How many of the classics, both modern and of literature, have you actually read?

This picture of Truman Capote (a very young Capote) on the back cover of one of his books caused quite a stir. He was flamboyantly gay and the homophobes of the times just couldn't handle this photo as they thought it was flirtatious.

 

You are on the right track in my snobbish opinion. But Im a classics junkie. Not that I fully comprehend all that is written.
Brothers Karamazov is a must read for anyone interested in the big questions in life such "why choose Christianity?". As is the redemptive nature of Crime and Punishment.
I need to reread Shakespeare because that guy just knows how to find the right words. I put Dosteovsky and him on the same level of psychological insight.
To Kill a Mockingbird is such an awesome book with unforgettable characters. But I cant stress enough the importance of reading the old classics because Universities these days have become so influenced by post modernism and scepticism of anything faintly masculine, that the classics are becoming extinct.

 

Classic has a pretty loose definition to it. I've been reading for pleasure since I was in single digits, and I was a Lit major in university, so I've read a lot of books that could be considered classics and some of them I really only remember when I'm reminded of them by something specific. If you gave me a list, I could probably tick them off as 'yes,' no,' or 'maybe, possibly... Is that the one...?'

 

Hmm, methinks flirtatious is in the eye of the beholder. David Drake, IIRC, had a line in one of his books that went something like "He hadn't been that horny since coming off of forty-three days on a one-man OP with no company save that of a ewe whose smile had begun to look flirtatious."

 

The Count of Monte Christo
The childrens version (aka shorter/abridged) of
Moby Dick, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
Where the Red Fern grows.

And not sure where Hotel Berlin '44 falls under, it was written in 1945.
Though I doubt many have heard of it, let alone read it.

 

Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies
Les Miserables
1984
paradise Lost (but I need commentaries to understand it better)
Dante's The Divine Comedy (also need summaries etcetera)
Carson Mcullers The heart is a lonely Hunter (great movie too)

 

It's an excellent book, but so dense and deep that I feel like I need to read it again to absorb it! Not sure if that's going to happen though. I'm planning on reading Moby Dick next year and got Jane Eyre waiting on my bookshelf. But I've been busy gorging on epic fantasy again lately... Not had the best year, and that kind of escapism is one of the best non-hangover/comedown inducing distractions from the blues I can think of.

Even Robert Jordan...

But saying that, Dmitri's anxiety ridden troubles were kind of a cathartic read, and he's probably my favourite character from The Brothers K.

 

4

 

I don't usually read classics, though have picked up a few. I mostly read genre fiction, which is a good use of time I think since I want to write genre fiction.

A few of the classics that I remember being required to read:

• Othello, Macbeth, R&J
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Death of a Salesman
• Great Expectations
• Beowulf
• Huckleberry Finn
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Short stories by: Twain, Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Poe, Bradbury
• Poems by: Dickinson, Sandburg

Classics I read of my own free will (taking a few liberties to include some of the more important genre fiction):

• Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm
• Lovecraft: A short story collection
• Rand: The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged
• Azimov: The Foundation series (books 1 & 2)
• Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
• Heinlein: The Man Who Sold the Moon (collection)
  
• Niven & Pournelle: Ringworld, The Mote in God's Eye

Stuff I tried but never finished:

• Dracula
• Slaughterhouse Five
• Fahrenheit 451
• Brave new world

I want to finish some of the stuff in the stuff I tried list. But haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

I want to read her stories. Is her Catholic influence evident?

 

I've only read the one story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," but yes

 

Her short stories are excellent. Highly recommended.

 

The only story I remember from her is Good Country People. I don’t remember if it was catholic but I do remember a certain bible salesman by the name of Manley Pointer.

 

I don't think any book, 'classic' or Classic, should be compulsory. Classic is a funny little word, isn't it? What exactly does that mean?

I've read a fair few classics, more than a healthy amount. I think people assume that at worst a classic book is either a boring book or a book that will not 'speak to' them directly. I don't like the idea that a book needs to feel familiar to have any kind of interest. Something like The Lonely Londoners is in the Penguin Modern Classics range, I am nothing like the protagonist, and it comes from a completely different world view and experience to me. I didn't identify myself with the character - but that's why I liked it. It was a window into another person's head, another world - and helped me see something of what being a black immigrant to the UK must have seen back in the 1950s.

That's a decent book, and you also get stuff like Frankenstein - that is a classic, and yes it's dense with subtext, but it's also a lot of fun. Modern classics shouldn't be thought of as boring, they very often aren't. You just have to learn to think in different ways to properly appreciate it, I think. Dickens isn't boring, he was the Star Wars of the day. Nineteen Eighty-Four is far from boring, actually it is probably the most effectively terrifying novel I've ever read.

The problem often seems to come from using what you have already read to measure something like Dickens or Nineteen Eighty-Four, or whatever, against. Some books are easier to read than others - and also might be actually harder to read, and the two are not one and the same. Shakespeare is only difficult because of the early Modern English words used in his day, but while his philosophies might be complex his actual stories rarely are. A lot of them are farcical and silly, and I mean that in a positive way. Once the language clicks, the dude's a riot!

 

More than a few and I enjoyed them. I've read most of the "Rory Gilmore" reading list (I used to like that show, but it's rather full of itself now). There are always going to be debates about what makes literature actually literature and what qualifies it to be a classic, but for the most part I think there's a general consensus on what they are.

My favorite classic is probably Frankenstein or Jane Eyre. Both are easily read and tell fantastical stories. I know the format of Frankenstein throws people off a lot, but I found it refreshing after all these years and I think it holds up well.

I think modern classics help show society what it is a bit better than those of yesteryear, but I also think we could have more modern classics that do a better job of that.

I think I'm rambling now, so I'll see myself out.

 

Yeah, I agree. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, as a more extreme example, is so old a lot of what it talks about are just not concerns for us anymore - the work house (I mean, ok, exploitation of labour and all that, but that stuff's more theoretical and retrospective) and the colonization of the Americas, which is also only contemporary through the use of analogies. If at all, I think people, especially academics, read too much into certain things.

It's also a book without chapters, it's really more of a sustained rant - which you don't see a lot of these days, and it's very much interested in detailing the society of the time - reading it could teach you a lot about working class life back in the 1700s (edit: 1700s in England). That can be cool enough.

 

Most of E.M. Forster's work, some of Evelyn Waugh's.

Steinbeck and Hemingway were high school reqs.

None of the more modern "intellectual" crap.

Everything by Asimov, Clarke, LeGuin.

 

Recently read Where Angels Fear to Tread. Loved it.

 

It's excellent. You were mentioning earlier how Moll Flanders is aged to a point where it's hard to contextualize into modern terms. I feel the same way about some of Forster's, work, particularly (for obviouse reasons) Maurice.

But the intrigue I have with that book is precisely the fact that it reads almost like a Science Fiction version of a gay love story. It comes to us directly from the era in which it was written, and which it represents, having been penned in 1913/14. It's a direct window into that life, not a modernized take covered in layer after layer of cultural progression and retconning. In that sense, it fascinates the heck out of me.

 

I've read a lot of them, hard to remember them all. Let me try to make a list, probably the easiest way:

Hunchback of Notre Dame
Frankenstein
Dracula
Bradberry's Martian Chronicles plus The Illustrated Man (I think it was the collection)
A few Asimovs like Foundation and a bunch of the Robot stories. Heinlein—Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land now thanks to the Book Club in here, Waldo, Red Planet.
Hamlet, MacBeth, Romeo & Juliet (for the first 2 I read the version that places a modern English trans beside the original and also read books explaining them—I really wanted to understand)
I didn't realize Ayn Rand was considered classic, I've read most of hers aside from Atlas Shrugged
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, which has a delightful style to it
Moby Dick
A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, several more by Dickens but I can't remember which. Oh, A Christmas Carol
Made it well into the Bible, I guess that counts?

Pretty sure there was more but drawing a blank for now.

Oh, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
A heck of a lot of Poe and Lovecraft if those are classics
Just had something else but by the time I wrote the last couple of lines it's gone now. Oh of course—Dante's Inferno. Big chunks of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Odyssey

I'm sure there's more, especially that I downloaded from Archive.org and Project Gutenberg, but can't recall any now.

How could I have forgot The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings??!

Starting to remember some stuff for school, like All Quiet on the Western Front, Shirley Jackson's Lottery, a bunch I can't quite recall including Faulkner, Hemingway... The Three Musketeers, In Cold Blood.

 

'He knew he could probably write smarter editorials if he read 'The Brothers Karamazov and some of the other great works of all time, but there was the trouble: if he sat around reading the great works of all time, in or out of pain, how would he ever get his editorials written?'
Richard Yates - The Good School

That's how I feel about reading classics, basically. I think obviously a writer needs to read to some extent, but writing is so much more important. I think we sometimes trick our brain into thinking torturing ourselves with classics we don't even enjoy is a noble requirement. But it's just as much a distraction from the work.

 

I dunno, you have to keep your hand in.

Even though I did not 'like' GG Marquez 100 Years so much, or it annoyed me in parts, it has lingered so much. His prose...majestic.

And then a stupid book, a collection of 'short stories of the 1800s' gives you Hardy's spooky hangman story, ticks off Trollope and Thackary [yawn], and you discover 'Mary Lamb of Fleet St...'

It is a good game.

 

Faust is often sidelined / not read within the anglo-saxon cultural circle, yet it's a brilliant work.

Malevil's another favourite, really moved my gears in my late elementary years.

Metro 2033 I'd consider a "modern classic". I really enjoyed the travel-journey introduction of various sides of society in it and the variety of characters met.

Spengler's Decline of the West has also been a major inspiration to me & my current project. Not really a literature classic, more a work of philosophy.