Do you read classic literature? Who are your favorites/least favorites?

Does Georgette Heyer count?

Alexander Dumas***

I love Agatha Christie, but she really doesn't fit in this list; she wrote genre fiction, with no higher pretensions.

Among the ones you mentioned, my faves are Wharton, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.

Other faves are William Dean Howells, Emile Zola, Joseph Conrad, and (moving into the mid 20th century) John Steinbeck and James Gould Cozzens.

I was late in discovering Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but once I found him I read his body of work voraciously, A Very Old Man with Wings is his masterpiece.

R5 - I discovered him late as well. Amazing but "Love In the Time of Cholra" was his masterpiece in my humble opinion. The part where the doctor wakes up after discovering the dead body of his friend....amazing. As for his short stories, NOTHING is as incredible as this:

[quote]their are a lot of people

OP is CANCELED!

OP marry me....I LOVE classic literature too and that was my undergrad major. Read all the classics in my tweens and re-read them all in my early 20's just because I wanted to and they helped me so much at the time that I was mourning my late partner...they somehow were a consolation and I read them with a different viewpoint. To your list, I will add F. Scott Fitzgerald, Balzac, Simone de Beauvoir, the Bronte sisters (19th century frau), H.G. Wells. Funny how my very straight dad always said that The Picture of Dorian Gray marked him in a sense because he understood, at that time, that humans have 2 faces and getting old was inevitable no matter how much you fight. Since he's now paralyzed, I sent him a picture of me at the hotel in Paris where Oscar Wilde died and he said it really resonated with him.

R5 Sorry I missed a word in the title “It’s a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” it’s really the perfect short introduction of what Magic Realism is and has inspired other works ranging from the REM’s Losing My Religion video to a trilogy of children’s books by David Almond amongst others.

R8 Ok. I'm single and have a stable job lol

R7 Goodness me. I really did drop the ball. I apologize. Sometimes my mind goes faster than my fingers...

I also like William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair is a masterpiece! Barry Lyndon is very dry and hilarious!

Love Tolstoy and Woolf.

You left out Dickens (my favorite) and Nabokov (Lolita is hilarious and disturbing and beautifully written.)

I love Jane Austen. Pride & Prejudice is also hilarious and not so disturbing.

The only Bronte I've read is Wuthering Heights. A great potboiler of a novel. I tried reading the other sister's Jane Eyre, but couldn't get through it.

Another vote for Tolstoy. My two favorite novels, by quite a bit, are ANNA KARENINA and W&P.

Dickens and Twain, both wrote from the perspectives of decidedly not upper-class society, but the middle- or working class whose voices weren’t featured prominently in great novels in earlier eras.

Rimbaud

D.H. Lawrence and Jane Austen when I was young. But I feel life is too short to read boring classic literature.

Henry James is too wordy. But I love Edith Wharton. And don't forget Evelyn Waugh. Somerset Maugham too. Prefer Tolstoy but I like Dostoyevsky.

How about poetry? Love me some Auden, G. M. Hopkins, Whitman, Dickinson, Basho, Lorca.

As for the really ancient ones — Iliad and Mahabharata…lol jk.

This admission probably makes me a freak, but my favorite Bronte novel is Villette. I would add Willa Cather to OP's list. For me, her novels grow in resonance with the passing years.

We're few and far between. I've given up talking to people about books--if they say they like to read, it usually turns out to be airport crime novels or young adult.

I don't like Dostoevsky and haven't read Tolstoy yet. Favorites are Nabokov, George Eliot, E. Waugh, Austen, Fitzgerald, John Updike (is he "classic" yet?) I've only just started reading Flaubert--I got through Madame Bovary in French (thanks to being able to work at home and learn French in the saved time). Am currently re-reading Candide in French.

R20 I agree!

Someone said Henry James was the bridge between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Thomas Hardy. That Tess bitch had it coming.

Anna Karenina is my favorite novel. I also enjoy some of Tolstoy's short fiction (The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, etc). I've read Dostoevsky and find his characters too overwrought.

My second favorite novel is Thomas Mann's The Buddenbrooks. Worth a read, if you enjoy family sagas.

Anyone for Trollope? I loved his soapy sagas.

Honore de Balzac!!!!

R23 If you like Thomas Mann, I would recommend trying his son, Klaus. Particularly Mephisto. Istvan Szabo made a film adaptation in 1981 with Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Thank you r26!

[quote] Someone said Henry James was the bridge between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Who?

Virginia Woolf said Henry James was impossible.

Virginia Woolf said

[quote] Henry James would be greater if he were content to say less and suggest more . . . His overburdened sentences could be quoted as proof of his curious sense of duty.

OP, you consider Agatha Christie's work classical literature? Yikes.

I distrust those who claim to have done Flaubert, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc. when they've only done a TRANSLATION.

You can't claim to have read an author if you aren't reading the author's words.

NOT J.D. Salinger. I hated Catcher on the Rye. Not really into Kerouac either.

I like Hemingway, de Maupassant, Woolf, Faulkner, James, Wilde, Forster, Waugh, Wharton. Henry Miller and Bukowski are some of my modern favorites.

Cannot stand Henry James, keep waiting for the rest of the world to finally cancel him. Prolix pretentious popinjay.

I would hardly call Christie great literature -- she might be the best mystery plotter of all time, but she was never a good writer.

The others on OP's list are all excellent.

My favorites also include the very under-read Marguerite Yourcenar, whose Memoirs of Hadrien and The Abyss are outstanding -- also the almost completely forgotten Samuel Butler, whose Way of All Flesh used to be considered one of the greatest novels ever written.

For comic novelists, it's hard to top Evelyn Waugh and E.F. Benson, whose own life read like a novel as well (but who, unfortunately, was also friends with James, and eventually lived in his house in Rye).

Re Americans, Salinger wrote a few good short stories but that's about it. Kerouac is an acquired taste. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are more interesting as people than writers. But Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner are world class novelists, and so is the under-appreciated Stephen Crane.

All that said, if I could only take one author's work to a desert island, it would definitely be Dickens.

What am I chopped liver?? signed Wm. Shakespeare.

Did all the significant mediums of the time.. Plays, poetry songs..And Crusshed them. And did all the genres tragedy, comedy, historical comedy & tragedy, fantasy, philsophical. Love poetry, standard poetry. When I get down I do Midsummer's Night Dream, puts a smile on face instantly & keeps it there.

Love many of the others noted, but old Will..He the man

[quote] …standard poetry…He the man

Yes, dear.

Tolstoy is my fave. War and Peace is perfect. But I love many old classics.

Now you've gone and done it! I have lots to say!

First of all, Balzac wrote "Cousin Bette" with Dataloungers as his target audience. The 70s video series featuring a very young Helen Mirren is excellent (at You Tube I believe).

Trollope's "The Way We Live Now" is also DL catnip. A case where it might be better to see the David Suchet video first, then read the book later.

I hated both "The Golden Bowl" and "The House of Mirth" for its thoroughly unlikeable characters.

Wharton's novella "The Bunner Sisters" is pure genius! So is Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil" (especially the "salad" scene).

I love and highly recommend Mikhail Bulgakov and Anton Chekhov. Dickens is a master of the pen. Austin is a great observer of character.

However, there are some classical authors I can't stand. Faulkner, for example, is boring. Hemingway - ditto. Too desperately macho. Lermontov - zzzz. Byron - childish. Help me, there must be more bores.

I think if Hemingway were alive today he’d be. A transgender butch dyke. His masculinity seems so performative.

There are so many of my favorites already listed; Woolf, Cather, Eliot, Zola.

Two writers I love who aren’t already listed are Graham Greene and Wallace Stegner.

[quote] Tolstoy is my fave. War and Peace is perfect. But I love many old classics.

Yes. Books Do Furnish a Room

R39: I'll second you on "Our Man in Havana" and "Travels with My Aunt" for Greene. I liked Stegner's "All the Little Live Things" and its sequel "The Spectator Bird".

[quote] Lermontov - zzzz

But he was very stylish.

All the Little Live Things is one of my all time favorite books R41.

I don’t believe I’ve read Our Man in Havana. Hmmm

James is I think an acquired taste. Start with the short fiction--What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, The Turn of the Screw, the ghost stories. IMHO Portrait of a Lady is magnificent. I also tackled his late-phase novels--The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dover--and found much to enjoy and analyze.

Hey, Elder Lez! Greene wrote a little-known novella "The Captain and the Enemy" you might consider as well.

Thanks R45/R41!

No problem, but I'll admit that I have little patience for Catholic angst shit.

Nothing, literally nothing in this world, is greater than Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'. Reading that book (even read in translation, so fuck R31) made me think that someone from the 19th century had managed to reach into my mind and understand how I think and what I feel.

There's also the work of J.L. Borges, and like R5 and R6 I also love Marquez, but for me his 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is the best. See also Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando'. I love fantastic, magical realist and speculative fiction.

There's James Joyce (I'm going to have another crack at 'Ulysses', now I am 20 older than my last attempt I think I might get further).

A lot of the weighty English classics (Austen, Eliot, the Brontes) have never appealed.

[quote] James is I think an acquired taste

The clever Colm Toibin distilled the best of Henry James. And made us all forget what a ponderous bore he was.

^^^ Now that I am 20 years older than my last attempt.

[quote] Catholic angst shit

There are no four letter words in Graham Greene.

[quote]Nothing, literally nothing in this world, is greater than Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'. Reading that book (even read in translation, so fuck [R31]) made me think that someone from the 19th century had managed to reach into my mind and understand how I think and what I feel

r48, are you me?

So, r31, you're saying people who claim to have read the Epic of Gilgamesh have not really done so unless they've actually read him in the original Sumerian? And the Iliad and the Odyssey can only be read in the original ancient Greek?

R52 I think Marcel is both of us.

R53 Yes.

I have read a lot of criticisms of English translation to where folks have blamed it on the translator. Sometimes, it's just the original text!

In translating, it's the responsibility of the translator to be more than just a Google translate literal conversion, rather making a judgment call as to what a native English speaker would say.

I enjoy quite a lot of classic literature, but I have also reached an age where I simply won’t persevere if a story doesn’t grip me. I’ve read hardly any Doestoyevsky or Pushkin, for example. And I long ago realised that I would never enjoy much of Dickens. I’ve tried a few of his novels, but Great Expectations is the only one I managed to read to the end.

I think the problem I have with many classic novels is that they were written either to be serialised (like Dickens, which makes them prone to very convoluted cliff-hangers, or were simply written at a time when books were very expensive, and other entertainment sources were scarce, so books were written long to give people value for money!

Of the classic novelists I enjoy, I love Austen the most. Her novels are so multilayered, on the surface being a nice chocolate-box romance, but really being a story about how most women were always living precarious lives on the verge of penury. And yet, she is strangely feminist in her implication that women should hold out for true love, with a man they can respect. She also writes unbelievably great prose which reads like poetry. Every word is perfectly fitting.

I also enjoy the fact that her droll humour endures, even 200 years later. I think so much humour can be lost over time, but Austen, like Thomas Mann and Anthony Trollope are still funny. A novel like Trollope’s Barchester Towers is still really enjoyable because of the humour and the well-defined characters. At times it is really like a sitcom, a sparkling, light read.

I love the moments of Catholic angst in Greene, especially the ones you don’t see coming.

I don’t know why I don’t like Dickens well enough to ever finish any of his novels I start. I keep hoping something will click in Dickens for me but it never does.

Faulkner esp. As I Lay Dying

The Great Gatsby

Dickens

Tolstoy

Steinbeck’s East of Eden

Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare

Agree r56, and obviously that can be very difficult and the result will never be perfect. But still, I'm not going to learn 20 languages, and I'm not going to just give up on literature outside the English speaking world either, especially classic literature. I love Balzac, and I'll never learn French.

Does John Steinbeck count?

Fitzgerald

A friend of mine -- a Dickens scholar, actually -- recommended The Pickwick Papers to me, as someone who never liked Dickens.

I only made it halfway through and realized, Dickens, in any form, is not for me.

R48 is correct about Proust. His book is really the greatest one I've ever read, wiser and more comprehensive than even the Bible. Harold Bloom said that In Search of Lost Time is the Mahabharata of Western Europe and he is completely correct. It's monstrously long, and Proust did not live long enough to edit the last half of it thoroughly, but it is a monsterpiece. Like any great writer, you have to learn his unique way of "talking," and learn how to understand him, but it is worth it. The book took me years to read, and it's the kind of thing you never really "finish" with, it is so vast. In my mind, his characters and the experiences he writes about have become memories of my own, like parts of my life that I remember as my own, it is really uncanny. The characters seem like people that I knew and still know. Tolstoy had this power of description too. As a younger reader, you really will learn a lot about things in life from this book that you never suspected until you become much older, it's a real education in that sense. It's daunting at first to start to wade into him, but nowadays there are vastly better English translations of all of the various parts of the novel, than the stodgy pretentious original Scott Moncrieff translation. In Search of Lost Time.

R58 - Dickens can be very tricky. I agree he was brilliant, but had trouble with his bullies like Squeers, Murdstone, etc.

Love Wharton, and like so many, just can't deal with Henry James. Tried but failed a few times to get through him. I do think it's funny they were great friends and would both probably think I was crazy that I could love one and not the other.

R60 So you love Balzac's plots because you're unable to appreciate his mastery of prose.

Possibly r67

I know many people who can’t abide James. He is so portentous, and his sentences are soooo long. I’ve tried many of his novels, and I can’t get through them. The great exception is Washington Square. I adore that book. It’s not it’s relative brevity I love, but the ostensible simplicity of the story, and yet the great ambiguity at the centre of it. It is James at his very best: there’s a depth to the story, but a lightness to the way it is told.

Go back to your comp lit Zoom department meeting, r31, and leave us dilettantes alone.

I think I’ll have The Old Man and The Seafood Salad while you have To Who The Stuffed Pepper Tolls.

[quote] leave us dilettantes alone

A dilettante is a person who cultivates something without real commitment or knowledge.

I'm going to recommend "Miss Marjoribanks" (Marchbanks) by Margaret Oliphant to our friend Elder Lez, and in general, for its premise of "No, women don't need a bloody husband to be a valuable person!"

Let’s skip the Edgar Allen Potatoes

Henry James IS tough to read, and so mawkish it almost makes you squirm, but the creepy, evil things that lurk in his writing are highly intriguing to me. James was gay, of course, and there are "secrets" hiding in every corner of his work. I have really enjoyed his shorter things, "The Figure in the Carpet," "The Beast in the Jungle", "The Jolly Corner" (which is terrifying), and such. A novella, "The Aspern Papers" is top-notch, creepy brown-nosing in Venice to enable the theft of a famous dead poet's letters. At the end of his career, he came back to the US, in 1905 or so, and toured the Eastern seacoast and wrote a book about it, called The American Scene. By that point, his English had become so tortured and elaborate that it is literally almost as dense as Joyce's polyglot mishmash in Finnegans Wake, virtually incomprehensible, because of all the qualifying relative clauses. It leaves you breathless. I am certain that it is available online for free, since the copyright has expired. I highly recommend taking a look at it, you won't believe your eyes.

Yes, r31, you are right. The whole Non-English speaking world should avoid reading Shakespeare because they are not fluent in Elizabethan English.

On one level, I do agree with you. I am relatively fluent in French and German, and I do recognise that you get closer to the novelist when you read in the original language. However, the value of translation is that it opens up a view into a world which would otherwise be inaccessible to you. Even through translation, it is possible to see the world through the eyes of Ibsen or Mahfouz or Dante, and a good, well-judged translation does not get in the way of the original author.

R72 But dilettante also means simply 'somebody who loves the arts', originating in a word that means "delight". I'm fine with being one.

And since I mentioned Joyce, Ulysses really is a great, great book. Again, it takes time to adjust to the style, but in English it is unparalleled. And it is pure pleasure to read it. And deeply human and compassionate: characters who are adrift, a man whose son died in infancy, and whose father committed suicide, with a wife whom he knows is cheating on him on the very afternoon that the book takes place. It's not really a book youngsters can appreciate fully. -R75

"Youngsters" in this case it means someone who is not as sophisticated as I think I am.

Circa 1992 my New Year’s resolution was to read a cycle of three types books a month: 1) contemporary fiction 2) nonfiction 3) classic. It was such a great year I maintained if for a few years afterwards and it made me a much better well rounded reader. It’s very easy for readers to fall into one genre and continue to read there, and as you get older it cements in place even more. Nothing can open you up to new things like switching up the genre you read from, so challenge yourself, even if it’s every tenth book to read something you wouldn’t ordinarily pick up. The good news is it’s very easy to find the very best works in each genre and usually they are so good because the themes or content reach beyond that genre to pull in a larger audience already.

[quote] Again, it takes time to adjust to the style,

What other tricks can you give us in order to appreciate Ulysses, R78?

Should we visit Antarctica for 12 months? Go to a pub in Dublin and get bashed by the clientele? Spend 6 months in hospital?

Faulkner

^Every great writer is hard to read, at first, ALL of them. You have to learn how to follow their style. It's just simply true. It's true of Tolstoy, Faulkner, Joyce, James, V. Woolf, CERTAINLY true of Wm Shakespear, and on and on.

[quote] Great Expectations is the only one I managed to read to the end.

It is Dickens' best because it has psychological depth and plot momentum.

Nabokov called Bleak House a masterpiece, and he was EXTREMELY stingy in passing on compliments like that.

[quote] Nabokov called Bleak House a masterpiece

I wonder why?

Plot? Prose? Bleakness?

^There's an entire chapter on it in his book of university lectures from Cornell. I don't recall the specifics, but I'm sure it has to do with the characterization and the complexity of the plot. I trust his judgment pretty completely. If you look at his commentary on Pushkin's *Eugene Onegin* (over 1000 pages long) you'll quickly see that he was deeply familiar with the literature of Russia, France, the UK, and the US, going back to the 1700'; his knowledge of the subject is almost frightening. He knew all 3 languages fluently too, of course.

Thank you, R87.

Nabokov knowing the language would have enriched his experience.

Tell you what, R79 and R81, I read Ulysses when I was in my very early 20's, and I can assure you I did not really "get" what the author was getting at in that book, nor was my mind sophisticated enough at the time to appreciate the incredible artistry of the writing. I know that the same is true, for me, for Faulkner, among others, and certainly Shakespeare. The irony of youngsters studying these great writers in college, in one's early 20's, is that one is just not experienced enough to "keep up" with the authors. It's not an insult to anyone, it's true of everyone at that age. All you can do is read the stuff and follow up later on. Great art is not for kids, ultimately.

^VN spoke English and French before he learned Russian.

John Grisham

I love so many classic novels. Particularly from 1910-1960 or so.

McCullers, Capote, Fitzgerald, Heller, Steinbeck, Woolf, Sherwood Anderson, and, my favorite, Henry Miller, were doing things with words and stories that continually amaze me.

It really is a shame that no one under 40 reads anymore.

I am glad I waited until I was in my 40s to read Ulysses. It isn’t my favorite, but I did really enjoy it. And I probably would not have had I been younger.

It baffles me that people enjoy Dickens. I kind of, sort of can see what he is doing and why it ought to work, but blech.

I read a lot of Henry James in my early 30s and the comment about the creepy things in the center of novels really struck a chord. When I was reading The Wings of the Dove, I kept thinking, “she’s just getting her period.” And imagining how squirmy that would be in James’s mind.

Many thanks for the recommendations!

^ I got a library card at my former University, and soon realized that NONE of the books therein were checked out. I asked one of the "barristas" downstairs about that, as he was checking out some books for me, and he laughed and said "Yeah, these students don't read books anymore." So the school has a 10-storey library with millions of books in it, stuffed to the gills, and an external storage facility with a few hundred thousand of the REAL ugly ducklings stashed offsite, that nobody has checked out in decades, and it is all a colossal waste of space and paper, seemingly. It's wonderful, I go in there and, above the ground floor at least, I'm the only swinging dick in the building...

BT, DT, as a Sec Ed English major with all electives taken in Literature/Comp Lit , and with a Master's that included Milton, Chaucer, European Folklore, the Modern Novel, and I forget what, if anything, else. Taught British Lit and American Black Lit. If I read any of these authors now, it would be one of the Romantic poets.

But I have always been more into US presidential history, true crime, alternative and/or little-known history, and weird sundries (like my August books whose subjects are Gene Krupa, film noir, and the tales of a female NYC cabbie).

IOW, for me, non-fiction---Agatha Christie excepted---puts the Classics right out!

The greatest crime-writer is, of course, Raymond Chandler. I only wish he had been more prolific.

^Agreed. His writing is stellar, and the slang he uses is ingenious. Elmore Leonard, in his best books, comes pretty close, maybe about 10 of his novels, among the ones I know about, are fantastic.

R96, I'm a hard-core Anglophile, so the settings (for the most part) of Christie's works added to their appeal.

^"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" is pretty unique among crime fiction, and that's saying something.

Dashiel Hammet is quite good; The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.

I love this thread. I need to give another try to some of these authors and, others, try them for the first time. Those of you explaining the qualities of your favorite novels have done a beautiful job.

I mostly read nonfiction, though I don't read that often. I have a friend who always talked about how she loved books, couldn't stop buying and reading them, and when I finally saw what she read I was really surprised: 100% contemporary fiction. Never picked up an old book.

I used to read only fiction. I love short stories (hat tip to the poster who said Guy de Maupassant) and novellas. When I was younger I worked my way through author after author in my high school library during free periods. I don't really have a favorite writer anymore, but I read a lot of Shirley Jackson last year and the year before in the depths of the Trump Administration era. Her darkness really resonated. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is fantastic, as is The Haunting of Hill House. Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding ripped my heart out. Some of my favorite novels are Jane Eyre and The Moon and Sixpence (Maugham). I want to get into Edith Wharton, too. Like 90% of the people who try, I couldn't get through Ulysses, but I might give it another shot.

Ah, I’m your British counterpart r98, a Brit with great interest in America.

Of course, if you are an Anglophile, there is still good reason to appreciate Chandler: he was educated at Dulwich College, which was also the alma mater of PG Wodehouse.

Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf, Mishima, Cather, Wharton, Poe, Dostoesky, Hesse, Nabokov, Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" are my favorites.

Currently reading Homer's "The Odyssey" and relishing it.

Shakespeare, of course.

Re: Dickens

I loved A Tale of Two Cities and tolerated Hard Times. Have tried both David Copperfield and Great Expectations, but gave up out of sheer boredom.

[quote] I got a library card at my former University, and soon realized that NONE of the books therein were checked out.

It was a reference library.

[quote] Those of you explaining the qualities of your favorite novels have done a beautiful job.

We need more of that.

We need help if we're attempting to tackle a vast mountain like Dostoyesky or Tolstoy.

It's good if there are movie versions to entice us and give us a clue. But Balzac, Dostoyesvsky and most of Woolf is unfilmable.

^R105: NO, it wasn't, isn't, a reference library, all the books circulate. It is a University library and this particular building (there is an entirely separate library for the Sciences), has, as I already said, 10 floors and MILLIONS of volumes. They ARE NOT used by anyone other than faculty and a very few readers, and the building is almost always completely empty, except for the ground level, where the study lounges and computers are located.

Ah yes, Italo Calvino. Wonderfully imaginative and fantastic works, especially 'Cosmicomics', the 'Our Ancestors' trilogy, 'Invisible Cities' and 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies'. Came out of the same intellectual atmosphere as Pasolini and Fellini.

R107 Libraries are repositories of knowledge, they're not Kwikee-Marts.

And I hope the books are well-cared for.

I live in a state which monitors book use. If there are 8 copies of a book in taxpayer-funded libraries across the state they will destroy any 'excess copies'.

R106: Tolstoy is "unfilmable." The incredible magic of his writing is that when he starts describing what people are saying and doing, you are THERE. Nobody has ever been able to equal it successfully. It's the sentences, and nothing but the sentences, pure RHETORIC. And I'm talking about reading it in English, because my knowledge of Russian is pitiful and rusty by this point. In all great writing, it is the sentences. People's naive idea that great literature can just be conveyed in a 2-hour movie is, well, just naive. Movies can be, and are great, but there is no movie that can convey what Tolstoy is really getting at. His style is mysterious: you ask yourself, "What is he doing, HOW is he making this seem so real?" You go to that party at the start of W&P, and you are THERE. That scene in Anna Karenin, when Stepan and Oblonsky eat those oysters in that restaurant, is just incredible. Just words on paper, guys and gals.

Words on paper doesn't excite like color and movement on screen.

^HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW. A simplistic attitude to a diabolically complicated thing (art).

Love Tolstoy and DIckens.

I love this!

For those of you trying to get into Dickens, Tolstoy, Wharton, etc. Audible has A LOT of classic literature for free to subscribers.

Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is narrated excellently by Simon Callow.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is for free and narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal (she does great).

R106, r4 here - I majored in history, with an emphasis on the post 1500 world, particularly the US, France, and Imperialism. As a result, I love the Realist and Naturalist writers like Howells and Zola - both former journalists - for their ability to transport me back to the American Northeast in the late 1800s or France during the Second Empire; Howells is also a master of irony while Zola is brilliant with suspense.

Joseph Conrad is great for the imperialism while also being an expert prose stylist. Steinbeck is also fantastic in recreation of time and place while also expressing great sympathy for the oppressed and disadvantaged. Cozzens is probably my favorite prose stylist as well as philosophically fascinating.

All of 'em

Yes R114

With the caveat that both can be difficult to listen to, especially Tolstoy, because there are so many characters--the first 100 or so pages of War And Peace introduces dozens of characters and Russians tend to have multiple names too, so it can be hard to keep track of, though Wikipedia helps tremendously

r71 nice Golden Girls reference lol

War and Peace is magnificent. Basically a Russian Dynasty, but with a great deal more artistry.

^The Russian name is the first, "Christian" name, followed by the "patronymic", based on the father's first name, simple: Vladimir Vladimirovich, Vlad, Son of Vlad, second part truncated to Vladimich. And there are nicknames, but it's really NOT complicated. Still the idea of listening to a person reading either of these incredibly long books aloud is kind of funny, to me. Like a MONSTROUS bedtime story, that inevitably ends in horror and death (all that Tolstoy was really interested in: again, he is strictly for GROWNUPS)

[quote] it's really NOT complicated

It sounds appallingly complicated and I've seen the opera and the 2 movie versions.

Even Dr Zhivago from the 1950s is tangled in complex naming systems and minor plot details.

^I remember being baffled by Russian names in books when I was about 14 years old. Jesus, come on, it's NOT tough.

R117 100%

There are some excellent film adaptations of the "great novels." It really depends on the director.

Merchant-Ivory in particular does an amazing job with adaptations. (A Room with a View, The Remains of the Day, The Bostonians, and the unfilmable The Golden Bowl)

David Lean (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India)

Martin Scorsese. Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence (finished the book today, watching the movie tonight! Super stoked! Post to come)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) with George Sanders and Angela Lansbury

The Innocents with Deborah Kerr. It is the best adaptation of Henry James' Turning of the Screw

Others to add include Barry Lyndon, Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Don't Look Now (1973), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Maltese Falcon, etc.

There are others, but this is my two cents.

I read Crime and Punishment when I was 15, I had the naming conventions figured out within a few pages. It really is not that hard.

R124 yeah. People who can't follow the names probably like to eat meatloaf at 5:30 and watch reruns of Everyone Loves Raymond until bedtime.

^Da, eta buivala...

R123 I notice you can't mention a good movie version of those foreign-language authors Flaubert, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. I can't either.

^^^^

R127, Sergei Bondarchuk's four part adaptation (1966-68) of Tolstoy War and Peace is excellent.

^Queens who fervently believe that all things in art and reality can be reduced to a teevee Movie of the Week are the bane of my life. You guys are just numbskulls. It's like looking into a mirror image and thinking it's realty, exactly a correct analogy, cheap and easy, slutty in fact. It's actually just a form of sentimentality, and nothing more, lazy, cheap, and empty-headed, smearing lipstick on a pig and telling yourself you're looking at a ravishing beauty. It's really hilarious and pathetic, such naivete'...You think Flaubert's books could be made into a "movie"? [>>SCREAMING with laughter<<]. Read what Flaubert himself had to say about Madame M. and then get back to me.

R127 I have only read Kafka's Metamorphosis. I don't want to watch a film adaptation of that.

I have yet to finish a Tolstoy book, but I have a deep admiration for what I have read, though I am unsure what I read lol

[quote] Read what Flaubert himself had to say about Madame M

How many thousands of words is it? Does it come with pictures?

A great Victorian novelist who I don't think has been mentioned is Wilkie Collins and my favorite book of his is ARMADALE. So much more engaging than THE WOMAN IN WHITE and THE MOONSTONE. The 2 male lead characters of ARMADALE seem to have a homo-erotic relationship and the plotting is fantastic, a real rip-roaring page-turner. I have no idea why it's not a more popular book and why the Brits have never made a film or, better yet, a mini-series of it. I also love Collins' NO NAME.

I'm a big Trollope fan but prefer his stand-alone novels. The best are THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (a masterpiece!), HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT, ORLEY FARM and THE VICAR OF BULHAMPTON. The first 3 titles are quite long and do take a real commitment but are well worth it. I've never much cared for most of his books that are part of his popular THE BARSETSHIRE and PALLISER series.

And I also love Thomas Hardy, particularly THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. Great plotting and sexy characters that seem more modern than other writers of his time. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD and RETURN OF THE NATIVE are also great reads.

And, of course, Dickens! Favorites are DAVID COPPERFIELD, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, A TALE OF TWO CITIES and DOMBEY AND SON. But when he's bad , he's awful. Never got through MARTIN CHUZZLEWHIT, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND or BARNABY RUDGE.

Tried to read various Henry Jameses but just can't get into them. I just don't care enough about his characters. And WASHINGTON SQUARE was hugely improved by the adapted play THE HEIRESS by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1949 film.

Exactement...

Umm Milton. My best friend's dad who was a total mensch told me when I was at Uni not to even try Paradise till I was 40, he was so right. Treasure it now. A real soul lifter,, even tho I only look 20(Ha).

For mystery Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey..so good.

And for#35-tight ass(wonder how you can fart out of that tight hole)..Shakespeare...What couldn't he do? He knew man, the soul & this thing called life on planet earth! He the man!

No one has mentioned Milan Kundera, who I read extensively in the 1990s and loved, though I haven’t read his later work. I will say The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a perfect novel and perfect movie independent of each other, one of the few times that has happened, and obviously that’s a foreign language author that translated to film.

I love Raymond Chandler, but would suggest anyone who hasn't read Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer books, should give them a try. Just as good as Chandler, and for me anyway, even better (though I wouldn't put up much of a struggle with anyone who disagreed.) Start with The Chill or The Galton Case.

READING the names is not every difficult.

But hearing them without seeing them can be tough, as in addition to first and patronymic there are nicknames, and in War and Peace many of them have both Russian and French names as that was the style in Petersburg at the time, so the Pyotr was also Pierre.

That's why Wikipedia helps, you see the name written out and then it all makes sense.

I read all of them, OP. But that was in my twenties and thirties. I liked her, but she is just a mystery hack. I think the authors that still hold up for me are Conrad and Tolstoy. My other favorites were Turgenev and Woolf.

I just LOVE Classic Literature: Patterson, King, Rowling, Meyer.

oops, mis-formatting ^ ^ I'm sure you can unscramble it.

Yes, I can r141.

Classic literature is Harry Potter

The 10-part Russian TV adaptation of "The Idiot" from 2003 is amazing. You can watch it for free at the link below - just make sure to turn the subtitles on.

Which languages do you know well enough to have improved the translations of the authors' original works, R31?

For American Lit, I love Twain the most, he’s so laugh out loud funny! I prefer Brit Lit though: Henry James, Austen, Chaucer, Shakespeare, & Spenser are my favorites. The Faerie Queene is so underrated!

Thanks for the tip, R144. I found Dostoevsky mind-blowing in my youth. This will be a treat.

I favor the lush prose of Carolyn Keene.

I didn't get to Dostoevsky till my mid-thirties, R147, but my mind was blown as well. And then blown again when I watched the series. I don't know how they did it, but they've captured that sense of impending disaster that permeates his novels.

He also captures the Slavic soul that knows.. all we have is this moment. Savor it. Give thanks for it.. Now, Pick up your cross & walk towards the light.

Dear George @ R145, I think you should re-read what I wrote.

When my jerk uncle found out I loved to read Agatha Christie, he got all snarky about how common, lowbrow, & simplistic her works are. I was like 14 & thought, yikes, lemme read what I like! I ended up majoring in Lit & we read Christie in one Of my upper division classes. So there!

R139, The Book of Laughing and Forgetting by Kundera is one of the few books I reread once every few years. I absolutely love it.

I think every gay person should read Giovanni's Room by Baldwin. His work is always fantastic, but GR has an urgency to it, an urgency of depression and hunger and incompletion, that I've never read before or since.

In my third year of college toward a Bachelor's Degree, I knew I wanted to be a special education teacher.. But at Beloit College, I was required to have an "academic major" in order to graduate. This was like 3 decades ago, very likely that things have changed since that. My academic major ended up being English Literature, which despite having minimal connection to being a Special Ed Teacher, was my preferred choice for an academic major. Hell, I ended up doing a poetry unit where my special ed students created poetry, even though they did not necessarily understand the concept of poetry. The book "Wishes, Lies and Dreams" was so perfect to help me help handicapped kids to put down their thoughts and have that be poetry.

[quote] Anton Chekhov.

R38, one of my favorite short story writers. Possibly the best ever.

Ahem, R155.

r102, I was, like a duckling, firmly imprinted with AC as a young teen, after viewing the Tyrone Power "Witness For the Prosecution." That started an obsessive hunt, long before she was a gleam in the eye of PBS, for every Christie work, with a few side excursions (Dorothy L. Sayers, Jonathan Gash, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mike Hammer) that, alas, have yet to include Chandler.

But as for SERIOUS Classics, I would highly recommend "Wuthering Heights" for not only its brilliance of characterizations, its wildness of setting, and its uniqueness of plot, but for its imagery: dogs; dreams; windows; and I forget what all. The depth and emotion of this novel is staggering.

The last is true also of the great "Madame Bovary." When taught this, I learned about its style and circular structure, elements that set a Classic above "a good read."

Of all the novels in all the world, I find these two most essential. I know; I know; "Moby Dick," "Crime and Punishment" (read and wrote a book report of in Grade 9), "Don Quixote," etc. I'm just sayin' for me.

You know what I love most about Guy de Maupassant, r101? Saying his name! "Ghee de Moepuhsont"!

R103, Were you in my Comp Lit course in 1970?! I didn't expect to see the names Mishima ("The Sound of Waves") and Hesse ("Steppenwolf") mentioned!

As for American writers of Classic works, my favorites are Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. I focused on Sinclair Lewis for Grade 11 book reports, but have never looked back, haha.

Were I to be young and beginning my studies, I would read more source material: "The Song of Roland"; the "Epic of Gilgamesh"; indeed, the Bible.

Luckily for me, I had been a Greek and Roman mythology freak from childhood (Hello, Edith Hamilton!), so Joseph Campbell, Heston, and Ovid were natural follow-ups.

Of course, above the entire pantheon sits, as r135 put it, The Man: Shakespeare (or "Shakespeare"). He understood the Human Condition sans peer.

But I would insist that to really understand the Classics, one needs a grounding in sources, in mythologies, folktales, artistic movements, symbolism, the social milieux.

This necessary underpinning of knowledge is why one might see child prodigies in music, child prodigies in mathematics, child prodigies in chess---but never child prodigies in true literature.

R157 here-- "Heston" was supposed to be "Hesiod"!

R153 - I read Giovanni's Room for the first time recently, after it had featured prominently in the gay novel Swimming in the Dark. Can't say as I "liked" GR, but it is definitely a "must read" (unlike the tedious Great Gatsby).

R133 - a friend of mine who's a lit professor said of the Armadale guys: "They even squabble exactly as a gay couple would!" Consider the book Poor Miss Finch as a lesser-known Collins work. The free audio version from Librivox is outstanding! Mrs. Hurtle from The Way We Live Now is another potential gay icon.

R159 I don't understand how anyone can call The Great Gatsby tedious. Beyond being one of the overarching great American novels, it's incredibly entertaining and engaging. Oh, well, at least this thread is better than arguing who has the best Only Fans account.

R160 I agree, it can be read in one sitting, how tedious could it be? War and Peace yes, Gatsby, no.

I've read both War & Peace and The Great Gatsby. W&P is thrilling, staggering, extraordinary; Gatsby is dull and boring.

Has anyone read the Painted Veil by Maugham?

Yes, r163. It's excellent, one of Maugham's best.

Love The Painted Veil. His best novel, IMHO.

Thanks! It is free on Audible and only 7 1/2-8 hours long! Will finish in two or three days

Kate Reading does an outstanding job reading The Painted Veil. However, when a server asks "Would you like a salad to start?" please refrain from bellowing "NO!"! The Mother Superior is a cool chick!

As for Gatsby... all those phony, unlikeable characters! The writing quality is excellent, but the story, honestly, bored me.

I don't understand the Henry James hate.

The Turn of the Screw, one of the most terrifying and intriguing ghost stories of all time. The film The Innocents with Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave is quite good, too.

The Bostonians is one of the first novels with a "behind closed doors" same-sex relationship between Olive and Verena. The Merchant-Ivory film is great.

The Golden Bowl is on par with Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Sex, lies, and betrayal.

The Portrait of a Lady is the defining novel of wealthy Americans traveling to Italy. Too bad the movie is so damn boring.

The Henry James hate is due to the fact that he's a pompous ass of a writer -- a man who thinks 15 words are needed when 2 will do. And the bigger and more arcane the word, the better.

He also has zero sense of humor.

I am such a literary ignoramus I had no idea the Painted Veil film was based on a Maugham novel until i read the credits. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. Now I feel like I can't enjoy the book because I know what happens and I have a fixed idea of how the characters should look and behave. I'm so stoopid. I'll try anyway.

[quote] The writing quality is excellent, but the story, honestly, bored me.

R167 You can't have both.

It's one or the other.

Listen to all those people above who accept novels translated from Russian, French etc. They accept the story but miss out on the writing quality.

R170 - I reread Painted Veil not long ago, knowing how it ends, glad I did so. I take it the "salad scene" is in the film? (Oy!)

Barbara Pym is a delight.

It's been thirty years since I read it, but I remember laughing quite a lot at "The Vicar of Wakefield" by Oliver Goldsmith. I read it because some member of the Brideshead Set had mentioned it. I love 18th century literature, from "The Adventures of Roderick Random" to "The History of Tom Jones" to "Clarissa", etc. It's all so much fun.

Barbara Pym is a goddess.

Also, Molly Keane, whose serio-comic novels of aristocratic families living crumbling Irish estates in the early 20th century are masterpieces. Her early novels (1920s-1950s) were written under the pen name of MJ Farrell but she made an amzing comeback in the 1980s with 3 brilliant books: GOOD BEHAVIOUR, TIME AFTER TIME and LOVING AND GIVING.

R74 I bet you didn't do the unabridged 'History of Tom Jones".

R173/R175, sometimes I break out A Glass of Blessings when I'm feeling low. The trials and tribulations of Piers Longridge and Wilmet Forsyth are somehow comforting. Then I move on to the letters of Elizabeth Bishop in One Art.

I've just finished all nine books of 'The Forsyte Saga,' for the second time. 'On Forsyte 'change' is a really good epilogue. Arnold Bennett is a favourite. Although he's compatatively new, Paul Torday has never failed to disappoint.

James' The Ambassadors wowed me. Also love Maughm, but don't regard his work as great literature. I don't think he did, either. He and Graham Greene were so entertaining. Have you read the short story collection, May We Borrow Your Husband?

I tried a few times to get through "A Dance to the Music of Time" by Anthony Powell, but could never get past about the third book. Has anyone ever read the entire series?

I gave up after the third book as well R180.

Other than one entertaining reference to Madchen in Uniform the books were sooooo boring. And the characters displayed no internal consistency. I don’t understand how the series made the best 100 books on the twentieth century list.

[quote] the books were sooooo boring.

They are English.

R177 I finally got around to Barbara Pym just this month, A Glass of Blessings and Quartet in Autumn. Very much my cup of tea. Even though Philip Larkin endorsed her as Britain's most underrated writer I don't think she quite makes the grade as classic literature but who cares. I thought Quartet was a little more complex and nuanced but the story arc of Piers and Wilmet is certainly memorable and beautifully executed.

r183, please read Pym's THE SWEET DOVE DIED next. Like QUARTET IN AUTUMN it goes quite a bit further than her comfort zone who excellent women. and suitable relationships.

R184 Will do.

Edgar Allan Poe. Besides the great movie adaptations, the books are very good. "Pit and the Pendulum" and "Tell-Tale Heart" come to mind.

Also, the Sherlock Holmes books from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Good stuff.

I took a class in High School called "The Novel" where we read classic books. Loved "Ivanhoe" but hated "Moby Dick".

OP, Agatha Christie is not classic literature. And there are hundreds of other writers you could have put on the list. So the whole thing seems sort of random.

I agree R187.

I was hoping that those who claim to "read Dostoyesvsky" might give us some hints for us klutzes on how to read Dostoyesvsky and make their claim credible.

R188 I've read Dostoyevsky. You just read him and then decide whether you like it or not. I don't understand why you put "read Dostoyevsky" within quotes, or why you think people only claim to have read him when they haven't really.

Yes I had a graduate seminar in Agatha Christie the same year we had Miguel de Cervantes. You left off Sidney Sheldon and Ayn Rand!

Is this the same OP who named Syracuse as an Ivy equivalent?

I love Kerouac's works.

Michel Houellebecq. I know he's still living and not technically "classic" but his work is a depressing, bleakly appropriate antidote to spending too much time on the chirpily positive parts of the internet/social media/real life. Like a refreshing punch in the gut.

[quote] I love 18th century literature, from "The Adventures of Roderick Random" to "The History of Tom Jones" to "Clarissa", etc. It's all so much fun.

It's hard to imagine "Clarissa" being considered "fun."

R193 Houellebecq is a shocker.

(But I only read him via a translator)

The Master and Margarita is a modern classic, I contend. Just love that book.

Also, I love cats. So that helped my fall in love with it.

If you're looking for a rather unknown but great very late Victorian novel, George Gissing's New Grub Street is one of my favorites of all time. It feels very modern as it's about how journalism was moving from serious to scandal-driven; in other words, very much the same argument that's been made in every generation.

Gissing is a very under-rated novelist. He was once considered in the pantheon of The Greats. Nobody seems to read him anymore.

A novelist who once was considered to be on a par with Dickens is Arnold Bennett, whom you never hear about today. But his Riceyman Steps is a wonderful book. So is Old Wives Tale. Arnold was by far the most successful novelist of his day, financially.

[quote] Arnold Bennett, whom you never hear about today

R178 told us about him.

(I won't be picking up Bennett, not after Virginia dismissed him)

R188 is there a particular issue you are having reading Dostoyevsky?

Assuming you don’t read Russian, you might want to make sure that you have a good translation. And then other that aforementioned naming convention there really isn’t anything particularly difficult about his novels. (Female middle names = father’s name + ovna)

I understand and enjoy Kafka in German, and I'm a French cockroach.

R133, I totally agree with you. While Wilkie Collins is really only known for The Moonstone and The Woman In White, he wrote a ton of other books.

I liked Armadale better than either one — and while it was named for one character I found the Ozias Midwinter character in it to be the truly unforgettable one.

Another thing I’d like to point out about Collins is that his writing style is very natural and accessible. I highly recommend him to those who are intimidated by Victorian fiction.

I also second the poster who mentioned Margaret Oliphant. Mary Elizabeth Braddon is another good one.

For the Russian big books, I think the translations by the team of Pevear and Volkhonsky are considered to be the most accurate and the closest in style to the originals. I'm pretty sure they've done War and Peace, Anna Karenin (no extra "a" at the end; as Nabokov joked, she wasn't a ballerina); and at least one of the big Dostoevsky novels, probably The Idiot, but I'm not certain, have not read that one.

I've tried reading a few books by George Gissing and Arnold Bennett but the only two I really enjoyed were the titles mentioned by r197, NEW GRUB STREET and THE OLD WIVES' TALE. Gissing and Bennett were one hit wonders in my book.

I gave up on Riceyman Steps.

曹雪芹的 「紅樓夢」

I’m reading Pale Fire by Nabokov and it’s hilarious. A story told by a madman! I’ve recently read So Red the Rose by Stark Young and Penhally by Caroline Gordon. Both writers were members of the Fugitives, Southern writers who wanted to present their truth about the South. Slavery accepted as fact but nothing salacious or paternalistic about the institution.

R202, there are quite a few of us out here who don’t care for those clumsy translators. Constance Garnett is still considered the best and most reliable translator.

R203 I had to read NEW GRUB STREET for an AP English high-school paper, and I hated it. Actually, it turned me off pursuing journalism as a career.

I thought the Garnett translation were notoriously bad because her Russian wasn’t fluent?

R182 as a young Brit and an aspiring gay writer, I agree that our current style is on life support. Fucking boring, soporific, bone-dry writing. If there’s a way to turn this on it’s head, I want to help do it.

What is the spice or the juice that’s missing? Is it that we’re sexless? Too polite? Too safe? Is it the themes, the characters, or the writing itself that’s aneamic?

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion, too:

R211: both of them were so attractive back then

No. 207 you couldn't be more wrong about C. Garnett. There is abundant discussion online re the clumsy, "made up" nature of her translation work, and her long-windedness. You might prefer it, for God knows what reasons, but she is NOT an accurate and faithful translator of Tolstoy, at least. That's like saying Scott Moncrieff did a good job of translating Proust; it's just preposterous. Pevear and Volkhonsky discuss Connie's miserable mistakes at length in their books, and have done so in articles online. Nabokov's discussion of translations of quite a few Russian novels into English also takes up some of Garnett's more hilarious blunders. You don't know what you're talking about.

^The P&V Anna Karenin "sounds" just like the novel sounds in Russian, the tone of the narration is exact. Connie Garnett's style sounds like Edith Wharton. Tolstoy does not ever sound ANYTHING LIKE a flabby, old, Edwardian lady-novelist. LOL.

Jane Austen, still laugh-out-loud funny 200 years later. Mark Twain, the same. Tristam Shandy, very funny and wildly unconventional (for 1789). Silas Marner, a good relatively short novel to introduce people to George Elliot. I know people who love Middlemarch, but I found it a hard slog and couldn't finish it. I love 18th century novels - Richardson and Fielding, like opposite sides of a coin - in fact, Fielding's satire of Pamela, called "Shamela", is hysterically funny. Not a huge fan of Dickens. In my opinion, shorter is always better in regard to Dickens, so probably Tale of Two Cities is my favorite of his works. This thread is making me want to dive more deeply into Proust and also into Tolstoy. People haven't mentioned Cervantes. Don Quixote is still amazing after 400 years. Thackeray's Vanity Fair is a good novel as well as the name of a good magazine...lol

FWIW I much preferred Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda to Middlemarch R215.

The thing about Tolstoy is that he had only one real obsession in his writing, the facing of death by men. It is an unavoidable, oppressive weight in all of his writing that I'm familiar with. Anna comes to realize that she is doomed, trapped by her violation of society's rules, and she can't escape, and it destroys her. Hadji Murad is about a man who is facing death imminently, from the Russian soldiers. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is about a man with a fatal disease and what it does to him. Master and Man, a Russian nobleman and his servant who become trapped in a fatal snowstorm all because of the nobleman's impetuousness, etc. It's hard to read this kind of thing, but he is such a great writer that you just have to go on with it to the end. And all down the line, the text is somehow insinuating, "You're in this trap too, you know."

I think it should be said (somewhere) that there is some incredibly fine literature written in the past 50 years and even in the past 20 years. It's not as though good writing died with Hemingway or Forster. There are some gay novels with breathtaking prose - almost anything by Andrew Holleran, for example, and people mentioned James Baldwin somewhere above. I'd venture to say that there are thousands of novels written in the 20th century on a par with classic novels, but they won't attain "classics" status because there are too many to choose from and they are not going to be taught in schools. Given a choice, in many cases I'm more likely to choose a novel with characters and situations I can relate to, which is more likely to be a contemporary novel.

[quote] but he is such a great writer

R217 Are you talking about Tolstoy or his translator?

^LOTS of writing that is considered to be "classic," while it is current or contemporary, just sort of disappears when the times change. Hermann Hesse was considered vital when I was young, today his work is nearly unknown except to people who read him way back then. I sense that Wm Burroughs is headed for the junkheap, and there a lot of others on that boat, many, many others. Also, there were poets galore who were alive and well-known at the time of Byron, Keats and Shelley, and they are now only subjects for specialists, at universities, nobody reads their work. So I think it's a lot harder to say who the really good contemporary writers are, in the sense of predicting which ones have staying value.

R219: Depends.

^Neither, if it's Constance Garnett.

Modern but worthy of inclusion: James Salter. Light Years is a masterpiece.

Constance and her appalling son David

[quote] Hesse was considered vital when I was young, today his work is nearly unknown except to people who read him way back then.

As a 2000s teen, I spent lunch breaks of one summer lovingly reading the dusty but almost-untouched school library copies of NARCISSUS & GOLDMUND and STEPPENWOLF. Everyone else thought I was pretentious boring weirdo, and continued to avoid me as they had done in previous years, but at least I was having a slightly better time.

^As a 1970s teen, I avidly read every book the man ever wrote, including the nearly unknown Gertrude and Beneath the Wheel. It took me almost 2 years to get through it all. Virtually none of it is memorable at all, except some of the nonsensical, hallucinatory parts of Steppenwolf. Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) is the longest, I think, and it involves some kind of futuristic "game" which people devote their lives to, and in retrospect it seems like it must have involved something very like the internet, but I'm not about to re-investigate it now...He won the Nobel Prize, so somebody back then thought he was swell. It was books for LSD enthusiasts when I was a teen, taking loads of drugs myself...

[quote] took me almost 2 years to get through it all. Virtually none of it is memorable at all, except some of the nonsensical, hallucinatory parts

That’s how I feel about Raymond Roussel. Like, I was mystified and intrigued by LOCUS SOLUS, and it did leave an aesthetic impression on me (hard to forget the image of Faustina the dancer suspended in liquid animation), but slogging though I really couldn’t make it make any emotional sense or muster a care about it either. His books all seem to be like that, panoramic avant-garde static weirdness that has no point.

R227, if you have not already read him, you might like to take a look at Harry Mathews, especially TLOOTH, THE CONVERSIONS, and THE SINKING OF THE ODRADEK STADIUM. Mathews was heavily influenced by Roussel, but his writing is very, very funny.

In order to make things a bit more non-western, I'm going to suggest "The Makioka Sisters" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki as a classic.

[quote] I love classic literature! However, I have discovered many people do not.

You think?

Two Women: Willa Cather, Louise Erdrich

I'd read Madame Bovary before and liked it. Then I read the Lydia David translation when it came out about ten years ago. A world of difference. I highly recommend this version to anyone who has or hasn't read it before.

R233. Sorry. Typo. Lydia Davis

For those who are saying Hesse is slipping completely under the radar, Siddhartha will always be read though by all those budding little teen Buddhist in spiritual crisis right?

I loved Shamela, the satire on Pamela. But you have to read Pamela first, obviously. Henry Fielding was a hoot--seems like he could walk into today's world and satirize it to death. Maybe Mike White is the new Fielding.

^Right, R235. I read it, and I've been a practicing Buddhist pretty much ever since. It's not badly told, but the ending is a type of cut-and-run, implying very strongly that Hesse did not really know very much about the import of Buddha's enlightenment (which had been typical of all German investigation of Buddhism up until that time). -R226

[quote] As a 1970s teen, I avidly read every book the man ever wrote, including the nearly unknown Gertrude and Beneath the Wheel. It took me almost 2 years to get through it all.

You sound so interesting, back in the day I would have loved to hang out with you on campus! Sounds like you didn’t get on with Hesse, though—looking back, do you recommend those two novels on any level, or not at all? And what did you first read in the 70s that stands the test of time so far? Lately I’ve been reading (and listening to) Richard Farina, and I think he walks the line between esoteric psychedelic weirdness and humane funny accessible emotion really well.

[quote] Virtually none of it is memorable at all, except some of the nonsensical, hallucinatory parts of Steppenwolf.

True. The part that always stuck with me about SW is the bit with all the doors.

R233: Lydia Davis also did one of the volumes of the new translation of Proust, I can't remember which one it is, but I think it's one of the first 2 books. They are all fantastic, esp compared to the thick sludge of the original Moncrieff versions. Proust does write long sentences, but his French is never tedious and stodgy the way Moncrieff made it.

OK so which translation(s) of Proust should we read?

^By law (copyright law, in place up until 100 years after the first translation was published), there was only one English version, by Scott Moncrieff, the last volume completed by someone named Flower, when M died. THEN they were "updated" by Terence Kilmarten sometime in the 80s, basically just edited a little and proofread better. Then in the early part of this century, the old copyrights began to expire and a committee of translators (8, I think), prepared new versions of the whole thing, with each one of them taking one volume each. They are vastly better than Moncrieff's first try, or even Kilmarten's honest attempt to iron out Moncrieff's blunders and terrible style.

^Additionally, Proust's manuscript, written literally by hand, not on typewriter, is an incredible monster (look it up on Google Images), and people have been unraveling it ever since he died. Huge portions of the book have been determined to have been omitted and so present day scholars and translators have had a better chance to get to the bottom of what Proust really meant for the book to say. The book is about 3,000 pages long.

[quote] is an incredible monster

because he was going gaga and repeating himself every ten pages. He never met an editor.

That’s a hell of a lot of Madelines to be chowing down on while sorting that all out.

[quote] sorting that all out.

He didn't sort it out. He just burbled on going around in circles.

All Proust wanted to say in the end is that nostalgia is like stale-ass biscuits—they’ll ruin your tea and make you wish you hadn’t taken a bite, honey.

If Proust had lived another 10 years, the book would have been just fine. The repetitious parts are all in the later "Albertine" sections, and Proust died before they were even published. He would have certainly prevented that repetitiousness had he lived. He only lived to be 59 years old, for God's sake, and he wrote one of the very greatest books ever written.

He said something else too: "The gods ALWAYS answer our prayers, but only do so after we no longer want what we asked for." - That's some heady stuff.

Loathe Austen. I stand with Mark Twain on her work.

Of OP's list, Tolstoy and Wharton top my list, for their ability to bring characters to life, to stand back from their creations so that the characters breathe on their own.

[quote] one of the very greatest

OK, is that like 'more unique'

If you look online you can easily find pdfs of all 8 volumes of the new English versions. I know I acquired a copy of *Sodom and Gomorrah* that way (it's what, 800 pages long?). University libraries almost always have access to online versions of these books, too. Oh yeah, spoiler: nearly half the characters in this huge story turn out to be gay. It has that going for it, too.

Proust had diarrhée verbale.

^Nabokov said it was one of the 4 greatest books written in the XXth Century. VN was tri-lingual, a polymath, a genius, and a very great novelist.

What was Nabokov's 3 other greatest books?

Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS, Joyce's ULYSSES, and SAINT PETERSBURG, by Andrei Bely (somewhat like a cross between ULYSSES and Bulgakov's MASTER AND THE MARGERITA, maybe).

Has anyone read Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities"? I've always wanted to try that one, but have never gotten around to it.

What about Nabokov? Is he classic literature? I liked what I read of his, but does he hold up?

^I would say yes, he is very great, in a league with Joyce, Tolstoy and all the rest. His books are so beautifully written, perfect, and INCREDIBLY complicated and deeply patterned. PALE FIRE, LOLITA and ADA are as great as anything in the past 100 years. PNIN also, is really beautiful. THE GIFT...

VN's commentary to his own translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" is maybe the very best book on the history of French and English (to say nothing of Russian) literature since the Eighteenth Century. It's mind-blowing, he had a photographic memory and knew all 3 languages, and he's a comedian at heart and so it's highly entertaining. It's about 1000 pages long. I've read it 3 times. Even the index is hysterical. (A direct relation to PALE FIRE, one of the few novels that has an index)...

R157 Sadly, I was not in your Lit class discussing Mishima and Siddhartha. Was a college freshman and 1970 was the year I first read "Siddhartha" and all things Hesse. Also share your love of "Wuthering Heights". Haven't read it in decades but your post makes me want to go back to it!

What about Kazuo Ishiguro???

The Remains of the Day

Never Let Me Go

A Pale View of Hills

The Unconsoled

Michael Ondaatje is also a good modern author:

The English Patient

In the Skin of a Lion

Raymond Queneau: ZAZIE IN THE METRO and THE BLUE FLOWERS, among others. *Very* funny, and simultaneously very sophisticated. He was a member of the Acadamie Francaise...and a pataphysician extraordinaire...

My favorites are Charles Dickens, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton.

Oh, forgot Gaskell; love Mary Barton, Sylvia's Lovers, and North & South.

The Unconsoled was like a nightmare to me, and I finally had to put it down. (R261)

Also,

[quote]Anna Karenin (no extra "a" at the end; as Nabokov joked, she wasn't a ballerina)

What does this mean, though? He doesn't give any indication what he means in that interview.

Not everyone's cup of tea, nor necessarily considered "way up there" with the "classic" authors, but I've always very much enjoyed the social consciousness, wry and ironic characters, and conscientiously detailed narration and dialogue of anything Charles Dickens wrote, and have always sought it out.

Someone way upthread mentioned Margaret Oliphant. Doing a little wikipeding of her, she sounds like my cup of tea. If anyone has read her, can you recommend where I might start? What's her best novel?

R218 thinks Andrew Holleran, who writes acceptable bland prose, is on a par with Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, and the like.

R218 is why we can't have nice things.

"[The Temple of Taste] is an abode which all the world speaks of, which few visit, and which they who travel thither, seldom take the pains to examine"-Cardinal de Polignac per Voltaire's account of their conversation, in Le temple du Gôut.

He really nails it, barely anyone has ventured into good taste, and those who did barely so. This thread is a monument to this fact. It's incredible how anglocentric it is, and how there's barely any mention to any work or author prior to the 19th Century, with the exceptions of R95, R135, R174 & R215. It's as if I stumbled upon some profane set of choirboys (per DL's demographics, doubt anyone here could be such a thing) with a very limited repertoire.

There's not a mention of Jonathan Swift, not a mention of Samuel Johnson or Boswell, not one of Alexander Pope, not one of Defoe (he who had the immense grace of being endorsed by Rousseau). The only good thing is nobody mentioned Jack London, who's nauseating. If Pope returned from the dead, Dullness would smooth him back. At least some dare criticize Proust, who's absolutely debased, and it's a shame the only mention to the Bible is to pejoratively compare it with Proust's excrementa, to contradict that philistine I fall upon Rousseau's judgement, it's the only book we really need. And apparently the rest of the world doesn't exist, it was quite good someone mentioned Cervantes, but none Quevedo or Grácian. And as much as people mention Flaubert or Maupassant, not one of Rousseau (who graced this world with his prose, his verse, his music, charming at every instance), not one of Fénelon (Voltaire: He could even render Paris happy, also endorsed by Rousseau & Catherine of Russia, among many), Fontaine, Fontenelle, Racine, etc. Too many to even name. About Shakespeare, what Voltaire said about was quite right, no doubt nowadays he's so loved. But, what's criminal is that there's one mention of Dante, none of Boccaccio, Petrarca, Ariosto, Tasso; as if Italy has ceased to exist. But this thread even lacks the usual suspects, no mention of Goethe or Heine, or Stendhal, which is impressive, though wholly admirable finally someone gives them some rest.

And that in a thread about Classics there's but one mention to those of Antiquity, Lucian could well write the epitaph to this thread: "[Y]ou cannot even buy the right things: any casual recommendation is enough to guide your choice; you are as clay in the hands of the unscrupulous amateur, and as good as cash down to any dealer. How are you to know the difference between genuine old books that are worth money, and trash whose only merit is that it is falling to pieces? [...] If an illiterate person like yourself goes in for buying books, he is thereby laying himself open to ridicule. You hesitate? Yet surely nothing could be clearer: who could observe such a man at work, and abstain from the inevitable allusion to pearls and swine? [...] When you take in hand your fine volume, purple-cased, gilt-bossed, and begin reading with that accent of yours, maiming and murdering its contents, you make yourself ridiculous to all educated men: your own toadies commend you, but they generally get in a chuckle too, as they catch one another's eye." Thankfully, since nobody here knows of his existence (nor of the many other Ancient authors), people could continue parroting the virtues of the pederasts Nabokov, Proust, Wilde and the rest of the bunch (I thank Ignorance, since she buried the beastly Gide or Genet).

So many beautiful lines in Holleran:

“They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style – all the things one shouldn’t throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.”

Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time.

During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.”

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.”

Oh no, R270. You've done that thing of calling other people dull, unthinking and ill-read without once giving anyone reason to think otherwise of you. Go on, tell us why we should read Virgil's Georgics. Which of the three Theban plays do you prefer and why? Explain how The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins is enough to make even the most steadfast atheist's soul wobble.

Of course you don't have to answer those questions specifically but could you answer them for works that you feel worthy? Could you do it without implying that others are stupid and without boring self-aggrandizement?

I’m pretty sure Nabakov preferred little girls R270.

How odd to come on to an English language site and accuse people of Anglophilia for having mostly read English language authors and then to prove ones broad mindedness by, with the exception of the Bible, listing an unbroken collection of men from Europe.

As for the Bible, while it is literature, that is not its primary purpose. And (shocking!) different parts have different author. Psalms even has multiple authors within it’s one section. If I look at it from a secular perspective, I am going to go with Jeremiah.

Its one section

Edgar Allan Poe

Re: Margaret Oliphant

Try "Miss Marjoribanks" (Marchbanks)

R270 -- If you actually look at the subject matter oft this thread, it isn't about nominations for the greatest works of world literature. It's just a question about what books do people like and dislike in the realm of the greats. No one is suggesting that if they were putting together a syllabus for a review of all great writing that only these books would be included. Just that these are people's favorites (or least favorites).

And yes, some less than classic writers have been mentioned, like Christie and Hollaren, but still,. people are allowed to post what they want to post, not what you want them to.

Pedantry and reality often don't correlate.

R273 I said anglocentrism, which is different of anglophilia, the difference between those terms is that for the first only that segment of the world seems to exist, and for the latter that they show a particular appreciation of Anglo-Saxon mores and culture (and considering the rage that the term "Anglo-Saxon" generates in DL, I doubt that, it's philistinism). And if I didn't name people outside Europe, is because I particularly wouldn't expect many people here to have read or heard about Ibn Tufail or Omar Khayyam, both of whom well received in Europe before failing into obscurity, when they don't even name Voltaire or Goethe (both of whom interested in the Islamic world, and Arabic literature). Pearls and swine, remember what Lucian said...

R277 It's about the Classics, and with only one reference to the Ancients, it looks quite dim. And you are right, people are allowed to post what they want to post, not what you want them to, which is what I am doing, pointing out these great authors isn't pedantry, but the reality of good taste. I'd dedicate you these words of Voltaire: "A depraved taste in the arts consists in enjoying subjects that are revolting to men of good judgement. Such taste leads us to prefer the burlesque to what is noble, and to prefer what is precious and affected to simple and natural beauty: this is a sickness of the mind. [...] There are also cold souls and men incapable of sound reasoning; these can neither be inspired with feeling nor corrected in their thinking; with them one should not argue about matters of taste since they have none." So I leave it at that, find whatever correlation you want to these words.

R278 I don't necessarily agree with what you've posted here but I do admire your articulate writing. So I'm curious about your education. Myself, I was in a PhD. program in English at the #2 department at the time but dropped out before completing it. #2 was filled with professors so pompously unpleasant I couldn't stand the idea of spending the rest of my life in academia with them. Became a writer instead. Quite successful but hardly one of note.

Absolutely no response to R272 from R278. As expected.

Classics is what YOU consider a classic novel. This could be from the year 200 or the year 2000.

[QUOTE]which is what I am doing...the reality of good taste.

Imagine saying something like that about yourself. I'm both bored and slightly fascinated by people who seem so utterly certain of their place above others. This person - still - has yet to do anything beyond accusing others of dullness and philistinism. They have yet to prove their own good taste credentials. Insulting other people's taste doesn't in itself imply good taste (although there will always be those - the genuinely dull-witted - who believe it does). Nor does knowing the names of great writers. The fact that you think Omar Khayyam is some obscure treasure only the most interlekshual of interlekshuals would know about says it all.

R279 I'm in Humanities yes, not philology or literary studies though. Many people are burned out in the Humanities, it's a combination of cynical nihilism and abhorrence of the ubiquitous philistinism that permeates society. It's true many professionals appear inaccessible and prepotent, but it's unfair to mischaracterise them as professional pedants. Why so many people feel intimidated by erudition, and how they feel everything should be unchallenging, is something I can't understand, the need to flatten everyone to the same mediocrity. I believe it's much worse (cynical teachers or academics, pure relativism, political correctness, etc.) in the US or in the UK, I'm from neither, though it's not that different here, you can see all the signals that herald all this, but the Academy isn't as lost as it's there, you can still disagree at least, without getting your head squished. And of course, for the vast majority of people, they are naught but a diploma grind.

R280 I had not seen that response. Anyway, here it goes. Was it I, R272, or was it Lucian? Nowadays we all have fallen into this deep error of thinking that taste is indisputable, that everything is relative. Lucian wasn't attacking a nobody, he was attacking a rich person close to the Emperor, and you can't see he does not hold back. And contrary to what you, or R282, he thinks of himself as humble, as someone who's on the side of the poor, against flatterers and its affluent victims. R282 it's certainly discernment, and hence a sign of good taste, to tell piss from white wine, same for literature. And I'm sorry, but nobody here even mentioned Omar Khayyam, or any Arabic writer, what impeded you for example from quoting him, since you seem so acquainted with his œuvre?

I quoted Lucian because he's amusing, whether you agree with him or not, and I thought it pertinent, in a thread where the Ancients are so absent (perhaps someone seduced by his witticism may follow him to the rest of his work), I could likewise mention what Walter Benjamin quoted Anatole France with saying: "Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, 'And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?' 'Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?'" What a great horror though, he called someone philistine... Guess he gets the scrub too, off to oblivion. But here's what you demand, I have quoted Voltaire, Lucian and Benjamin, yet you have not quoted Khayyam, despite affirming how amply acquainted people are with him, feel free to do so.

R202 The Peavar and Volkhonsky translations may be closer to the original, but the prose doesn't have the high, crisp, extremely literate style of the Constance Garnett translations, for my money.

Nabokov a pederast? On what evidence?

Have you read the French short stories or Ada or Ardor R285? It was a theme he was drawn to, but girls not boys. No idea about IRL.

R285 Take a look at this. Since Russian patronymics were mentioned before here, and I can't quote at length, I shall leave it at this incriminating curiosity, the author points out how Humbert Humbert shares something in common with Vladimir Vladimirovich, a two syllables name repeated twice, true Vladimir Vladimirovich has three, but Nabokov himself affirms that: "In rapid Russian speech longish name-and-patronymic combinations undergo familiar slurrings: thus 'Pavel Pavlovich,' Paul, son of Paul, when casually interpellated is made to sound like 'Pah-pahlych' and the hardly utterable, tape-worm long 'Vladimir Vladimirovich' becomes colloquially similar to 'Vadim Vadimych.' (Source: Look at the Harlequins!, pg. 249)" He did not commonly use Vladimirovich publicly in the US, which explains why "this visceral link between Nabokov and his fictional pedophile was lost on his American audience". Even if he was so, and even if he was active, he wasn't alone (among his peers, to have or indulge in this vice), he wasn't poor, and he had aplenty prestige to make up for it. And most people don't give a rat ass, see Ginsberg among the many out-and-about pedos.

R283 genuinely appears to believe that quoting a great writer = proof of deep acquaintance with said writer's works/interlekshualism confirmed. I'll note that no one has demanded quotes from you, either. Read R272 again. Can you answer any of those questions? At first I wondered if you were a troll but now it seems you are serious.

[quote]Nowadays we all have fallen into this deep error of thinking that taste is indisputable, that everything is relative.

If anyone here is presenting (their own) taste as indisputable it's you. You also contradict yourself here in the space of a single sentence (how is "indisputable" the same as "everything is relative??")

Which is it, pseud?

I googled "omar khayyam quotes" and found this:

[quote]“Our life is as short as a raging fire: flames the passer-by soon forgets, ashes the wind blows away. A man's life.”

Am I smart now? Because that's the bar, is it not? Quoting great writers? Tell us why you esteem Omar Khayyam so highly, R283. Do it without insulting or quoting. Can you do it? Can you do it for any of the writers you have mentioned? Again without insults or quotes?

[quote] The writing quality is excellent, but the story, honestly, bored me.

[quote] [R167] You can't have both.

The writing quality can never be the same in a translation; but there are famously stylistically gifted translators who have crafted translations that are gorgeously written in their own right.

Constance Garnett's translations of the great Russian 19th-century writers come to mind (Janet Malcolm wrote a beautiful encomium to these translations a few years back in the New Yorker), and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's famous translation of Proust does as well.

[quote] It was a theme he was drawn to, but girls not boys.

In Nabokov's novel [italic]Pale Fire,[/italic] the main narrator Charles Kinbote talks about having affairs with young boys when he was King Charles II of Zembla.

Nobody ever has proven or even claimed Nabokov himself had affairs with children.

To say that he must have been a pederast because he wrote about pederasts frequently would mean that by the same logic Agatha Christie must be a murderer.

r267, Charles Dickens is absolutely "way up there with the classic authors."

He is considered internationally one of the very best novelists the UK ever produced.

Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Maupassant, John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Haruki Murakami, John Irving, Bronteï Sisters, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, Tolkien, Alexandre Dumas, Hemingway, Victor Hugo.

As for Nabokov, I have no personal knowledge of whether or not underage girls (or boys) made his dick hard - but surely we can agree that he understood what it was about girls of a certain age that appealed to men with certain tastes - no? I love witnessing the pearl-clutching and posturing over this, by the way. "Oh dear, you poor philistine fool! Surely you understand that creating a character with certain tastes does not imply that the author shared those tastes!!!"

Sigh. Yes, Intellectual Karen, we understand that. I see you with your sanitizing spray, tho.

Kerouac

Wow, did you ever overreact, r295.

You must have the thinnest skin imaginable.

I would love it if some people on this thread could name their favorite translators, particularly of the Russian authors. And the ones to avoid.

Lol R297, I see your lack of an actual response. You'll also note that I straight up said I have NO IDEA what got Nabokov's dick hard. I am not one of the posters arguing one way or the other. Because, again: I don't know. The way the subject matter at the very heart of Lolita (the fuckability of very young girls to the main character and the detailed descriptions thereof) has been rendered inert in academia is interesting to me, though. I don't even know on what grounds this would make a person thin-skinned but I'm not going to bother defending myself on that count because it's entirely possible I am.

I wish BronzeAgeGay was here.

R288 & R289 Either you are deranged or I hit a nerve, perhaps both. First of all, quoting demonstrates being acquainted, as superficial as that acquaintance may be, with an author. Since it does not please you to admit that, what else is left? Do you want me to submit a dissertation about Fonataine's naughty contes? Why should I? I feel no need to prove my acquaintance or comprehension of this or that author to you, neither in this particular case nor generally to anybody. I pointed out how absent where great part of the Moderns, and the almost total absence of the Ancients, do I need to resume Aesop's fables to demonstrate this? Or to demonstrate my comprehension about Arabic literature or European literature by taking a side in Al-Marzuban's Superiority of dogs to those who wear clothes, or Anselm Turmeda's Dispute of the donkey? What you are asking for is not only unrealistic but also fallacious, you claim anyone can quote from finding it in the internet, but anyone can also open the Wikipedia and find something quite similar to what you ask for, hence neither would demonstrate anything at all. But I can demonstrate that my quotes are meaningful in that they fit the context, these aren't aleatory fragments, but alluding to a concrete situation. What does your quote of Khayyam say to this particular context of discussing literary merits? Anyway, I turn back to Voltaire's quote about taste, since it fits perfectly the context: "There are also cold souls and men incapable of sound reasoning; these can neither be inspired with feeling nor corrected in their thinking; with them one should not argue about matters of taste since they have none."

Oxford World Classics spent the past two decades publishing Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels under the supervision of Brian Nelson, the first complete English translation of all 20 novels. La Debacle couldn't be more timely, plus it has a surprise gay angle.

Also R288 you understood nothing, it's relativeness that makes things indisputable, because it affirms the validity of everything, and I particularly said that thinking about the famous [italic]de gustibus non est disputandum[/italic], on the other hand, I do think we can discuss or dispute it, because with greater or less certainty we can make such judgements. It's you, and others like you, who make literature impossible to discuss because you all fall back always upon "it's just a matter of taste" or "it's personally insulting to criticize taste", but taste can be discussed (if you aren't a cry-baby or deranged), and we can arrive to conclusions and make judgements about it.

[quote]I feel no need to prove my acquaintance or comprehension of this...

As long as you accept, R300, that this means no one here is obliged to accept you as an arbiter of taste or intellectual merit.

Wow - this thread has degenerated to a level unpleasant even for Datalounge. For the record, I am not at all interested in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Etc but don't consider myself a cretin.

Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Unset is wonderful. Won the Nobel.

R303 When did I propose myself as supreme judge of taste? We all judge, we all arbiter, beside that, I merely pointed out some awful absences in this thread, some liked it, some did not; you in particular seem to be horrified someone expressed a opinion that differs from most other posters. Doubtfully I can impose my taste upon yours, nor you can through all these disingenuous demands. As for quoting, I like to quote, it's extending an inviting hand to others, Lucian might be harsh, but he sure is amusing in his chastisement of philistines, and I hope some might pick him up. You did not like it? Remain with the choir, and sing your limited repertoire, for all I care.

This is a personal question, not "let's rank who you think are the greatest of all time."

If you don't like Tolstoy, say it. If you love Christie, say it. No one can deny that Anna Karenina and The Mysterious Affair at Styles are important pieces of literature that have influences generations of authors and book lovers.

[quote]hence neither would demonstrate anything at all

Yes I believe this is the point being made. That an ability to quote great writers in no way in and of itself raises your own literary opinions above those of people you obviously disdain. Not all literature is equally worthy, I agree. A difference of opinion on taste is not inherently insulting. I agree. But if you want people to accept your specific opinions on what is and is not worthy you are (still) going to have to give us a reason to do that beyond quotes and insults.

R308 Therefore you accept that your demands were disingenuous, since what you demanded wouldn't ever satisfy you, anyone can infinitely move the bar while denying it's been met. You say I "disdain" but it's rather an objection, just as you do so with Lucian's diatribe, and why you made all this about quotations, not about meeting any kind of acquaintance about this or that. This therefore isn't about literature but merely a petty and superficial quarrel about being offended at Lucian's words.

[quote] But if you want people to accept your specific opinions on what is and is not worthy you are (still) going to have to give us a reason to do that beyond quotes and insults.

It seems you fail to grasp that I was pointing, what in the opinion of anyone with some general culture, were notorious absences. Even if I reasoned, per your admission, that would demonstrate nothing, therefore we enter circular reasoning, since you believe things are purely relative there's no way to demonstrate anything at all, everything is equally valid, yet you contradict yourself at this ("Not all literature is equally worthy, I agree. A difference of opinion on taste is not inherently insulting. I agree.") Hence why I had to concur with Voltaire, there's no reason to argue more in this case. And if Lucian's quote itches you (since it's an eloquent indication of philistinism), scratch it out, read him, laugh and move on (to the rest of his œuvre).

Why I love Victor Hugo: he really cared about human beings. The section in Les Miserables about the little homeless boy who sleeps in the paper-mache elephant in a public square is so touching and brilliant to me. And Hugo articulated the plight of the poor so well that it resulted in legislation that changed things. Same with Sinclair Lewis, although he was not a wonderful stylist like Hugo.

This thread pretty much explains why I dropped out of academia.

I think I know what you mean r311. Not sure, shouldn't speak for you, but there does seem to be a kind of academic that really sucks the joy and pleasure out of their subject area, almost by design.

Exactly. I've never seen so much overwritten snobbery on the one hand, and pugnacious anti-intellectualism on the other, on a once-worthwhile DL thread before.

[quote] it has a surprise gay angle

Is it in anyway explicit, R301?

Balzac's "Cousin Bette" and Trollope's "The Way We Live Now" are favorite books of mine.

Pee Wee's Big Adventure is one of my favorite movies.

Are there ANY gay moments in classic literature prior to 1910?

Some at DL are mortally afraid of discussing or disputing, R311 you did right, if you can't handle a thread so superficial as this how could you have defended your thesis?

R312 I thought most people here loved sucking things out, and there might be that kind of academic, but you wouldn't believe how much ordinaries suck out of life any pleasure it has, for example the so parroted about principle of academical freedom, trying to flatten to mediocrity anything that rises above the ordinary, so I guess things are even.

R313 Thankfully you could contribute your own dose of cheap anti-intellectualism too, see, now you can feel you have contributed something to it.

[quote] Wow - this thread has degenerated to a level unpleasant even for Datalounge.

R304 Great literature arouses great passion.

And we get proprietorial about all those hours, day, weeks we forced ourselves to wade through all these ancient nouns and lifeless verbs from unregarded tomes.

R317 sounds like English is not his first language, as that post, and his others, reflects his misuse of commas -- also, his phrasing sounds as though he was translating into English from another language.

Ah, R319 so you're as sceptical of translated literature as I.

R317 English isn't your first language, is it?

I'm guessing French, r321.

R314, older, world-weary soldier Jean takes younger, impetuous soldier Maurice under his wing as they march to the Battle of Sedan, protects him when they are taken prisoner, carries him in his arms when they escape, then the following passage at the link occurs when they finally have a moment to themselves in the woods. Yes, it's couched in a fraternal term, but the relationship has the arc of a romance throughout the book, they share more kisses, and other characters comment on their closeness, such that I think Zola meant them to be interpreted as lovers for those of us inclined that way. If some filmmaker had balls, it could be the gay romantic historical epic we've always wanted.

Love the classics:

Dickens

Trollope

Jane Austen

Tolstoy

Theodor Fontane

Thomas Mann

Wilkie Collins

Fitzgerald

Waugh

Emily Bronte

Heinrich Boll

Gunther Grass

Elizabeth Gaskell

Yeats

I think French too, R322. The rhythms are off. And the occasional grammatical mistake that a non-english speaker would make.

But with the attitude of someone who thinks he speaks perfect English.

Donc, il doit être français.

Moving on from the pedantic kerfuffle, has anyone mentioned Thomas Mann? The long, slow death of the mother in Buddenbrooks still haunts me.

Miss Jean Brodie declared that 'if a novel isn't sufficiently stimulating or profound to read twice…" (and she paused here and concluded) "… then it's not good enough to read once".

^ I assume she's saying we shouldn't waste our time on shilly-shallying, time-wasting waffly verbiage.

Me too, R326

“Pedantic Kerfuffle” is the literary name of DL.

I'm not a big re-reader, although I'm planning on it with Bleak House at some point.

What about D.H. Lawrence?

What about T.E. Lawrence?

Gunther Grass is a "classic"?

Lord.

There's a difference between a "classic" and "serious literature," for fuck's sake.

My bookclub wants to read Magic Mountain r326. I have to ask, is Mann a big slog? Does it take forever? Should any Mann book be spread over a few months? That's just an impression I get, but maybe it's wrong.

(Also too, loved, loved, loved the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, book and movie.)

Quicker Classics for faster reads.

I believe he has fallen out of favour a bit R332 but I've always loved his work. The hands down hottest passage I've ever read was in Sons and Lovers (I think it was Sons and Lovers?). I would find it and quote it here but I now can't find my copy and am not 100% sure it was that book. I know it was DH Lawrence. It was 2 characters meeting on a pathway or at a turnstile, the description of what they are feeling. I remember it almost blowing my head off (without being at all explicit) when I first read it. I also recall there being long passages in The Plumed Serpent that got at the truth of attraction to masculinity in a way I don't think I have ever read before.

R326, loved Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kruger, then The Magic Mountain. That led me to Erich Maria Remarque's Heaven Has No Favorites. Not sure Remarque qualifies as great lit, but very poignant.

R335, I haven't read The Magic Mountain, so maybe R338 can better answer whether it's a slog. I think Mann does have a reputation for being slow-going.

Henry James when I run out of Lunesta.

No one seems to read George Bernard Shaw, or Bertrand Russell anymore

Does reading the late and great Harold Bloom’s gazillion introductions, rather than the books themselves, count?

Magic Mountain is a great book but it isn't easy. Mann is a bit of a German Henry James, although not as pretentious. There are some extraordinary scenes in the book.

Has anyone mentioned Ford Madox Ford? Good Soldier is a fascinating character study. Adapted (along with other Ford's works) into a terrific English tv show called Parade's End (which is another of Ford's books but not as good as The Good Soldier).

R341 's fallacy of basing an assertion on a biased subjectivism.

A simple comparison based on the current Amazon market, which is the most accessible, near-universal datasource on cost-related societal interests, shows 488 results for GB Shaw, and 566 for Bertrand Russell, 602 for Aldous Huxley as an added set.

Saul Bellow came in at 218, Norman Fucking Mailer came in at 366, John Updike at 387 and Bernard Malamud at 402 (!), same as Judy Blume (!).

AND Thomas Mann has 987 offerings. I'm delighted Josephine Tey has 110 and Dorothy Sayers has more than 1,000.

It's called objective information, R341. Sensible people use it as the basis of their assertions.

Mann's BUDDENBROOKS is basically a generational family soap opera. Very similar to John Galsworthy's THE FORSYTE SAGA and I.J. Singer's THE BROTHERS ASHKENZI....but with German food.

They're all about family dynasties ruined by the spoiled younger generations. Once you've read one, you've read them all.

Long time British mystery fan from everyone from Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell to Kate Atkinson and I finally read my first Dorothy Sayers GAUDY NIGHT this summer. What a drag! Thought I'd never finish it and came to not care whodunnit.

I think there was a much earlier TV version of "The Good Soldier," maybe shown on Masterpiece Theatre in the US in the late '80s or early '90s. I liked "Parade's End," but I kept looking at Valentine and thinking, "Are you SURE you're not Carey Mulligan?" It was distracting.

I'll just direct your attention to this word in R341's post, R344:

[quote]seems

Also this subreddit, which you are in serious danger of appearing on:

Thank you r348

R339, I was a lonely teen/college student who devoured literature to 1)feel less lonely, 2)learn about life and the world, especially the rich/European/educated/elite world, and 3)I had a talent for understanding it. Now I don't have the patience to read those 'slogs,' so I understand those who feel that way. I don't remember Magic Mountain or Proust or any of it being painful. It was delightful.

It bears repeating... so I shall...

Balzac's Cousin Bette ought to have the dedication: to my homies at Datalounge.

Can you imagine bumping into R344 at a party?

It would be, to borrow a title, the end of the affair.

But that's a biasedly objective subjectivist fallacy fallacy, R352!

R337 Were you 18 years old at the time?

Early 20s. But condescension acknowledged.

DH Lawrence is young men; Henry James and Thomas Mann is for old men.

R351, yes, Balzac would fit in. One of his great characters is Vautrin, a criminal mastermind who is unambiguously gay. He career his chronicled over the course of three novels, and quite a career it is: he escapes from prison several times, masquerades as a priest, rescues his former prison lover from certain death, and woos several handsome young men with promises of wealth and social advancement.

R344, you can’t expect us to take you seriously when you propose that looking up “George Bernard Shaw” on Amazon and counting the number of hits provides one with any kind of usable data.

R344's point is interesting. For Mann, there is also the fact that Amazon's stats no doubt include his original German works, the English translations, and probably the French, Spanish, and who knows what else, also. He's a world-famous XXth Century author. Many of the other cited English books probably are not translated so much into foreign languages. Also, Mann was a Nobel Prize winner for Lit., in 1929...I tried reading Death in Venice or The Magic Mountain when I was in college, I can't even remember which one it was, but the beginning seemed so over-wrought and badly narrated that I couldn't go on. Portentous with absolutely no sense of how ridiculous the tone seemed.

I ordered "The Old Wives' Tale" from Amazon and it had a pretty cover. What I got was apparently a computer print out with no margins and no paragraph indentations - so stick with the publishers you know.

Oh dear R360. I laughed at your post but you give good advice!

R332 Yes. The Rainbow is very great, I think. And Sons and Lovers.

R178, R345

What I love is the old stuff. Anything written in the 18th, 19th or early 20th centuries. Because if they have survived all this time, they have to be wonderfully descriptive. IMO, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh are my favorites. Wharton paints pictures of people and places and you can visualize them. House of Mirth is a favorite. I like Balzac and Oscar Wilde, a lot too. Although in all honesty, Truman Capote and James Baldwin are descriptive. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison too.

I gave up on House of Mirth - too many unlikeable characters amidst all that obscene wealth.

Believe me, Proust is incredible. In Search has unputdownable books but I'm totally struggling with La Prisionniere. Nothing happens, everybody vanished except the Narrator and Albertine. And I just want the Narrator to strangle Albertine and end this shit. I don't care if she's cheating on him, hopefully she is, because he needs a reason to kill this boring bitch.

I really enjoyed some of the older French literature, such as Candide. There is something sane and consoling about Voltaire’s view of the world.

I’m also fond of The Princess of Cleves, and The Princess of Montpensier. Both books are filled with such passion, seemingly restrained and formalised, but always threatening to overcome the characters. There is a sense that the author is trying to test the conventions of the novel.

R366, There is a canny quote about Proust from someone famous, I think either Gide or Roland Barthes: "Proust's good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages." (Also Proust did not live long enough to fully edit the 2nd half of the huge novel, it was subsequently stitched together by his editors.)

R368 You are an apologist.

It's obvious the sick, demented wreck had dropped 100 pages of scrawled manuscript and the servants had to scramble them together.

Pinter does in 300 pages what the old man did in 4,215 pages.

I believe Gide also asked, of Proust, " How does a man take 20 pages to fall asleep in bed at night?" He declined to publish Proust's manuscript.

But credit where credit is due, he later recognised it as one of the worst mistakes of his life.

^Harold Bloom, who knew Western Literature like the back of his hand, said that In Search was the greatest novel ever written. I totally agree, and yes, it's hard to read and it's a shame the book was published in the form that it was, but Proust's editors were rightly afraid to meddle too much. The book is so great it overcomes the sloppiness of the second half, it was not completed. Proust needs no apologies. You are kind of dense if you think H. Pinter came anywhere close to Proust's stature as an author, it's ridiculous.

R370: THE greatest. He said it was a mortifying embarrassment.

R372 OK, in fairness Gide's list of regrets was quite long.

I have a soft spot for Southern Gothic writers: Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor especially.

I love the kinky, gory works of John Webster and John Ford, probably the greatest Jacobean playwrights not named Shakespeare.

Am I into tit torture? Fuck no!

R368 r371 Thank you for the informations! I glanced one of Proust's biographies and read about the Gide thing. An embarrassment, indeed.

The biggest problem I'm having with Prisioniere is that its not unmissable, it doesnt keep you interested like the other books. Thank God the bitch dies anyway. A happy ending in disguise.

I'll keep reading anyway, let's finish this shit. LoL

^The last volume, *Time Recaptured*, is incredible. (And the book is circular, so you have to read it twice, LOL)

I wish more people were familiar with two of the great classic works of Scottish literature: Sunset Song and The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Are you people so utterly brazen as to read books in public?

Yes, R380.

It's now fashionable to read books in Starbucks for hours on end while other customers hover around waiting for a seat.

But 366, isn't the static atmosphere and obsession the point? Even though the narrator observed how Swann's obsession with/manipulation by Odette destroyed him, the narrator has a similar situation with Albert(ine) and can't get out of it. When I read it I felt pulled into the narrator's emotions and desperate to, yes, get some closure about Albertine, short of killing her, lol.

Proust is just a M I A S M A.

People claim he is the pinnacle of everything but they're dumbfounded if you ask if Proust's so-called artistic genius lies in his plotting, dialogue or prose.

^No, they aren't "dumbfounded," and I expect that what you are actually reacting to is the awful, clunky English of Scott Moncrieff's stilted, Edwardian translation. Someone said of Moncrieff, "Il a son propre petite style." Proust's writing is clear in French, and the new set of translations that have appeared in the past 15 years make that a lot clearer. If you don't like the book, you don't like it, but in view of the people who have declared it to be one of the greatest books ever written, you just sound like someone who just doesn't get it. I think the book is more profound than even the Bible, it is a deeply wise work by a great genius, who simply didn't live long enough to work out the duplicative parts of La Prisonniere and Albertine Disparu. The obsessiveness and the jealousy in them go on and on because that is just how those emotions operate, they won't let up. No one else that I am aware of ever wrote about either subject with the brilliance shown in this novel. Nobody.

[quote] the new set of translations

By the one translator?

Fuck no!

R386 To whom are you responding?

The new Proust translation(s) are discussed up above. Read the thread, sorry...

R379 I think you have to be Scottish to appreciate Sunset Song. It's a law there.

I love Restoration period literature. The plays of that genre are hilarious and filled with sex. William Wycherley, John Dryden, and William Congreve are all great playwrights.

Agreed, R390. I never forgot my college class on the coffeehouse culture, witty plays and poems, Areopagitica. Wonderful class taught by John Williams, the National Book Award winner. Love Fielding as well, or am I mixing eras?

R391 no, you're not mixing anything up. Areopagitica is a great piece on censorship. That period was coming out of a very repressed and religious driven society. They really braced the freedom and it's an underrated genre.

One of my favorite lines from that era is I think Pope's: "I am his majesty's dog at Kew. Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?" 'Braced the freedom' is a nice phrase, btw, R392! Anyway, I wish we had satirists of this caliber now. I'm out of the loop, though, so maybe we do and I just don't read them.

Found another gay character in a Zola book, La Curée (aka The Kill; 1872): Baptiste is a valet who expresses no interest in women and is witnessed making moonlight visits to the stables where he enjoys the pleasures of the grooms.

I'm getting into Mikhail Lermontov and I'm blown away by his writing.

R395 I'm blown away by his writing.

By his plotting or his dialogue? By his use of Russian adjectives and Russian adverbs?

R396 The language

[quote]“I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.”

Holy shit the OG incel.

People are strange when you're a stranger Faces look ugly when you're alone Women seem wicked when you're unwanted Streets are uneven when you're down

If we're talking old-timey stuff, I love "Candide."

I just currently started re-reading Proust. I've decided to re-enact the scenes as I read them. This month, I am rolling over in my bed. Thankfully, the Doordash driver is okay with coming into my house and delivering my meals to me.

My favorite novel of all time is "Under the Volcano." It's not yet a classic, but it's old enough to be classified as so by people born after its publication. Somehow, I relate to the protagonist.

>>hic<<

[quote] Holy shXt the OG incel.

What is OG?

literally: original gangster meaning: the original of a thing, does not have to be a gangster

DL is, for example, the OG gay messageboard (possibly the only one as well - but also the OG)

Lots of jealousy for people who read. Sorry you can't get outside your own heads long enough to get into the minds of some of the most amazing people who've ever lived. Stick to the Burger King menu, I guess. Nobody grudges you your pleasures the way you do ours.

Is it jealousy for people who read on this thread? IMHO most of the unpleasant posters just seem to be folks in love with their own erudite opinions to the point of disparaging others who offend their delicate and refined (or more continental and ancient) sensibilities. And they are few and far between. Most of the thread is a pleasant discussion punctuated good natured ribbing. (For instance, if I said off to AA with ya’ to R400 that’d be good natured ribbing)

I am reading The Commander and the Enemy now. Thanks to the poster who recommended it. It is a joy to read on the beach so I am glad to have started with that one at this time of year.

OP here. Wow this threat BLEW UP! I love the passion for books and learning. I'm a younger guy and it scares me how little my generation knows of Proust, Pushkin, or Poe.

Why are people being bitchy about books?

Haven't been through the thread yet.

I like William Makepeace Thackeray, read his "Vanity Fair" every few years.

Because some posters, OP, get angry that those of us who love literature don't equate beach reading with the greats. I read everything from trash to the classics, but some don't have the wherewithal for the more difficult reading, so they try to pretend there's no difference between trash and treasure. No way. I'm not down for that bullshit. Quality exists.

Off to where you belong, R403.

And you, R407. Off you pop.

Thank you for the ribbing, R404, and I'll take you're advice and head off to AA as soon as I finish re-enacting Proust (I expect around 2026.). It's good to know there are like-minded folks here.

R409 didn't know what 'pseudo' meant until he furiously started googling ways to bolster his self-esteem and show off his anti-intellectual cred. Off to your true home, R409. Don't let the door hit your shit-stained ass on the way out.

Let's carry on discussing books.

I credit my Russian teacher for introducing me to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, et. al. They're still my favorites. Fathers and Sons is an exquisite novel.

[quote] an exquisite novel

Plotting? description? or dialogue?

Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. Learned more English words from that book than from any other.

"The Captain and the Enemy" is a rather obscure one, Elder Lez. I was truly surprised my library didn't have a copy; they ordered it almost immediately upon suggestion probably thinking "How have we missed a Greene title after all this time?"

“Do you read classic literature Bro?”

Disappointed that no one else has mentioned Marguerite Yourcenar. Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss are amazing books.

Yourcenar lived a remarkable life. She was the winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, and the first woman elected to the Académie française. Also, a lesbian. Lived in Maine with her lover who translated her books, with her, into English. The books are extremely gay-friendly, especially about Hadrian's love for his young man.

Henry James is dull. William James and Henry Adams, though, are both well worth it.

Faulkner was a terrible writer, as was Hemingway.

Here is a really good piece about why Tolstoy is such a great writer:

^ALSO, the author of that article is starting a 2nd online reading group of War and Peace *today*, coincidentally, on 9/15/21. I just realized this. You can easily find Pevear and Volokhonsy's English translation online, if you're interested.

Anyone read George Gissing? His NEW GRUB STREET takes on Victorian book publishing and is remarkably au courant.

Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dominic Dunne. The true Masters of Literature.

Put "New Grub Street" on my TBR. Have zero interest in Russian classics by Dostoevsky, etc.