Favorites:Great Expectations, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Foundation, Stranger in a Strange Land (the last two are not exactly classics, but classics in their own genre), 1984.
Refuse to read ever again: Last of the Mohicans, Pilgrims Progress, Romeo And Juliet, Pride and Prejudice
Fav: *Pride and Prejudice, Les Miserables, Twelfth Night, Persuasion, Wuthering Heights. Daisy Miller. Call of the Wild. My Antonia. *
Hates: Decameron (what Kyla said). *Emma. Portrait of a Lady. Grapes of Wrath. *Freakin The Bell Jar.
Favorites: Bleak House, Moby Dick, For Whom the Bell Tolls, All Quiet on the Western Front, To Kill a Mockingbird and just about all of Jane Austen
Unloved: The Grapes of Wrath, Billy Budd, A Separate Peace, Wuthering Heights, Swann’s Way
1984 tops the list. Almost alone among the great classics, this one always grabs me from the very first page. Not that this is the only one I like, of course - but I can’t stop reading this without effort, once begun. Fantastic, chilling stuff.
Among my favorites: anything by Victor Hugo, abridged.
Among my least favorites: anything by Victor Hugo, unabridged.
Yes, Linty Fresh! I love *Arrowsmith *too!
Favorites:
Lives of the 12 Caesars - Suetonius
De Re Culina - Apicius [i know it isn’t fiction, but it fascinates me to cook from it]
The Decameron - Boccaccio
1001 Arabian Nights - Burton version
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
Hates:
Anything by Ernest Hemmingway, what a wankfest
Most russian literature, though it is good if you cant find any sleeping pills and you have had insomnia for several weeks.
Harlequin type romances. I dont want to read about getting fucked, I want to get fucked.
Gotta show some Hawthorne love. My favorite book of all time is The Scarlet Letter.
Growing up, my enjoyment of classic literature often depended on having a good teacher who could guide me through it. I highly doubt I would have liked Shakespeare had I not had a wonderful English lit teacher in high school.
However, I still think reading anything by John Steinbeck is akin to watching paint dry.
Does that mean it was good or that it was bad?
Favorites: Anna Karenina, War and Peace
Least Favorite: David Copperfield
Love Don Quixote and Dracula. Don Quixote took some effort but it was well worth it. Dracula holds up very well, and is a lively read.
Hated Lord Jim. It was a chore getting through that tangled mess, and there was no payoff for it. I’ve never read Heart of Darkness just because I hated Lord Jim so much.
Well, I hated it. It was incredibly, repetitively depressing. I did all this reading in a unit on poetry in my AP Lit class in 12th grade. Literally ALL WE DID in class for six fucking weeks was read the poetry of Emily Dickinson. (Previously we had spent four weeks on the much less suicide-inducing poetry of Robert Frost.) I was really, really glad when that unit was over.
Least favorite: Silas Marner
So peasant life is dull and demeaning. Duh!
Awesome. Were you the one recommending the film to me in the other thread a few months back? I still haven’t gotten around to seeing it, but I was just thinking about it the other day.
Favorite: A Canticle for Leibowitz counts as a classic in the Sci Fi genre and it’s one of the best books I ever read.
Least favorite: The Red Badge of Courage, I had to power through it for school and I hated every minute of it. Ditto Billy Bud
Biggest surprise:* Moll Flanders*, I was traveling alone in Europe and books in English were rare so I read a few I never would have otherwise, Moll Flanders was surprisingly engaging.
I can’t even put together a coherent sentence about how much I hate Jude the Obscure. HATE. HATE.
I read it sixteen or seventeen years ago and I still remember how much I hate it. Mostly because of Sue. She has got to be modern precursor to every person who cocks up their life by trying to apply too much theoretical philosophy to the simple act of living. Even as a teenager I kept throwing the book across the room and screaming “Sue, get off the f*cking cross already.”
Oh yeah, and beyond Emma and Pride and Prejudice I find Austen unreadable.
Favorite: Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens.
Least favorite: A Separate Peace some guy who can’t write.
Very probably. I am a pushover for Ronald Colman.
Favorites: 1984, The Stranger, Don Quixote, Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, various Shakespeare plays
Least favorite: On The Road was quite possibly the worst book I’ve ever read, classic or no. I found both Lolita and A Confederacy of Dunces so tedious and dull I gave up on both after multiple attempts. And add me to the Hawthrone haters (can’t remember if I hate Thomas Hardy, as well, or if I’m just confusing him with Hawthorne).
Favorite: Huckleberry Finn, at least up to the point when Tom shows up.
That book made it obvious to me that Dickens was getting paid by the word.