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Author Topic: Classics  (Read 5829 times)

SmashTheTV

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Re: Classics
« Reply #10 on: November 23, 2014, 01:21:12 PM »
Re the earlier comment about A Clockwork Orange being a better movie than book.

To be honest I don't remember much apart from the ending: And then I grew up and was no longer interested in violence. Totally ruined it for me.

MartinTeller

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Re: Classics
« Reply #11 on: November 23, 2014, 03:14:41 PM »
I find the book's ending far better.  As Burgess said, it makes the difference between a story and a fable.

Dave the Necrobumper

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Re: Classics
« Reply #12 on: November 24, 2014, 04:00:44 AM »
Favourites in Red

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling

His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
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 Plague by Albert Camus
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The World According to Garp by John Irving
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

I would also recommend
Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The Forever War by Joe Halderman

I have not read the book, but I do highly recommend the TV series
I, Claudius by Robert Graves

I have not read the book, but I do recommend the Film
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

KasperL

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Re: Classics
« Reply #13 on: November 24, 2014, 12:37:36 PM »
Thanks for the replies  :)

I'll use a similar system. Red for four stars out of five (on Goodreads). Bold and red for five stars.

1984 by George Orwell
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
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
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dune by Frank Herbert
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling (I've read The Halfblood Prince and The Deathly Hallows)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, haven't read the rest yet)
Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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 L.A. Quartet by James Ellroy
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Ulysses by James Joyce
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Furthermore (on top of the favorites mentioned in my original post), I can recommend:

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Improvisatoren by H.C. Andersen
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Manden der tænkte ting by Valdemar Holst
Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Stoner by John Edward Williams
The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
The Hollow Man AKA The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne
The Rubber Band by Rex Stout
« Last Edit: November 24, 2014, 05:14:16 PM by KasperL »

verbALs

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Re: Classics
« Reply #14 on: November 24, 2014, 02:59:35 PM »
The 10 I would go with from the original list

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The L.A. Quartet by James Ellroy
I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don't do that so much anymore. - Banksy

KasperL

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Re: Classics
« Reply #15 on: November 24, 2014, 06:19:46 PM »
... 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.

@smirnoff: I've just read (and loved) 'Stoner' by John Edward Williams. It's not a long book, but very much a page turner for me (despite the fact that little of great consequence happens!) and it covers most of a university professor's life. Two out of three ain't bad, right?  :)


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.

Of Faulkner's work, I've only read 'The Sound and the Fury' (might be my favorite novel of all time!). But, yeah, he didn't seem to give readability top priority, that's for sure ;) I'm definitely checking out a bunch of his other novels (as well as some of his short fiction) whenever I find the time. But I think I'm going to read 'As I Lay Dying' next. I keep hearing that that's a tour-de-force.


@oldkid Really interesting list, thanks! I've just added Emily Dickinson's poems, 'A Wrinkle in Time' and 'American Gods' to my (admittedly much, much too long) reading list and moved up 'The Gods Themselves' and 'The Martian Chronicles'. BTW, my two favorite short stories by Flannery O'Connor are 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find' and 'The Lame Shall Enter First'.


I would also recommend
Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The Forever War by Joe Halderman

@Dave the Necrobumper I've been researching classic sci-fi titles, so these are on my radar. A friend of mine actually recommended 'Mars Trilogy', too, just the other day.
I've read the first 'Foundation' novel (or, that is, the one called 'Foundation'), and while I dug the premise, I found it very difficult to "get into". But I'd like to give 'Foundation and Empire' a chance. Are you aware that Jonathan Nolan is preparing an HBO series based on the series?
« Last Edit: November 24, 2014, 06:25:51 PM by KasperL »

KasperL

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Re: Classics
« Reply #16 on: November 24, 2014, 06:22:41 PM »
I've tallied the recommendations given in this thread so far:

3+ recommendations
1984 by George Orwell
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Dune by Frank Herbert
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
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

2 recommendations
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
L.A. Quartet by James Ellroy
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The BFG by Roald Dahl
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
« Last Edit: November 24, 2014, 06:28:17 PM by KasperL »

smirnoff

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Re: Classics
« Reply #17 on: November 24, 2014, 07:45:38 PM »
... 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.

@smirnoff: I've just read (and loved) 'Stoner' by John Edward Williams. It's not a long book, but very much a page turner for me (despite the fact that little of great consequence happens!) and it covers most of a university professor's life. Two out of three ain't bad, right?  :)

Thanks for mentioning it!

Out of curiosity I went and grabbed my copy of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors to see if John Edward Williams had an entry. Not that it's any indication of quality (in my experience) but I enjoy seeing what has been written about a particular author when it's available. It's a handy tool for turning yourself on to different authors because it often gives you a book to start with. In this case his name did not appear. The closest I came was another author with same initials. John Edgar Wideman. ;)

In any case this sounds like a surprising book. Do you remember where you first hear about it?

Dave the Necrobumper

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Re: Classics
« Reply #18 on: November 25, 2014, 03:54:45 AM »
@Dave the Necrobumper I've been researching classic sci-fi titles, so these are on my radar. A friend of mine actually recommended 'Mars Trilogy', too, just the other day.
I've read the first 'Foundation' novel (or, that is, the one called 'Foundation'), and while I dug the premise, I found it very difficult to "get into". But I'd like to give 'Foundation and Empire' a chance. Are you aware that Jonathan Nolan is preparing an HBO series based on the series?

Yes Foundation and Empire might be a read more to your style, if you had trouble getting into Foundation. The Foundation universe would be great source material for a TV series. Time to go and see how far along they are with the HBO idea (looks like not very far at the moment). Also in the Foundation universe is the Caves of Steel trilogy, which are mysteries set in a time before Foundation, but within the same universe.

KasperL

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Re: Classics
« Reply #19 on: November 25, 2014, 07:06:02 AM »
Thanks for mentioning it!

Out of curiosity I went and grabbed my copy of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors to see if John Edward Williams had an entry. Not that it's any indication of quality (in my experience) but I enjoy seeing what has been written about a particular author when it's available. It's a handy tool for turning yourself on to different authors because it often gives you a book to start with. In this case his name did not appear. The closest I came was another author with same initials. John Edgar Wideman. ;)

In any case this sounds like a surprising book. Do you remember where you first hear about it?

I won it at a pub quiz on literature. Back in 1965 when it first came out, it sold a mere 2000 copies and was soon virtually forgotten. But during the last decade it's been rediscovered, and for the last couple of years it's become a bestseller (http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/surprise-best-seller-stoner-by-john-williams-review/), receiving quite a few rave reviews (http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/stoner/). The New Yorker called it The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard Of, and it's a curious thing that it doesn't seem to have found much success in The States (yet) when it's now such a huge phenomenon in many European countries.

Here's my mini-review:
"A farmer's son becomes a university professor, gets married and leads a quiet, normal life. That's basically what happens in this novel. It doesn't sound very enthralling, does it? But John Edward Williams' masterfully controlled narrative is as captivating as any piece of literature I've encountered.

It's a damn near perfect portrait of an ordinary man. We get to know his circumstances and to understand his passions. We cringe at his weaknesses while applauding his accomplishments. The prose describes characters, scenes and reflections with delicious precision. Years are elided when appropriate. Now and then, a defining situation gets the breathing room it deserves.

Williams explores the nature of his protagonist's identity, examines his friendships and loves, shows us the near ruinous effects of petty grievances at his workplace, and contrasts Stoner's steadfastly stubborn ideology with the horrific marital hell he's unable (or unwilling) to escape. The thematic richness is enhanced by wise observasions, and everything flows along nicely and homogenenously.

'Stoner' is a miraculous achievement. It's specific and universal. It's simultaneously heartfelt and unsentimental. And, as mentioned, entirely gripping from beginning to end. I give it top marks."
« Last Edit: November 26, 2014, 04:14:43 AM by KasperL »

 

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