What’s your favorite classic? my favorite is the Catcher in the Rye.
I’m trying to get more into classics. What’s your favorite classic? I haven’t read many but my favorite that I’ve read is the Catcher in the Rye.
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anna karenina by leo tolstoy is my fav classic
One of my favorites, too.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And for easy reads A Secret Garden and A Little Princess
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is on my list to read soon.
Don’t think I ever read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but love A Secret Garden.
Gone with the Wind
Love this!
Moby Dick
Rebecca and Jamaica Inn
Wuthering Heights
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is wonderful-And I went thru Gone With The Wind in no time-that was a great book. I’ve tried and tried with Moby Dick, I just can’t get into it.
I read Moby Dick. There’s this amazing story, but between each chapter of story there’s about 3 chapters that are just essays on whaling… sure, they add something to the climax as it happens, but STILL…
The whole Anne of Green Gables series which will keep you busy for a while.
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Ohhh-Farenheit 451 is excellent
What is the definition of a Classic?
Literature rather than just a novel
In researching my own question, the best description seems to be quality,excellence and.timelessness.
No different than movies (e.g. “The Wizard of Oz”) or music (e.g. “Yesterday” by The Beatles) classics are enjoyed generation after generation, not a short term fad.
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
My Antonia
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins, Great Expectations – Charles Dickens, Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 3 of my favs
Pride and Prejudice
I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo right now.
Awesome read. Lengthy but rewarding.
Where the Red Fern Grows
Catcher in the Rye was my favorite book when I was in my youth (my youngest son is named Holden), but as an adult, A Tale of Two Cities is hands-down my favorite classic. I reread it at least once a year.
Pride and Prejudice, Emma.
Have you read any Jane Austen?
I read some of her letters in school but that’s it.
Two of my favourites are Jane Eyre and To Kill a Mockingbird ?
JANE ? EYRE ?
I loved Dracula, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Portrait of Dorian Grey, and Lord of the Rings
Rebecca! All time fav.
I love the film too.
Frankenstein. Dracula
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is ?amazinghhhh?????????????
The Great Gatsby.
Frankenstein
The woman in white by Wilkie Collins
Vilette by Charlotte Bronte, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim, My Cousin Rachel by Daphne DuMaurier (anything by her really), Gentleman’s Agreement (blanking on the author right now), A Tale Of Two Cities by Dickens, ……
Bridge to Terabithia
Tale of Two Cities is fantastic
Ulysses (and Pride and Prejudice).
1984 and Brave New World — both timely reads today.
Animal Farm too
@Miki, if you read it as more than a book about animals! lol
Frankenstein is awesome. So is Emma.
Wuthering Heights
Great Expectations
I agree 100% with Fahrenheit 451, I could read that over and over. I also love To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies was a good read!
Grapes of Wrath and Jane Eyre but I haven’t read many either.
A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
Pride & Predjudice
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Frankenstein, Dracula, The Count of Monte Cristo, To Kill A Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, The Scarlett Letter, The Red Pony.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Lord of the Flys- William Golding
The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
Pride and Predjudce, Portrait of a lady & Jane Eyre
Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights
The hobbit, Jane eyre, the Martian chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and the portrait of Dorian grey
War and Peace.
I lived in Russia and all my friends would recommend just reading Peace (its long) ?
Me too for a while when I was a kid – agree about its length, took me 6 months, but we’ll worth it (just for the Peace ?)
War and Peace, Frankenstein and Lord of the Rings
Following***
Jane Eyre, Little Women, Great Expectations.
Excellent choices – I would second all of these ?
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Lea Miserables!
Some I have read as an adult that I really liked are An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser — not especially well written but the story is phenomenal and has stuck with me; East of Eden by John Steinbeck – read this a while ago but couldn’t put it down; others: Berlin Stories by Isherwood, anything by Jane Austin and I will echo the recommendations for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Count of Monte Cristo if you have the chance it’s amazing, I also am gonna say Frankenstein is great. And Dracula.
Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. I will never get enough of it. In fact, my daughter is now reading it for her highschool reading assignment. And we are bonding over favorite parts!
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45
Pride and Prejudice, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Woman in White…to start!
Little Women
I just started Little Women. I’m only a couple of chapters in but it seems kind of lame. Does it get any better?
@Jennifer yes…keep going!!
Little Men
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby. The Great American Novel. It’s all there.
Jane Eyre and anything by Mark Twain.
Dracula is great. Frankenstein is dark and clever and 200 years old this year. Jane Eyre moved me. Dickens is actually very good, and underrated. I wouldn’t bother with D. H Lawrence. 100 years of solitude is amazing. Lolita is worth a read. I hated Moby Dick. Ohh Slaughter House 5 for Sci fi. And Animal Farm.
How about this one. I don’t think others have suggested it. “At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft. The man has a way with words.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
When you say classics, doesn’t that include Shakespeare?
I was going to say Macbeth and Hamlet, but nobody has mentioned Shakespeare’s works, so I was just wondering if it’s wrong.
I love Macbeth
Definitely classics. One old definition of a classic was something still being read after 100 years or more. So, yes! Ham and Mac, and Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Henry V.
I love HP Lovecraft.
I haven’t read many classics but I think I’ll start. I did read Dracula and loved it.
Gone with the Wind 🙂
I consider The Alexandrian Quartet by Lawerence Durrell a classic body of work. Have read it four times at various stages of my life ( I am 72) and I continue us to love all four novels.
One of my favourite classics is “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens.
Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind
It would be easy to say something by Dickens, but I’ll shoot for Vanity Fair.
Great Expectations
Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
To Kill a Mockingbird for sure ?
Some favorites that I don’t think have been mentioned yet:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Brothers Karamazov
Turn of the Screw
David Copperfield
As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
Gullivers Travels
If on a winters night a traveler
The Count of Monte Cristo
And for kids: The Wind in the Willows
David Copperfield, great expectations, gone with the wind, Jane Eyre – that’s a few of my favourites! My daughter said Crime and Punishment.
The Native Son by Richard @Sarah
If you must read Dostoyevsky, sample Notes from Underground. It’s blessedly short. I prefer Chekhov’s short stories and plays.
If I were you, I’d start off with shorter classics. Eliot’s Middlemarch is a great novel, but 800-900 pages long. Maybe Eliot’s Silas Marner would do.
The Great Gatsby is, in fact, outstanding.
Agatha Christie’s books from the 1920s and 1930s are fun. Ditto Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series.
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is delicious.
Try a little poetry too—T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, others.
You might enjoy Dorothy Parker, a wicked wit. And Oscar Wilde.
James Joyce, The Dubliners.
Hope this helps.
Thumbs up on all of your suggestions! Except I would also suggest diving into Dostoyevsky’s great novels, long though they may be. Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are on my all-time favorites list
Thank you! I believe you, but I’m missing the FD gene. I got the Buffy the Vampire Slayer gene instead. ?
@Mari, LOL, and at risk of seeming dense,what do you mean by FD? (P.S. Buffy is awesome!)
Oh, duh, just got it! ?
Laura Atwood, I meant Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’m glad you like Buffy. I consider it the zenith of US culture. ?
@Mari, LOL, a case of not seeing what’s right in front of your nose! Cheers to Buffy!
High five ! My favourite so far is The catcher in the rye too
Bleak House, 1984, Jude the Obscure, Anna Karenina, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, We, On the Road.
The Moonstone
And Frankenstein
Three musketeers
Everything Jane Austen. Read them all.
Little Women
Little women
trying to get through catcher in the rye now. classics are so hard to read.My favorite back in school was to kill a mockingbird.
The Bronte sisters, Jane Austen & Dickens
Jane Eyre – I’ve read it several times. I also adore anything by Oscar Wilde
Little Women, Pride and Prejudice
Crime and Punishment, McTeague
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I cannot recommend it enough 🙂
Pride and Prejudice. So amazing I love it. First read it as a teenager and regularly reread it.
“The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins, “Rebecca” by Daphne de Maurier and “The Good Earth” by Pearl Buck.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Definitely Jane Eyre
I have read all of J. D. Salinger`s prose and greatly enjoyed it.
Great Expectations; Gone with the Wind
The Count of Monte Cristo unabridged
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Silas Marner by George Eliot.
The Three Musketeers ?
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Persuasion by Jane Austen
I have several. Grapes of Wrath, A Christmas Carol, 1984, Animal Farm, Watership Downs, The Jungle, Gone With the Wind. I read them over and over.
The Mayor of Castorbridge by Thomas Hardy.
East of Eden!
I love it too, and it really made an impression on my as a kid, but many dislike this book.
Some of my favorites are Jane Eyre, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Rebecca.
Helter skelter
Not a classic!
But great
Tom sawyer
A Separate Peace
The bible or a dictionary give it a whoorl may surprise urself
My favorite would be The Brothers Karamazov
I loved Jane Eyre.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas hardy
Anything by Mark Twain but the diaries of Adam and Eve is absolutely laugh out loud hilarious.
Robin Hood by Howard Pyle is my ultimate favorite classic book! I read the book when I was in 4th grade. I’ll admit to having a crush on Robin Hood, and I did want to kill his cousin for betraying him.