Must-read classic novels

I believe the greatest English language novelist to never win a Nobel or Pulitzer is Graham Greene who is on the list mentioned upthread. I would start with "Our Man in Havana" which is funny and a trenchant observation of world events...with a heavy dose of ruminations on Catholicism. Classic Greene.

 

Don Quixote, certainly.

Where are you on 19th century lit? There's a lot there you need to read, from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Austen and Bronte and Eliot to Dickens and James and Hawthorne and Irving, et al., etc., etc., etc., ad inf.

 

Where are you on foreign authors like Garcia-Marquez?

 

Winesburg, Ohio was the perfect book as an angsty teen in a small town. I'm afraid to read it again in case it isn't what I remember it to be.

 

I would strongly suggest "The Sportswriter" by Richard Ford, precisely because it has little to do with sports writing, but what it does say about that vocation, and living a life, is powerful.

I would also suggest reading "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," then read the original to see what a clever job he did in grafting the zombie mayhem onto the original story.

 

The other two parts of that trilogy, 'Independence Day' and 'Lay of the Land' are both well worth reading. 'Independence Day' won the Pulitzer in 1996.

 

It probably won't be. I say that, despite not having read it.

It's not fair to expect the books that spoke to us so intensely as teenagers to have the same impact decades later. It's enough that they took up residence then.

 

I think 'Ulysses' is the most important artisitc acheivement of the 20th century.
'The Dubliners' is a wonderful collection, and 'Portrait of the Artist' is a great precursor to tone you up for 'Ulysses,' but 'Ulysses' is the real deal.

In unrelated note, Thomas Hardy has always been a personal favorite.

And when I finished 'Moby Dick,' I wanted to dig Melville up and kick him.

 

God, no. Tried to read it and found it to be the stupidest bunch of gibberish I'd ever seen.

My favorite "classic" novel is probably "Hunchback of Notre Dame."

 

It's already been mentioned, I believe, but All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren is an unbelievable piece of writing. Written in 1946, but holds up extremely well. I try to re-read it every couple of years just for the sheer brilliance of the prose.

 

I found Moby Dick to be long-winded, and Melville definitely went off on some tangents, but if you filter out some of the extraneous material, the story is riveting, the characters are well drawn and the imagery is vibrant.

I feel like Melville needed an editor the way Peter Jackson does. Both produced epic works that are soaked in skill and mastery of their craft, but damn, somebody needed to tell them to tighten things up.

 

Imagine a world with no other form of mass communication but print. Readers didn't WANT tight.