[ul]
[li]Short stories from the golden age of magazines. Saki, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and the short work of W. Somerset Maughm lead the pack, but second-stringers such as Bret Harte can be amusing as well. This is all public domain now, so trawling through Project Gutenberg is a good way to find it. Going through used book stores and chancing upon anthologies is also a good way of finding this stuff.[/li][li]Mark Twain. Pretty much all of his work is at least amusing, and plenty of it is absolutely wonderful. He set the tone of American prose for decades, so it all sounds reasonably modern to our ears. Again, all public domain and plenty of it at Project Gutenberg.[/li][li]George Orwell. Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm yet? If not, what the hell have you been up to!? If so, don’t write Orwell off so easily. He wrote lesser-known works well worth seeking out and reading. Down and Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days are standouts, and don’t forget the essays. Project Gutenberg of Australia has them.[/li][li]The Sherlock Holmes stories. Arthur Conan Doyle had a real way with creating prose fiction you can just fall into. I have read Sherlock Holmes stories compulsively for a while now. Project Gutenberg has them all, I think.[/li][/ul]
Can’t believe no-one’s mentioned Treasure Island, which is tightly-written, nicely plotted, brilliantly characterised and a page-turner from start to finish, and has barely aged in my opinion.
Emma is a fine book to judge her by - way better than Mansfield Park. The thing to remember about Austen is that her best books are Romantic Comedies - she is funny. But you have to get into 200 year old language (and the culture - Regency gentlemen landowners are probably not a culture a lot of us get) enough to get the jokes.
Persuasion is short, has some of the best Austen elements, and isn’t much of a committment. If you can’t get through Persuasion, you probably aren’t going to get into Austen.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling magically captures that point in time in India. It’s no wonder he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
I agree with a lot of the books already recommended, and I’ll add Vanity Fair. Okay, it’s long, but entertaining and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
I found Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat (1889 - non-fiction, probably embellished a bit) incredibly readable and interesting.
Speaking of Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King is a good (and short) read.
:smack: Yeah, and Kidnapped!
AuntiePam already mentioned Main Street in her post, but I think it bears repeating. I’m working my way through Sinclair Lewis (I’m on Elmer Gantry now) and I find his books amazingly fresh. Really worth checking out. I’d recommend starting with Main Street or Babbitt. I didn’t like Arrowsmith quite as well but I’m really enjoying Elmer Gantry so far.
I second Dumas’ Three Musketeers and Dracula.
Hunchback was…good, but he completely derails his story repeatedly at times to talk about French architecture or French civilization or something else. This may have been the point of the story; I just think it’s sorely vexing. But if you can skim through those parts, feel free.
I thought Gulliver’s Travels was horribly boring and the guy immensely egotistic and annoying. Just my view.
I confess I could never read Treasure Island. Is it really worth it? I have never been able to get past the first chapter; it bored me to death right there.
As for the Divine Comedy, I have read most of all three. Inferno was marvelous, Purgatory was meh, and the last one was the one I didn’t finish as it was also kind of boring.
I also agree with Candide! Marvelous!
I picked up a copy of Ivanhoe a few months back and absolutely could not put it down. Yes, it’s wordy and bloated. But damn, I didn’t care. Fabulous from start to finish.
Really? Not even in the shower?
Just came in to mention All Quiet on the Western Front.
There’s quite a bit of W. Somerset Maugham’s stuff that’s aged well. Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge and The Painted Veil are still particularly powerful. The Moon and Sixpence perhaps not as much. Or is he too modern to qualify as classic?
I don’t know if it’s truly a classic, but Shogun was one of the awesomest books I ever read in my life. I think there are very few books I could put in the same category. It started out slow and without me even knowing it it dragged me in until I was obsessed.
It should be a classic.
Perhaps the funniest book, ever.
**All Quiet on the Western Front ** is one of the best.
I also quite liked George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, though it sure ain’t to everyone’s taste.
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was a good read. Got through it in two very long sittings.
For pure fun and a quick easy read, Mikhail Lermontov’s minor classic A Hero of Our Time is good.
Anything dealing with plagues is usually good too: La peste, by Camus, or A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe.
My mother’s family is from Sauk Center, Minnesota and the towns around it - home of Main Street and I confess I’ve never read Sinclair Lewis. I’ll put it on my list.
I read Captain Blood last year and enjoyed the heck out of it. “The Sea Hawk” also by Sabatini is next on my stack of books to read.
Burmese Days By Orwell, or **The Quiet American ** by Greene. Both are written in the past, but predict the future very accurately…makes for fascinating reading.