What classics have you read?

[Jenna]

Wow some amazing lists you are all very well read in the best literature and NOT the loathsome Harry Potter or the awful and banal Da Vinci code pffft

I will not list for fear of sounding pretentious but I will say Anna Karenina is my favourite for its power of emotion and her strength of integrity right to the end in her idealogical suicide and also Don Quixote because I have days where I am definitely Sancho Panza but if I am honest even more days where I am Don Quixote deluded in myself and seeing giants in windmills.....

Yr most obdt hmble srvt,
Jenna

 

[Carol]

Wow some amazing lists you are all very well read in the best literature and NOT the loathsome Harry Potter or the awful and banal Da Vinci code pffft

I will not list for fear of sounding pretentious but I will say Anna Karenina is my favourite for its power of emotion and her strength of integrity right to the end in her idealogical suicide and also Don Quixote because I have days where I am definitely Sancho Panza but if I am honest even more days where I am Don Quixote deluded in myself and seeing giants in windmills.....

Yr most obdt hmble srvt,
Jenna

Dang. I love Harry Potter. Something evil about those books though, and I don't mean the witchcraft. Ms. Rowling's writing is absolutely addicting and I get sucked thoroughly in to the story...but...migod there is such an undercurrent of sadness to those stories that depresses me terribly. Even with that though...I can't wait for the next one. Go figure. Maybe it is the witchcraft

 

[Shirt Ripper]

Steinbeck, Slaughter House 5, Catcher in the Rye, I prefer books about human performance however.

 

[Old Fat Kenpoka]

Seems like some of you are interested in Science Fiction.

Well, before I rediscovered the "Classics", I used to read tons of Sci-Fi. Quite honestly, most Sci-Fi is junk. But there is lots of good Sci-Fi. In my quest to find good Sci-Fi, I encountered two books about Sci-Fi and Fantasy written around 1979/80 by Baird Searles in the UK and some of his colleagues. He includes his recommendations for Sci-Fi and Fantasy Classics. I have read almost all of the books on this list and while some of them are very dated, they are, for the most part, very good.

I particularly enjoyed the works of Olaf Stapledon with his sweeping trillion-year histories of evolution and galactic consciousness as well as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy with its truly strange characters. Enjoy.

Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction by Baird Searles, et al. “the Five Parsec Shelf”
1. Brian Aldiss Hothouse
2. Poul Anderson Tau Zero
3. Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy
4. J.G. Ballard Vermillion Sands
5. Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination
6. James Blish A Case of Conscience
7. Ray Bradbury The Martian Chronicles
8. John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar
9. Edgar Rice Burroughs A Princess of Mars
10. Arthur C. Clarke Childhood’s End
11. Arthur C. Clarke The City and the Stars
12. Hal Clement Needle
13. Samuel Delany Dhalgren
14. Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle
15. Gordon Diskson Dorsai!
16. Thomas M. Disch 334
17. Harlan Ellison Dangerous Visions
18. M. John Harrison The Centauri Device
19. Robert A. Heinlein Citizen of the Galaxy
20. Robert A. Heinlein The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
21. Frank Herbert Dune
22. William Hope Hodgson The Night Land
23. Henry Kuttner The Dark World
24. Henry Kuttner and CL Moore Earth’s Last Citadel
25. Ursula K. LeGuin The Left Hand of Darkness
26. Fritz Leiber The Big Time
27. CS Lewis The Perelandra (Space) Trilogy
28. HP Lovecraft At the Mountains of Madness
29. A. Merritt The Moon Pool
30. Walter Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz
31. Michael Moorcock The Cornelius Chronicles
32. Larry Niven Ringworld
33. H Beam Piper Little Fuzzy
34. Pohl and Kornbluth The Space Merchants
35. Joanna Russ And Chaos Died
36. Mary Shelley Frankenstein
37. Cordwainer Smith Nostrilia
38. EE Smith First Lensman
39. Olaf Stapledon Last and First Men
40. Olaf Stapledon Odd John
41. Theordore Sturgeon More Than Human
42. AE van Vogt The World of Null-A
43. Jack Vance The Dying Earth
44. Jules Verne From the Earth to the Moon
45. Stanley Weinbaum A Martian Odyssey and Others
46. HG Wells The Time Machine
47. Jack Williamson The Humanoids
48. Sydney Fowler Wright The World Below
49. John Wyndham The Midwich Cuckoos
50. Roger Zelazny Lord of Light


Reader’s Guide to Fantasy by Baird Searles, et al. “Seven League Shelf”
1. Poul Anderson The Broken Sword
2. L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz
3. Peter S. Beagle The Last Unicorn
4. Ray Bradbury Dark Carnival
5. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
6. Lord Dunsany The King of Elfland’s Daughter
7. Charles G. Finney The Circus of Dr. Lao
8. Alan Garner The Wierdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath
9. Jane Gaskell The Atlan Saga
10. Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows
11. H. Rider Haggard She
12. William Hope Hodgson The House on the Borderland
13. Robert E. Howard Conan
14. M.R. James Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
15. Rudyard Kipling The Jungle Books
16. Fritz Leiber Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
17. CS Lewis Till We Have Faces
18. HP Lovecraft The Shadow over Inssmouth
19. George MacDonald Gifts of the Christ Child
20. Patricia McKillip The Riddle-Master Trilogy
21. A. Merritt The Ship of Ishtar
22. Naomi Mitchison To the Chapel Perilous
23. Michael Moorcock The Elric Saga
24. CL Moore The Black Gods Shadow (Jirel of Joiry)
25. Edith Nesbit The Five Children and It
26. Mervyn Peake The Gormenghast Trilogy
27. Edgar Allan Poe The Fall of the House of Usher
28. Bram Stoker Dracula
29. JRR Tolkien The Chronicles of Middle-Earth
30. TH White The Once and Future King
31. Charles Williams War in Heaven
32. Robert Wise & Phyllis Fraser Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
33. Austin Tappan Wright Islandia

 

[OnlyAnEgg]

Wow some amazing lists you are all very well read in the best literature and NOT the loathsome Harry Potter or the awful and banal Da Vinci code pffft

Ah, Jenna, my dear, dark angel! I must disagree! My youngest (13 year old femme) is an avid fan of that 'loathesome' Potter child. Though the path of Rowling, I have successfully introduced her to Tolkien, Orwell and Herbert. He is a fine introduction.

My eldest was very fond of R.L. Stine's tween horror-tripe; but, her love of reading allowed me to send her the way of Orwell, Barker, Camus and others.

As for Brown's stories...eh *shrug* He's really quite clever, though deceitful.

So, by those treacly-sweet pathways, my children are become versed in modern classics.

 

[tkd_jen]

I too must applaud the Harry Potter series for "re-introducing" many kids (and their parents) to reading. I am 28 and this spring read all the Potter books. I just kinda needed a nice, easy read requiring not too much thought. However, back to the topic at hand...some of my fave reads:

East of Eden
To Kill a mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye

 

[matt.m]

I have read so many classics that i cannot tell of them all. However, I would like to read the story of Moby Dick again. The greed and symbolism is just fantastic.

 

[Kreth]

I have read so many classics that i cannot tell of them all. However, I would like to read the story of Moby Dick again. The greed and symbolism is just fantastic.

I just finished it last night. I found the ending rather abrupt and anticlimactic, considering the amount of detail that Melville put into the writing.

 

[shesulsa]

I just finished it last night. I found the ending rather abrupt and anticlimactic, considering the amount of detail that Melville put into the writing.

I thought that was part of the point of the book, tho ... such enormity and detail only to find it wasn't such a big deal after all?

 

[Kreth]

I thought that was part of the point of the book, tho ... such enormity and detail only to find it wasn't such a big deal after all?

Interesting thought. The writing style just seemed very bare at the end, though. To give an idea... On Palm OS, Moby Dick runs just over 2900 pages. The climactic battle with the white whale only consisted of about 60 pages.

 

[Jenna]

Ah, Jenna, my dear, dark angel! I must disagree! My youngest (13 year old femme) is an avid fan of that 'loathesome' Potter child. Though the path of Rowling, I have successfully introduced her to Tolkien, Orwell and Herbert. He is a fine introduction.

My eldest was very fond of R.L. Stine's tween horror-tripe; but, her love of reading allowed me to send her the way of Orwell, Barker, Camus and others.

As for Brown's stories...eh *shrug* He's really quite clever, though deceitful.

So, by those treacly-sweet pathways, my children are become versed in modern classics.

Hey Egg-san well I would never take away the fact that the huge corporate Potter machinery has indeed drawn many a clever child and many an inquisitive adult too to reading and this on the face of it is a laudable thing if that were the intention and not solely to clear profits and bolster stock prices but there is something disagreeable about Rowling and what is made of her "poor me" background bleh....

But the point I would want to make is that I find the whole machinations of Rowling through Bloomsbury distasteful and yes! loathsome and this great self-propelling PR machine has unfortunately pushed the classics of this very thread and those you mentioned yourself off any shelves they may have sat on before and worse than that there are a great many children who hang on EVERY word of Rowlings HP and are so wholly engulfed in the story and character and probably films too that they have no inclination whatsoever to read ANYTHING else until the next HP installment and they are certainly not at fault because what chance has Moby Dick as mentioned by Kreth and others when who ever heard of a Call me Ishmael T Shirt or a White Whale school satchel or a Moby Dick PS2 game?? And while I am ranting happily to myself I will say that despite their claims to be searching for new writing talent publishers I notice are simply seeking "the next" HP and this I think has narrowed their focus WAY down to the lowest common denominator so while HP takes up the top five shelves of our bookshops then down below are the Rowling wannabees oh as well as the blethering and nastily plagiaristic Da Vinci I mean pffft

I am sorry for going off on one I would guess I have a problem with corporatism and what I would see as the absolutely undeniably legal and acceptABLE and acceptED monopolisation of young peoples reading habits when I would have thought we should have been encouraging a BREADTH of reading not just in young people of school age but in us all but hey shoot me for H8n on the hallowed Potter I am bulletproof anyway, ha!

Yr most obdt hmble srvt,
Jenna