Author Topic: Classics  (Read 5828 times)

KasperL

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Classics
« on: November 17, 2014, 08:33:06 AM »
Hi, I'm new in this group. So, uhm, sorry if this has been done in another thread.

I'm looking for classic literature recommendations.

What are your favorites? :)

This list of 250 classics (which I've compiled from heaps of other lists) might help jolt your memory:

1984 by George Orwell
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Absalom Absalom! by William Faulkner
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Candide by Voltaire
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dubliners by James Joyce
Dune by Frank Herbert
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Emma by Jane Austen
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Herzog by Saul Bellow
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Ironweed (Albany Trilogy) by William Kennedy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Light in August by William Faulkner
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Native Son by Richard Wright
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguru
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Possession by A. S. Byatt
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Sult by Knut Hamsun
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Ambassadors by Henry James
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The BFG by Roald Dahl
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Good Earth by Oearl S. Buck
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Illiad by Homer
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The L.A. Quartet by James Ellroy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Magus by John Fowles
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Sorrows of Young Werther by J. Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Stand by Stephen King
The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCollough
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Ulysses by James Joyce
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

To give you an idea of my tastes, here's some of my favorites:

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dune by Frank Herbert
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Laterna Magica by Ingmar Bergman
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The L.A. Quartet by James Ellroy
The Locked Room by Paul Auster
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Stranger AKA The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Thanks!

Oh, and btw, I can't wait for another Filmspotters' Top 100 Books list, Junior  ;)
« Last Edit: November 24, 2014, 05:06:56 PM by KasperL »

SmashTheTV

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Re: Classics
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2014, 11:58:16 PM »
That list is to big to go through but here is my take on some of them.

1984 by George Orwell - Over-rated. I really think this undermines the human race. Faced with a super Nazi government and they only thing we do about it is have sex in a field?
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess  - Movie is much better.
Dracula by Bram Stoker - Fantastic!
Dune by Frank Herbert - Amazing. Must read if you have any interest in Sci-Fi. The audio book on Audible is crazy good.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - One of my favorite books. Everyone should read this!
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde  - I wasn't to fussed about this one.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley  - Also not to fussed about this one either, I read it after Dracula though which was just so much better written.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - Is this worth reading? Maybe only if you like fantasy. I was a car park attendant at the time so I could read this during work. Super happy I managed to read this in my lifetime.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov  - I listened to the audio book read by Jeremy Irons. His voice was so perfect.

smirnoff

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Re: Classics
« Reply #2 on: November 18, 2014, 04:04:07 PM »
The ones I've read, and the ones I'd recommend.

1984 by George Orwell
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dune by Frank Herbert
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

KasperL

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Re: Classics
« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2014, 04:26:39 PM »
Thanks!

SmashTheTV: I think I'll check out 'In Cold Blood' at some point. Do you know/remember whether or not it has a lot of material not covered in the 1967 film and/or 'Capote'?

I've read (and enjoyed) most of your recommendations, smirnoff, but I'm really looking forward to getting to 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'A Handmaid's Tale'.

Junior

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Re: Classics
« Reply #4 on: November 18, 2014, 04:32:12 PM »
All the books from the list that I've read follow. Red are really good, bold are in my top 50.

1984 by George Orwell
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Candide by Voltaire
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dubliners by James Joyce
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Christopher Marlowe
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The BFG by Roald Dahl

The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Stand by Stephen King
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne


On the topic of a new top 100, somebody else would have to take over. I'm in a real busy way right now. I'd be happy to guide somebody(s) else through it, but I can't do it myself.
Check out my blog of many topics

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smirnoff

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Re: Classics
« Reply #5 on: November 18, 2014, 05:33:23 PM »
I've read (and enjoyed) most of your recommendations, smirnoff, but I'm really looking forward to getting to 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'A Handmaid's Tale'.

Ever since reading it, maybe 8 years ago now, Monte Cristo is the kind of book I find myself looking for most often: a book that keeps me turning the pages (obviously), a book that spans a great deal of time, and a book that takes a substantial amount of time to get through. Great Expectations, Pillars of the Earth and Lord of the Rings all fit that role for me, but it was Cristo I think that first made me appreciate the kind of impact a book that long can have on you. Shorter books can be impactful too no doubt, but there's a kind of richness that comes with spending that much time with a book on a daily-ish basis. I think it took me a number of months to complete it, but in my mind it's "the year I read Monte Cristo". :)

SmashTheTV

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Re: Classics
« Reply #6 on: November 19, 2014, 12:33:29 PM »
Thanks!
SmashTheTV: I think I'll check out 'In Cold Blood' at some point. Do you know/remember whether or not it has a lot of material not covered in the 1967 film and/or 'Capote'?

Mmm. Well Capote isn't in In Cold Blood if I remember correctly. Not like the movie where he is the main character. I think maybe alot of the killers back stories are in the book that weren't featured in the movie.

Oh Slaughterhouse-Five yeah that is in my top books.


MartinTeller

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Re: Classics
« Reply #7 on: November 19, 2014, 01:34:46 PM »
I've read these... pretty much all worthwhile IMO (except maybe The Bell Jar and Watchmen) but I've highlighted my favorites

1984 by George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Animal Farm by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Candide by Voltaire
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (first half only)
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Light in August by William Faulkner
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Stand by Stephen King
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Watership Down by Richard Adams
White Noise by Don DeLillo

I started reading Absalom Absalom! once and got maybe 10 pages in before I couldn't deal with his insane sentence structure any more.  I wish I'd finished Don Quixote but after I'd put it aside for a couple of months I found it difficult to get back into.  Maybe someday I'll start the whole thing over.

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Re: Classics
« Reply #8 on: November 20, 2014, 01:55:46 AM »
On your list, these are the ones I read with my favorites in red:

1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Candide by Voltaire
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Dune by Frank Herbert
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman

I, Claudius by Robert Graves
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Native Son by Richard Wright
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The BFG by Roald Dahl
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Stand by Stephen King
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick, 1977)
And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie, 1939)


Along these lines, here are some classics I also think are must-reads:

Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Genesis
The David Story, translated by Robert Altar
The Book of Job
Ecclesiastes
The Book of Psalms (King James Version)
The Last Days of Socrates by Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo)
The Oedipus Cycle
Aesop's Fables
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Confessions of St. Augustine
Gawain and the Green Knight
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Displaced Person by Flannery O Conner
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wannigern
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
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verbALs

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Re: Classics
« Reply #9 on: November 20, 2014, 03:41:11 AM »
Re the earlier comment about A Clockwork Orange being a better movie than book. I can understand the underlying point because they are very different entities. The film is terrifically ambiguous in sharp contrast to the book which is brutally specific about good, evil and how freewill is exercised to either end.

Let's say if your actions are consistenly and unerringly "good"; if they are always positive and if you never say a bad word. If that is the case are you exercising freewill or are you being forced to act that way by fashion, rote education or religious doctrine. If that's the case have your good deeds any meaning. Are you acting out of choice or are you forced or told to act that way? Could you just as well be acting with evil intent all the time. Where did your freewill to act for the right reasons then disappear to. If say the need to fight and kill to protect your family or home (and home invasion is a recurring theme) occurred would your inability to act in any other way than "good" be of any use. When confronted with a threat how can you defend yourself having been conditioned to only respond with kindness- which ends up happening to the kid.

So freewill is a concept related to individuality. Society might naturally decide that forcing a person to be good is better than leaving them evil. But Society might also decide having only heterosexuals or people of one belief or blond haired and blue eyed might be better for whatever reason. So Society isn't the best judge is it? Or is it? (I don't think "depends" is a good answer btw)

It's a ferocious concept and Burgess' uncomprising unambiguous approach is in danger of stripping the story of any semblance of reality, which Kubrick injects. However as much, I think, as any book could succeed with such a fierce treatise then this one does. My major problem with it was that it is blisteringly horrific in its first half that you are fighting a depression dealing with it's bleakness. Kubrick doesn't water down the violence but Burgess makes it less a lads night out and more an act of deliberate will.
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