’s Night…
With some weightier “classics”, I’d suggest everyone ought to at least TRY to read them. I never made it through Ulysses, Brothers K, or In Search of Lost Time. But from my efforts, at least I have an idea what the book is like, and my personal reasons for setting it down.
Just yesterday, my SIL commented on the difficulty she was having getting past the first 50 pages of Sense and Sensibility. Obviously, reading just isn’t a priority for her.
I was going to mention Vanity Fair. Moby Dick, meh. I suppose I could submit for consideration the Great White Whale of post-modernism, Gravity’s Rainbow, but I still haven’t figured it out.
I’m the first to mention To Kill a Mockingbird? To my eye, it’s still the greatest work of American literature (Huck Finn would be second place).
I’ve also heard it said that the quickest way to teach an English boy French is to give him a copy of Around the World in Eighty Days, but with only the first half translated. I can buy that. A lot of Verne has held up well (and also a lot hasn’t), but that’s the best of them.
With the caveat that you have to find a good translation of them. The first time I attempted Homer, it was a translation by one of those classical scholars of the “embalmer” school, who believed that Greek and Latin were dead and who intended to keep them that way, and who turned them into an absolute slog. Later, I found better translations and very much enjoyed them.
I think it very much lives up to its reputation, to wit: unreadable. I have never ever heard of anyone who a. have actually read all of it and b. have read parts of it for anything but purely academic reasons…
I want to throw in an author and ask i f you think it’s worth my time: In my early 20’s I came across a sale of a packet of books by Graham Greene. I enjoyed Our Man in Havana and Brighton Rock. But the rest of them seemed all to be about the angst of a middle aged man, stuck in a dreary, middle class life. I started reading several of them and ditched them a few chapters in. Being a snooty and snotty “intellectual” wannabe I was not the right age for them.
Being a middle aged+ man, I wonder if they’d have any appeal now, but at the same time, I fear they might be very dated in quite a few ways. So - should I give them another go?
I’ve read all of GG that I’ve been able to get my hands on. He is one of my favorite authors. I just love the way he writes, and I find the settings in the declining British Empire interesting. But you are right - many of them may come across as similar. Among my faves are Heart of the Matter and Comedians. Never cared for Power and Glory.
I find Evelyn Waugh quite similar to GG in many respects.
But IMO there is a heckuva lot of WORSE stuff you could be reading. And most of them aren’t horribly long or onerous.
The Power and the Glory is about the anti-Catholic purges of the 1920s/30s, and the last priest in one state. He is a dissolute “whisky priest”, and pretty much an exercise in working through the ambiguities of Greene’s later-in-life conversion. It’s a terrific book to me, but not sure if I’d recommend it….
In college, I took a fiction literature class that promised to take us through brilliant works of prose and help us become better readers and commentators. We read Winesburg, Ohio, Catch-22, and My Antonia. Catch-22 was the only one I enjoyed. Winesburg, Ohio was an unbearable slog. My Antonia, I remember nothing about.
Catch-22 definitely lives up to its reputation of greatness. But the rest suck.
It was after this class that I realized that I don’t have to read books I don’t like. It was very freeing to just stop reading books that I didn’t enjoy. Reading is allowed to be fun.
It’s not unreadable. It is for people who enjoy wordplay. It absolutely lives up to its reputation as a classic, on the sheer density of multi-layered puns alone.
This may well be true, but I would hesitate to say that it is true about any particular “classic.” If I find a book unreadable or not worth the time, that might be my fault rather than the book’s.
Many years ago, I made lists of classics I had read: one list of books that I thought lived up to their reputation and were really worth reading, and the other list of books that I thought were overrated and did not deserve their reputation. But I was fully aware at the time (and still am) that I might just be missing what other, better readers appreciated about those books.
But I don’t remember any specific books that were on either list.
Just read it this month. I had read a review o fa new book that described it as a modern version, and thought that I ought to get around to reading it. I agree with you - sure seemed longer than the 175 or so pages that it was. As best I can tell, it is more significant for how it compared to other literature at the time, as opposed to continuing to stand on its own. I took mild enjoyment from the description of small town life in the early 20th century.
The actual story parts of Les Miserablés are great. The fifteen page digressions where Hugo ponders whether or not human feces would be good fertilizer for the farms of Paris are… less great. Does a classic hold up to its reputation if it’s in need of a solid modern editing process?
I remember as a schoolchild not being surprised to learn that Dickens was paid by the word (because his books were serialized); they seemed overly wordy, though I enjoyed many of them.
This may just be my own personal bias, but Frankenstein has always been my favorite book and I personally think that it still holds up today.
The Sherlock Holmes novels etc. are a close second. But only the originals. Newer books and especially newer TV and movie adaptations don’t quite get it. They always seem to want to make it all about this super-hero and super-villain thing between Holmes and Moriarty. Professor Moriarty doesn’t feature much in the books and in fact was just a plot device that Arthur Conan Doyle could use to kill of Holmes. Most Holmes stories have absolutely nothing to do with Moriarty.
I agree. Mrs. Geek had never read it until we watched the 2019 mini-series on Hulu. She enjoyed the show but didn’t care for the book. I personally liked both.
My own personal list would add these:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Grapes of Wrath
Treasure Island
I personally enjoyed the Hobbit, but I found the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be tedious.