Must-read classic novels

Notes From the Underground by Dostoyevsky
Les Miserables by Hugo
Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald
Someone mentioned Native Son. Richard Wright's Black Boy is powerful as something bordering fiction and non-fiction.

And I believe David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are in that class, although modern works.

 

Does Dickens count?

I reread Great Expectations recently.

He was funnier than I remembered -- in that low-key British way -- and really great at developing characters.

 

Where people are at with Joyce's Ulysses, I'm at with Faulkner. I read him. But I can't say it's with the same enjoyment I get out of so many other authors. I'm just a completist, so I feel a sort of duty to slog through Faulkner.

 

Same boat. Read it all. Got it. Admired certain aspects.

There was nothing there that spoke to me -- the occasional bright, shining star of a sentence. But otherwise a pretty dark night.

 

"Sot-Weed Factor" -- John Barth.
Here's one really off the wall, but I loved it "Tristram Shandy."

 

I think that "The Sound and the Fury" is a slog, but I think if you put the time into it, it's a remarkable piece of work. In college, I had to read it accompanied with the Cliff's Notes that helped decipher what the hell was going on. But once I had that tour guide, the novel was a revelation to me. It would be interesting to go back and read it again now. At the time, it was one of my first exposures to what an artist could do with narrative and unconventional storytelling techniques. I was, simply, floored.

 

The Sound and the Fury was great. Faulkner doesn't make it easy, though.

 

Can't bring myself to read Ulysses or Faulkner, although I slogged through The Sound and the Fury in high school.

Kerouac is classic enough for me. Dharma Bums and Big Sur add some perspective to On the Road.

Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest should be considered.

FYI, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was enjoyable but, in the end, way overrated...

 

How many of these have you read?


The Modern Library Board’s List

ULYSSES by James Joyce
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
1984 by George Orwell
I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara
U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
KIM by Rudyard Kipling
A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
THE OLD WIVES’ TALE by Arnold Bennett
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
LOVING by Henry Green
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
IRONWEED by William Kennedy
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

 

It's why I keep reading him. There are pages that leap at me.

It's also why I kept reading Thomas Wolfe (the forgotten, crazy one of "You Can't Go Home Again" fame) who now gets panned by every literary critic alive. There would be gorgeous prose for three pages and then he'd be indecipherable for 25 pages.

 

I believe I have read 39 on that list.

Seems like a Lot of D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad there.

 

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer

Favorite Steinbeck is Travels with Charley.