That’s what I’m doing really. Trying to read the classics that most/many people have read and that I may not have.
The list is fine, The Alchemist is the only one I haven’t read. Gatsby is brilliant - one long punching up of the rich and the careless and those who worship The American Dream.
It was a little strange reading that after 1984. Koestler’s is the earlier book, and it’s hard not to imagine that Orwell read it a few times. It’s quite good, but I agree probably not in a top 10 way.
Leaving the West, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is fantastic, but I’d warn that it’s also work - non-linear narrative, lyrical, and long.
Oh I forgot I was also going to say that beyond some definition of a “top 10” if you wanted to broaden the type of things you read that the Icelandic sagas (Njall’s saga is the ‘classic’) are really interesting. They don’t belong in a top 10 and I don’t even know about a top 50, but I don’t think I’ve read anything else quite like them either. Just very unique.
I’ve read all on the OP list and enjoyed them except The Alchemist, which I would retitle I Am a Self-Absorbed Fuck Who Benefits from Patriarchy and Thinks All Other People, Especially Women, Exist to Support My Existential Fuck Wanderlust–I Am a Rock, I Am an Island! I’ve also read his Camino book, which could have the same title, and won’t try a third.
As mentioned, the OP list is pretty canonical, and there are lists around with excellent works by women, POC, writers from other continents, etc. No reason not to read canon, but it’s also good to put it in world context.
Your exact words were “Tolkien is for kids.” Not “The Lord of the Rings is for kids” (which I completely disagree with.) “The Hobbit” is for kids. His other works, not really.
The sheer heresy of Exapno_Mapcase…
He will get what’s coming for him, nobody expects the Gondorian Inquisition!
Those are the extra 50 years Borges was talking about…
(Great writer but he had a murderous wit and no inhibitions on using it)
MAD magazine had a bit about a book publisher who got rich by publishing “the classics” with fancy covers but were blank inside. His business model was parents bought these for their kids because “everyone should read these books,” but never bothered to open them, and if the kids did open them, they were delighted they didn’t have to read them.
Literature gives us looks at other people in other circumstances, and a “classic” may not speak to you and your experience and aspirations. If it does, great! If not, you can spend a lot of time gnashing teeth and wishing more of those pages were blank.
Also: have never understood the love for Tolkien. Have not been able to finish any of the books. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, on the other hand…