Have you read a classic lately?
 

My book group task is to suggest a classic. Any favorites?

I can't seem to enjoy rereading a book...or rewatching a movie.

I read Evangeline at least once a year, but it is not an easy read. The reason it fascinates me is that it parallels my family's history.

I would say you can't go wrong with "To Kill a Mockingbird".

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.

Z

I as a lit major but somehow I missed a lot of "The Classics". I am going back and have started reading some of the ones I missed amid current popular fiction. The most recent was "Heart of Darkness". I would recommend "The Bell Jar" but not "The Picture of Dorian Gray" ( it had a 127 word sentence which did not advance the plot).

I just reread The Godfather. I guess that's not a classic unless you're from NJ. And I used audible books as I was waiting around the airport back and forth to Denver over the Holidays. I could half listen and people watch because I knew it so well and audio books are a good way for me to pass the time.

In the last year I enjoyed reading

The Good Earth...Pearl Buck
The Count of Monte Christo.....Aleander Dumas

I sometimes listen to some of the Classics on books on tape while driving around the Villages.

The Bible is one of these. http://www.inspiredby.com/bibleexperience.shtml

I have heard mention of the five foot shelve referring to the classics that can be purchased. does anyone know what this five foot shelve consists of and if it can still be purchased?

Middlemarch
George Eliot

DO NOT be intimidated by a 19'th C novel, it is very easy to read and the story becomes interesting very quickly. I love this book.

I think I'll start doing this. I love Evangeline and remember vividly my first encounter with it..Wow. this is a good suggestion.

Would you mind diagramming that 127 word sentence for me like Sister Jovita would do in the seventh grade?

The Harvard Classics had that Title at one time. They are online for free.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/t...ee-ebooks.html

Maybe consider reading Lady Chatterley's Lover. Controversial, scandalous, and even banned when published in the late 1920s. Those risqué scenes are rather tame by today's standards, though the very mention of the title makes the mind go straight to. . .:o. . .well, you know. . .

It has been a few years since I have read it, but when you asked the book club question, I thought about how interesting it could be to read and discuss it now.

Lots to talk about: Women's roles, then and now, and all that stuff in between. Class distinction. The characters. Lawrence's use of language. More things, too, that I can't think of right now.

Downton Abbey fans might enjoy reading about Lady Chatterley. It's about that time.

Well, good luck with whatever you choose. I think I have just talked myself into a Kindle download of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's a classic, after all.

One of my goals this year is to read more classics. I came up with a list of classics I thought I would enjoy.

Right now I am reading The Bell Jar which is very good so far.

Others on my list:
The Secret Garden
Flowers For Algernon
Memoirs of a Geisha
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Screwtape Letters
The Handmaid's Tale


Good luck.

For a classic book, you cannot beat "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. Strong women characters, scandal, family dynamics and love all interplay in a wonderful book. I would also recommend David Copperfield, excellent book!

Harvard Classics: The elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf .
Harvard Classics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Within the limits of fifty volumes, containing about 22,000 pages, I was to provide the means of obtaining such a knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seems essential to the twentieth century idea of a cultivated man. The best acquisition of a cultivated man is a liberal frame of mind or way of thinking; but there must ..."

At 15 pages a day [15 minutes] you will be done in 4 years. That's not too bad but look at the list. I nodded off just reading the titles.

but click here for a free download

Nice selection of popular fiction, but not classics.

If you want to stick to a strict definition, I have never read a classic because I cannot speak Latin or Greek.

For American literature:

The Grapes of Wrath
East of Eden
The Scarlet Letter (spoiler alert!)
My Antonia
The Great Gatsby
Slaughterhouse Five

Thank you Tal

Yea but to learn Latin or Greek play golf:swear:

One of my Latin teachers taught that a 'classic is that which has pleased many for a long time over different periods.' Words to that effect.

So to some, maybe the Aeneid was in fact 'popular fiction.' Then it grew whiskers and by passage of some undefined time became a true classic. Almost ninety years have passed since the magnificent prose segments of Tom Joad and Preacher Casy in "The Grapes of Wrath." After a while I think it's hard to distinguish between "popular fiction" and a classic.

Perhaps look at "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," or "Moby Dick" or so many of the other great books mentioned above.

The Mill on the Floss
 

everyone should read Giants in the Earth about Norwegian immigrants. i love the quality of the writing in The Mill on the Floss, also by George Eliot who was a woman...and i also reread a few times The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy....if you are teachers you will love Good Bye Mr Chips...i still get a nice feeling just thinking about these books....my favorites! from the great french literature comes A Knot of Vipers by Francois Mauriac, great characterizations. and anything by Graham Green, especially The Potting Shed. i had to read My Antonia in american literature and it was the most depressing thing i ever read, sorry Willa Cather.
Enjoy!

NOT A CLASSIC BUT A GOOD READ after the classic
 

"THE GOOD EARTH" by Pearl S. Buck is one of my all time favorites, which I've read & reread numerous times.........excellent classic.

Also, another recommendation is "Gone with the Wind"........

"The Emigrants" by Vilhelm Moberg: about Swedish immigrants setting up a farm/homestead in America........well worth reading....

"Exodus" by Leon Uris

However, I'm pretty eclectic in what I read........including books that depict what "might" happen in our near future......given the current state of the world.

At the moment, I'm reading "ONE SECOND AFTER" by William R. Forstchen........re what would happen to all of us if an E.M.P. (electro magnetic pulse) should go off over the horizon.......did you know that our modern cars would not work?

Anyone have an old Edsel? Volkswagon bus/van? Old, very old Army Jeep? You are my new best friend. This book is so riveting (very easy read).....that I encouraged my husband to also put it on his Kindle.........he's almost caught up to where I am at the moment.

New York Times best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real...a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages...A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies.

Months before publication, One Second After has already been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a book already being discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon as a truly realistic look at a weapon and its awesome power to destroy the entire United States, literally within one second. It is a weapon that the Wall Street Journal warns could shatter America. In the tradition of On the Beach, Fail Safe and Testament, this book, set in a typical American town, is a dire warning of what might be our future...and our end.

In a Norman Rockwell town in North Carolina, where residents rarely lock homes, retired army colonel John Matherson teaches college, raises two daughters, and grieves the loss of his wife to cancer. When phones die and cars inexplicably stall, Grandma’s pre-computerized Edsel takes readers to a stunning scene on the car-littered interstate, on which 500 stranded strangers, some with guns, awaken John’s New Jersey street-smart instincts to get the family home and load the shotgun. Next morning, some townspeople realize that an electromagnetic pulse weapon has destroyed America’s power grid, and they proceed to set survival priorities. John’s list includes insulin for his type-one diabetic 12-year-old, candy bars, and sacks of ice. Deaths start with heart attacks and eventually escalate alarmingly. Food becomes scarce, and societal breakdown proceeds with inevitable violence; towns burn, and ex-servicemen recall "Korea in ’51" as military action by unlikely people becomes the norm in Forstchen’s sad, riveting cautionary tale, the premise of which Newt Gingrich’s foreword says is completely possible. --Whitney Scott

WILLIAM R. FORSTCHEN has a Ph.D. from Purdue University with specializations in Military History and the History of Technology. He is a Faculty Fellow and Professor of History at Montreat College. He is the author of over forty books, including the New York Times bestselling series Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor (coauthored with Newt Gingrich), as well as the award-winning young adult novel We Look Like Men of War. He has also authored numerous short stories and articles about military history and military technology. His interests include archaeological research on sites in Mongolia, and as a pilot he owns and flies an original World War II "recon bird." Dr. Forstchen resides near Asheville, North Carolina with his teenage daughter Meghan and their small pack of golden retrievers and yellow labs.





　


　

Tal, thanks for the great link, much appreciated.:read:

It depends on the definition. Maybe more people would read classics if people could relate to them.

True!!

And those are the classics that I cannot stand. Too much blah blah blah and not enough getting done and living. Shoot me now, lol. Some people love them and can discuss them forever…me I want to live life not discuss it:icon_wink:

I agree with your " I want to live life not discuss it" but why not do both? As Socrates said, "The ‘unexamined life is not worth living’ - I live my life fully but still can educate myself and read how others see life and what it is to be human

For me living life to the fullest includes discussing it.

Balance is always good. I just wish more people "did" instead of yammering about it or complaining about it, lol.

That's good. We are all different and that's what makes the world go round. Of course we can learn from each other by discussing things. It's when the same things are pounded to death or entirely and unnecessarily descriptive that my eyes start to glaze over, lol.

I think I was misunderstood. What I meant was if it can explained in 250 words then it doesn't need to be dragged out in 1000 words as many of the true classics are.(of course those are random amounts) It can be discussed and we can all learn about others and empathy from reading but it doesn't need to be such a long drawn out story.

Can't disagree with that. :)

I know what you're talking about, and it still goes on in some modern novels that are not 'top sellers' for that reason probably. I steer clear of Charles Dickens and always have. Paid by the word or page and it shows it.

Another set of novels, "Dance to the Music of Time" by Anthony Powell will pull you right into a social group in mid-20th century England. Beautiful writing and some odd and interesting characters - all well developed.

As the thread turns. . .

I am thinking of tweeting The Great American Novel.

Thoroughly Modern Laurie

I always know who would be enjoyable to be around. They summarize.

Anything Jane Austen wrote. Funny, poignant, profound.