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Midnight-Rider

Favorite Classical Works?

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I havent seen a thread for this yet, so I decided to make it!

 

What is your favorite classic book or books? Any recommendations for some?

 

My personal favorites are To Kill A Mocking Bird, Where The Red Fern Grows, Moby Dick, Black Beauty, to start on some!

 

So, yeah, discus below!

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I've liked most of the classics I've read in high school, though we had a lot of contemporary works rather than classics so I haven't read many of the "staples" of high school english.

 

The ones I remember the best were Jane Eyre, The Call of the Wild, Heart of Darkness, and 1984.

Edited by TehUltimateMage

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When I read the topic title I thought you meant classical as in Ancient Greek and Latin, lol.

 

Lolita, Animal Farm, War of the Worlds, Little Women, Call of the Wild, Wuthering Heights, TKAM, The Invisible Man, Black Beauty, White Fang, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, and more that I'm not remembering now. I'm not actually sure if all of these are considered classics but whatever

 

Just realized that my list is kinda long. If I had to condense into a top three: Lolita, Black Beauty, and Animal Farm. And Call of the Wild. Guess that makes it a top 4.

Edited by glamoursea2

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I need to read some of those, actually! Im going to read A Tale of Two Cities soon for history plus others I cant remember the name of right now.

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Voltaire's Candide is actually pretty funny (at least, in French - I'm not sure how well it translates, as I've never read it in English). And I absolutely love The Bald Soprano - just as much fun to read as it is to watch.

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I actually have a lot that I can consider as favorites xd.png though I must say these were the most memorable ones for me.

 

-Count of Monte Cristo

-The Secret Garden

-Little Lord Fauntleroy

-The Incredible Journey

-Tess of D'Urbervilles

-Pride and Prejudice

-Anne of Green Gables

-Heidi

-The Social Cancer

 

Where the Red Fern Grows still brings tears to my eyes whenever I read it. So much nostalgia xd.png

 

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It would be easier for me to do favourite classical authors, I think (I'm really bad at choosing favourite books).

 

-Alexandre Dumas

-Wilkie Collins

-Charles Dickens

-H.G. Wells

-Daphne Du Maurier

-Margaret Atwood

-F.Scott Fitzgerald

Edited by owlion

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My favourites are as follows:

 

-Macbeth by William Shakespear

-The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

-And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

-Tolkien's Legendarium

-Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespear (more sentimental because I was in a production)

-Utopia by Thomas Moore

-The Complete Grimm's Fairytales by the Brother's Grimm

-The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson

-The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom (more of a modern classic but still great)

-Selected poems of Edgar Allen Poe

Edited by OutlawQueen

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@OutlawQueen we've got some favourites in common. :P I love Jane Eyre and Poe's poetry is some of my favourite. I also love Romeo and Juliet (but cop a bit of slack for it) since Mercutio is my all time favourite Shakespearean character and the biggest redeeming feature of Romeo and Juliet. Macbeth is great, but I always struggle to pick a favourite Shakespeare. Hamlet and Othello tend to fight over that coveted position. 

 

I wouldn't even know where to start listing my favourite classic novels, so I'm going to follow someone else's lead and go with authors. George Orwell, Henry James, John Steinbeck, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Robert Louis Stevenson.

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@StormWizard212 Cool! I haven't read Hamlet or Othello yet, but I do have a copy of Hamlet that I plan on picking up in the summer.

 

I think it's hard to choose great classics because all of them are great. That's why they've been around for over 100 years.

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Hamlet is definitely worth reading. I hope you enjoy it! I studied it extensively at high school and absolutely loved it. I've seen it on stage a couple of times, too. I saw Othello earlier this year when we had a pop up Globe Theatre in my city and that was amazing. 

 

Speaking of plays, Tennessee Williams is another favourite of mine. Cat on a Hot Tin roof is a personal favourite. ^_^

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I used to be a pretty big Shakespeare nerd, I seemed to be the only one in my high school Shakespeare class that actually enjoyed it all. I do tend to enjoy his sonnets more, though.

 

Definitely To Kill a Mocking Bird, probably Black Beauty (although I cry every time I read when he's abused), The Crucible... Some of Edgar Allen Poe's stuff.

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The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Heidi, Jane Eyre, Black Beauty, To Kill a Mockingbird, Little Women, Gone With the Wind, The Handmaid's Tale, The Godfather, and pretty much anything by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, or compiled by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.

Edited by catstaff

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- The Middle-earth universe

- All the classic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, Perrault, Villeneuve, etc.

- Shakespeare, especially Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream

- Homer's Odyssey

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I honestly should be reading more classical works than what I have been reading so far ... But I do believe the ones I've read to this point and loved are as follow:

- The Phantom of the Opera

- A thousand and one nights

- Fairytales by the Brother Grimm, Andersen, etc.

- Alice in Wonderland (at least here in Sweden it's deemed to be a classical book, even though it's a children's book).

- Frankenstein

- Most written work by Selma Lagerlöv and August Strindberg (two of our Swedish authors and poets who are deemed as some of the "must-read" here in Sweden if you're into literature)

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Definitely a big TKAM fan! It was an unpopular opinion but high school English books were actually amazing. The classics are the classics for a reason I guess!

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Bram Stoker's Dracula and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray are my personal favorite classic books.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was alright, but not my favorite.

I'm not sure if they're recognized as classics, but of course Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are good. Though The Lord of the Rings is very, very, VERY long.

Oh, and Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy is another good classic for me. But it takes a while to get into the flow of the writing unless you're used to it already.

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I've read way too few classics! My first thoughts were Austin's Pride and Prejudice and Alcott's Little Women. Then there are several 20th century works that I love, like Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Adam's Watership Down (all three translated into Finnish by my favourite translator Kersti Juva, by the way!), Le Guinn's Earthsea, Ende's Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story), Lindgren and Calvino; and I almost forgot Jansson's Moomins despite being Finnish. It's not like I've read many books from those three authors, though, just like two from each.

Edited by Varislapsi

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my prefer classical works is :

Tthe lady of the camelias of  Alexandrè Dumas Jr.

The woman in Black of Susan Hill

The italian or the confessional of the black penitents of Ann Radcliff.

Journey to the centre of  earth of Jules Verne

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Ooooo.  Ooooooo oooo ooooo.  Okay, I'm glad I found this thread.  

 

On 8/18/2019 at 1:32 AM, Sesshomaru said:

All the classic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, Perrault, Villeneuve, etc.

@Sesshomaru, first, SAME, and also, have you ever puttered around the Sur La Lune website?  They're in transition from an old format to a new one right now, but they do these great annotated versions of fairy tales and let you look at different authors' and cultures versions of similar stories side by side, and it's just really really great for folks who are into that kind of nerdery.  Here's a random bit of the currently-in-development site that shows a bunch of different takes on the Beauty and the Beast theme.  

 

For all the others out there who like Fairy Tales and, er, can deal with ones that make them cry buckets, I love Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales.  He only wrote a few but they mostly are just heartbreakingly beautiful and ... er... heartbreaking.  They're on Project Gutenberg, and "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose" stick out most in my memory.  

 

On 8/2/2015 at 1:19 AM, Gsea said:

When I read the topic title I thought you meant classical as in Ancient Greek and Latin, lol.

 

I have a tendency of doing that, too.  Er, if Platonic dialogues are fair game for this list, really like several of them.

 

On 9/29/2015 at 1:13 PM, m_overdone said:

Voltaire's Candide is actually pretty funny (at least, in French - I'm not sure how well it translates, as I've never read it in English).

 

At least the translation I initially read of Candide is also funny in English.  So is Gargantua and Pantagruel, but both were more fun to read in French, for me.

 

ANYWAY... 

 

My actual list: 

 

  • The Brothers Karamazov (I like Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation best)
  • The Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset (Nunnally translation) which is kind of the same weight as the above but focused on woman and how her choices shaped her life
  • ... is it too early to call N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth Trilogy classic?
  • Hamlet and several of Shakespeare's sonnets, too
  • The Aeneid by Virgil
  • The Inferno by Dante
  • Persuasion by Austen
  • The Little Prince
  • Ulysses
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • The Glass Menagerie
  • A Confederacy of Dunces
  • The End of the Affair
  • The Last Unicorn
  • Haroun and the Sea of Stories
  • The Phantom Tollbooth

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