Favorite Classic Novels!

Odile_Blud

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What's your favorite classic novel? By classic, I'm referring to early twentieth century and any time before that. For me, I'd say Dracula. Probably because I love horror and gothic literature, and it's been a huge inspiration. What's yours?
 
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What's your favorite classic novel? By classic, I'm referring to early twentieth century on up. For me, I'd say Dracula. Probably because I love horror and gothic literature, and it's been a huge inspiration. What's yours?

Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. It's very definitely not twentieth century; it's very firmly Victorian and nineteenth century.

You might want to say Victorian era, which will get you up to 1901 (the first year of the Twentieth century).
 
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Odile_Blud

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Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. It's very definitely not twentieth century; it's very firmly Victorian and nineteenth century.

You might want to say Victorian era, which will get you up to 1901 (the first year of the Twentieth century).

I know. By early 20th century on up I meant early 20th century and anytime before that. Sorry. I'll change it.
 

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I'd define "classic" as anything published before my birth, which is longer ago than I care to admit. But, in keeping with the OP, I'll say anything published before 1923, which is the date currently in effect for U.S. copyright protection.

So, six favorites of mine, in no particular order.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain
The Time Machine, Wells
Ethan Frome. Wharton
The Man Who Laughs, Hugo
Lord Jim, Conrad

caw
 
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teardownthismall

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Hmm.... If you liked Dracula, here's a few more that might interest you:

1. Frankenstein
2. Journey to the Center of the Earth
3. Crime and Punishment -- It took me something like two years and four tries to get through the first half of the book, and about a week to get through the second.
4. The Invisible Man
5. Heart of Darkness

Cheers!
 

JCornelius

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/.../
3. Crime and Punishment -- It took me something like two years and four tries to get through the first half of the book, and about a week to get through the second./.../
The Karamazovs (free version: http://manybooks.net/titles/dostoyevother05brothers_karamazov.html) starts off ten times more boring than Crime and Punishment*, but when it starts rolling it grows into a deeper and wider epic about the human condition, recommended! I'd say the only thing by ole D that rivals Tolstoy's depth.


___
*Unless you like the archetypal 19th century narrator, in that case, even the start will be a stylistic thrill:
"How it came to pass that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous intelligent girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all called him, I won't attempt to explain.

I knew a young lady of the last "romantic" generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place. This is a fact, and probably there have been not a few similar instances in the last two or three generations.

Adelaida Ivanovna Miusov's action was similarly, no doubt, an echo of other people's ideas, and was due to the irritation caused by lack of mental freedom. She wanted, perhaps, to show her feminine independence, to override class distinctions and the despotism of her family. And a pliable imagination persuaded her, we must suppose, for a brief moment, that Fyodor Pavlovitch, in spite of his parasitic position, was one of the bold and ironical spirits of that progressive epoch, though he was, in fact, an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more."
 
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Odile_Blud

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Hmm.... If you liked Dracula, here's a few more that might interest you:

1. Frankenstein
2. Journey to the Center of the Earth
3. Crime and Punishment -- It took me something like two years and four tries to get through the first half of the book, and about a week to get through the second.
4. The Invisible Man
5. Heart of Darkness

Cheers!

I've read Frankenstein. Loved it, by the way. And I've been meaning to read The Invisible Man for the longest, but I still haven't gotten around to it.
 

Curlz

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Pride and Prejudice Austen :LilLove::heart:
 

Brightdreamer

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Personally, I found Sheridan le Fanu' Carmilla easier to get through than Dracula; the latter was a more terrifying monster with a larger-scale spree, but the former was shorter and seemed a little less rambly and repetitious (plus it wasn't quite so over the top on the religious angle.) If you haven't read Carmilla, you should give it a try. Very creepy monster, and an influence on Dracula. (It's public domain, so you can find free eBook versions.)

My reading of classics is somewhat spotty; older-style writing can be difficult for me to immerse in. That said, I enjoyed Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which remains a very relevant critique of human nature. I also liked the ideas behind the Carnacki stories by William Hope Hodgson - "The Whistling Room" was particularly chilling. And I like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ability to craft memorable characters.
 

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Chris P

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Frankenstein and Huckleberry Finn immediately come to mind. War and Peace as well.
 

Lakey

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I am a big fan of many classics, but if I had to narrow it down, I'd say:

George Eliot, Middlemarch -- The former has marvelous scope and wryness; it's amazing how much insight, social psychology, and politics she packs into the book. (If you like Eliot, I also adore Daniel Deronda.)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair -- A portrait of a calculating sociopath that couldn't have been more sharply* drawn if it had been written with a modern psychology textbook to hand, and is also a social satire that is at times laugh-out-loud funny. (Every time I read it I wonder whether, for every joke I get, there are 10 more that its contemporaneous audience got that fly over my head.)

If you enjoy Vanity Fair, you'll probably also like Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, also a social satire poking fun at "people of quality.


* Those familiar with the character will see what I did there.
 

Taylor Harbin

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My definition of classic might be broader than yours, and I'm sure there are some I'm forgetting.

Bambi
Huck Finn
The Old Man and the Sea
Lolita
The Winter of Our Discontent
Of Mice and Men
East of Eden
Dune
The Naked and the Dead
Animal Farm
Brave New World
The Wind in the Willows
 

blacbird

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Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone is still very enjoyable.

Agreed. Likewise The Woman in White and, less known, The Dead Secret. Collins, a close friend of Charles Dickens, tended to be much less prolix than a lot of Victorian novelists.

As for The Invisible Man, I almost put it on my list above, but decided to go with Time Machine instead, and keep the list short. But the work of H.G. Wells in general remains highly readable today. He was just a fabulously gifted natural writer of great narrative. I'd also cite The Island of Dr. Moreau in the same vein.

caw
 

AR_Kingston

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Um, wow, I think that list would be a mile long. Let's see if I can shorten it a bit
1) Lord of the Rings/Hobbit
2) Dracula
3) Moby Dick
4)The Picture of Dorian Grey
5) Three Musketeers and all the sequels including Man in the Iron Mask

I'll stop myself here, or I'll go on for hours listing them all.
 

HarvesterOfSorrow

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It's gotta be Dracula. But, then again, I haven't read much from that era. I need to brush up on my classic reading.
 

Stephen Palmer

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Agreed. Likewise The Woman in White and, less known, The Dead Secret. Collins, a close friend of Charles Dickens, tended to be much less prolix than a lot of Victorian novelists.

Gosh, yes, I'd forgotten about The Woman In White. I must give that a re-read. Never heard of The Dead Secret !
 

autumnleaf

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is an obvious one, but for good reason. So many great moments and lines.

Do you think I am an automaton?–a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!–I have as much soul as you,–and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;–it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,–as we are!
 

benbenberi

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Gotta speak up for my classic fave, Anthony Trollope. Well observed & delicately nuanced social fiction of the high Victorian era, often with an element of politics and a focus on the nexus of money, class & gender. Also social comedy, and fox hunting. (Trollope loved to hunt, and indulged himself with at least one good hunting scene in almost every book, sometimes more. And they're not all the same - as a good writer, he always finds opportunities for character development!) He covers some of the same ground as Dickens, but not as melodramatic. And his characters -- even the most virtuous & villainous ones -- are 3-dimensional, not caricatures. Also unlike Dickens, he writes women as fully developed and complex as the men, & their stories & agency are central.

He was very prolific too. A model of the professional writer: he got up early every morning, wrote 4 long pages an hour for 3 hours (with a timer), then went to work at his day job (senior bureaucrat at the Post Office). If, during a writing session, he happened to reach The End of a book before his 3 hours were up, he didn't knock off early & celebrate, he just took a fresh piece of paper and started Chapter One of the next book! That's how you write 45+ novels and more in 35 years.

Not all the books are equally good, of course. Among my favorites: The Palliser novels - Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, & The Duke's Children. The Barsetshire novels are another sequence, somewhat different in tone: The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, A Small House in Allingham, and The Last Chronicle of Barset. And some stand-alones worth reading: He Knew He Was Right, Orley Farm, The Way We Live Now, The American Senator, The Vicar of Bullhampton.
 

blacbird

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Re: Trollope. I've read exactly one of his many novels (The Claverings), and quite enjoyed it. Trollope was enormously popular in his day, and was witty in a dry and subtle way. In contrast to his contemporary, Dickens, he wrote entirely about upper-class people and society, and that might be why he is less read today than he was a century-plus ago. But he's definitely worth a look.

caw
 

sideshowdarb

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Frankenstein is my absolute favorite book. Carmilla is also a favorite. I used to be much higher on Gatsby than I am now, though I still have soft spot for it. Other books I think of when I get this question are Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney, and Dubliners, by Joyce.
 

divine-intestine

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A book that affected me profoundly, and I guess can be considered a classic, is Nevil Shute's On the Beach. I was forced to read it in English class when I was 16. I hated it at first but I was bawling by the end. One of few books I've read in English.
 

sideshowdarb

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On The Beach is a very good book. I was thinking of it when I wrote one of my novels, which is sort of an apocalyptic wind-down. I even through a reference to a nuclear sub.