Can you recommend some good books considered classics?

[raccoon]

A family member asked me this yesterday.

Here’s the list I came up with for her. (Note: many books I didn’t include because she’s already read them.)

-----------------------------
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins

David Copperfield

The Sound and the Fury (I needed to look at notes to understand this one.)

1984

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Main Street ( I don’t remember a lot about this one, but it’s not too hard to get through.)

My Antonia

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
-------------------------------


Your suggestions?

[Blues Heron]

1. Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Just finished it, amazing beautifully written book

[JustAnotherGen]

2. Things Fall Apart

by Chinua Achebe

Rag Time - E. L. Doctorow

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

A Christmas Carol - Darles Chickens aka DWM but a great 'hidden theology' book.

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote -No Fiction but classic

The Color of Water - James McBride - Not fiction but modern classic

Fear of Flying - Erica Jong

[Lochloosa]

3. Uncle Tom's Cabin

[SheilaT]

17. I second this.

I read it a decade or so back, when NPR's Talk of the Nation was doing its Book Club of the Air. One month they selected Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I decided to read it, figuring it was one of those books I "ought to have read." I honestly expected it to be something of a slog, and the first fifty pages were a little slow, but after that I simply could not put it down.

The Uncle Tom of the title, completely opposite of the current usage, is a genuinely good, religious man, who always does what he thinks is right.

There's a scene early on, after Eliza has escaped to freedom and she's been taken in by a Quaker couple. The man asks his wife if she doesn't have some clothes for the child Eliza brought with her. I don't have a copy of the book to do the exact quote, but Stowe directly addresses the reader, especially the female readers by saying in effect, Is there not one of you who does not have some clothes put away from some beloved child no longer on this earth? It's such a strong reminder that back then so many children died young, that essentially every woman who bore children also buried some of them.

Later on, when there are scenes on the Legree Plantation, (yes, Simon Legree) which read like a foreshadowing of the Holocaust.

I think the incredible power of that book is that when it was written no one had any idea that in a decade there would the the great Civil War, and slavery would end. Within the context of the book there is absolutely no hope that that will happen. Every novel written since Emancipation always anticipates the freeing of the slaves, even those that take place entirely within the period when slavery was in force. We can't really go back and truly know what it was like to be white or black, slave or free back then. But in this book we get a glimpse of it.

[prc73450]

23. third this

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, Giants in the Earth,

Here are a Few good lists...Books that are on both or all three...are MUST READS

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2963336/44-Classic-Novels-To-Read-Before-You-Die

http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/booklists/?id=classics

http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Five-GREAT-American-Novels/lm/2YTQGV42R0SYZ

[ChairmanAgnostic]

5. Lord of the Rings

Tom Sawyer

The Time Machine

Robinson Crusoe

Alice in Wonderland

Hound of the baskervilles,

The Count of Monte Cristo

Call of the Wild

Dracula

Biographies of John Adams, Ben Franklin, by

Asimov's Foundation

Neuromancer

20,000 leagues under the Sea

Kidnapped (stevenson)

[eyeofdelphi]

6. The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood, and the Blind Assassin
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

[earthside]

7. Babbit

Just finished re-reading Sinclair Lewis's masterpiece ... as relevant now as it was in the 1920s.

Also worthwhile is Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here".

[Pyrzqxgl]

8. How About:

LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe
THE GRAPES OF WRATH: by John Steinbeck
20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA: by Jules Verne
RALPH 124C41: by Hugo Gernsback
THE WIZARD OF OZ: by L Frank Baum
THE COVERED WAGON: by Emerson Hough
THE TIME MACHINE: by H.G. Wells
A WORLD TO WIN: by Jack Conroy
INNOCENTS ABROAD: by Mark Twain
MY 10 YEARS IN A QUANDERY & HOW THEY GREW: by Robert Benchley
DR. DOLITTLE: by Hugh Lofting
and thats not even a start

[ChairmanAgnostic]

10. YES, how could I miss some of those?

[enlightenment]

9. Some older ones . . .

A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded - Samuel Richardson
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
Oroonoko; or a Royal Slave - Aphra Behn
Orlando; a Biography - Virginia Woolf


edited for title correction

[ZombieHorde]

11. Stranger in a Strange Land, Do Androids Dream of Electic Sheep,

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Illuminatus!, Naked Lunch, and (in twenty years) World War Z.

[raccoon]

12. You like SF, don't you? :-) I've read WOrld War Z. nt

[pscot]

13. Middlemarch is a wonderful book

Madame Bovary is also, and a good deal more modern in tone. I also really enjoyed Trollope's Barcester novels.

[dixiegrrrrl]

14. I recommend Trollpe and Dickens, actually.

Nothing new under the sun, indeed.

Even tho there have been some excellent screen adaptations of both authors, there is much lost in the translation and characterization.

[mtowngman]

15. Got on a read classics kick about a year ago, in addition to The Jungle

some I've gotten to include:

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Catch 22

On The Road

Tropic of Cancer

I find online lists like this helpful: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html

[pitohui]

16. hard to suggest w.out knowing what you're leaving out (she's already read)

i'll guess if she hasn't read david copperfield she hasn't read dickens at all, in that case, i liked "our mutual friend"

"tess" is the most accessible hardy but if she's ready to wallow in darkness, then "jude the obscure" is my favorite

everyone should read 1984 of course

has she read a lot of "modern" classics? or can we nominate a few?

"because it is bitter and because it is my heart" (oates) is accessible but really hard hitting

less accessible but to me a wonderful modern classic is "infinite jest" (wallace)

another would be "cloud atlas" (mitchell)

i could name so many more but i don't watch tv and see like one movie a year so i have time to read a LOT of books, i'd better hold down on my infinitude of suggestions

too many books...so little time!!!

[Richardo]

18. I finally read 'Grapes of Wrath' this year.

What a phenomonal book.

Also: 'Babbitt', except that has not aged as gracefully language-wise. Still a good book, though.

[Lex]

19. "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck & "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"

by Betty Smith. I just read both of the in the last 5 years for the FIRST time. Wonderful books.

So is "O Pioneers!" by Willa Cather

[LWolf]

20. Two years before the mast, by Richard Henry Dana. nt

[mvccd1000]

29. I'll second that.

I just read it as a free download on my kindle. I really enjoyed the story, and I had a blast using google earth to find all the places mentioned in the book as they stopped there.

[DemocratAholic]

21. candide

candide by voltaire. my favorite book.

[BlueIris]

22. A Separate Peace, if she didn't manage it in high school.

One of the only American classics I feel is really enduring.

A Farewell to Arms, again, if she somehow skipped it in her formative years.

The Golden Notebook? Not my favorite Lessing, but a classic never the less.

[prc73450]

24. don quixote

[Journeyman]

25. "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. . .

Points for a Compass Rose by Evan S. Connell

The Autobiography of Lenny Bruce: How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

[Iwillnevergiveup]

26. Rebecca

by Daphne DuMaurier

[tortoise1956]

27. "Cannery Row" by Steinbeck

Excellent character development, and a pretty fast read.

[tortoise1956]

28. Some more...

"Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe - get an edition with the extra stories
"The Jungle Book" by Kipling
"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas
"Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson