suggestions please

[houseelf]

Once a year I try to put down my normal fare (Oprah magazine and light reads like an Innocent, a Broad) and read a classic. (I know you are overwhelmed with my drive to improve my literary knowledge: ONE IMPORTANT BOOK PER YEAR!!! ) Hey, it is winter in Minnesota.

In the past few years it has been Ayn Rand, Tolstoy, Faulkener. I remember loving lit in college I just can't kick my pants to make myself do it without a syllabus and some extraneous goal like an arbitrary grading scheme. Anyway, what "classic" is a must read in your eyes? I'm open to all suggestions.

Kelly

ooh, serious literature?

I never really took a serious lit class in college, and inthe last 15 years have been discovering them.

Here's off the top of my head, contemporary and classic.

Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Lolita, all the Kerouac stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Metamorposis, anything by EM Forester, The HandMaids Tale, anything by Toni Morrison anything by Jane Austen, anyghing by Steinbeck.Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterlys' Lover, the scarlett letter, the Awakening, Alice in Wonderland, anything by Roald Dahl, Dracula, Mark Twains stuff, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Joseph Conrad, Victor Hugo, Upton Sinclair, Walden, Edith Warton's stuff.

[DCJenn]

I second the vote for Thoreau, and will add Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the list- the original Sherlock Holmes stories, which are sort of a happy medium- they're classics but each story is relatively short. I also liked James Fenimore Cooper, but he's an acquired taste.

Dr. Zhivago was written in Perm, Russia and it supposedly takes place there, as well. (If you want to envision my most recent overseas trip!) Boris Pasternak's house is there, too. However, the evidence of the Soviet world is still around, as the American tour books talk about it, but our driver and translator said they knew nothing about it until the American's showed them the books!

Jenn

You could go way back and read Odyssey or The Iliad. I was going to mention Tess of the D'Urbervilles too. Or you could go a little lighter and read Pride and Prejudice or something else Austen.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, Anna Karenina. I still have to finish it.

[houseelf]

Ohhh...Anna Karenina is so good. It is one that I actually have finished.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm mulling them over.

Kelly

[Rapunzel]

My list of personal "classics":

Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus)

The Lord of the Flies

Animal Farm

The Screwtape Letters

Les Miserables

A Wrinkle in Time

anything by Charles Dickens

The Red Badge of Courage

The Time Machine

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (along with The Hobbit)

Antigone (ancient Greek play)

Hmmmm.... That's all I can think of at the moment....

Jennifer

I actually haven't read very many "important classics" (somehow I missed out on those classes in high school...) but here are a few I like (some are repeats of what others have posted) and they're all relatively short.

Frankenstein
Kim by Rudyard Kipling (get a copy with a glossary)- it's a fun read.
Siddartha by Hermann Hesse- very short, but thoughtful
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes (could be a little difficult without some background of the Mexican Revolution)
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
The Screwtape Letters

Can East of Eden be considered a classic??? This one I truly loved, learned a great deal from and highly recommend. It brought back Oprah's book club and I was glad to see she had gotten away from the lighter reads she usually recommends. Good reads just not always GREAT reads, which I think East of Eden is. Kelly we seem to have the same book choices...I love Ayn Rand and just picked up Anna Karenina to begin reading soon.

[SueC]

Not necessarily a classic, but this book is huge and I found it fascinating.
The Way It Was by Mary Welsh Hemingway. She led an interesting life in her own right as a journalist in Europe during WWII.