Classics Or Dud?

lol

That and Augustine, Tactius, Origen, Luther, Calvin, Igantius. They founded the way we view the world, and would give you great amunituion.

And as I find it hard to read anything written before 1945, I can't really help.

Using my college's reading list as a guide (http://www.sjca.edu/resources/seminar.phtml -- and Michael Daddino to thread, please), pick out what looks interesting and I'll tell you what I liked.

And EVERYBODY needs to read the Divine Comedy -- it ain't misnamed.

Also, The Monk! And The Faerie Queen, and that one by some 17th C lady that is kind of bizarre proto-feminist-scifi-fantasy. Hold on, I'll check what it's called...

Old and grebt (if not great) thing I'm reading right now and adoring: "Roister Doister".

I love the Ewing Grands Projets (sp?).

I'd go for the Paul smith designed ones though, they don't scream Pikey teenager as much as the standard ones.

i was thinking if they came in that penguin classic thing (i know bulgakov doesnt but...)

Tom Jones obv. And get a good translation of Don Quixote and don't feel bad when you skip the boring bits. Tristram Shandy too - the GRavity's Rainbow orf its time. ANd search all RLS.

I'll second Tacitus, find out just how naughty those romans really were.

I'd recommend metamophosis over the trial but I'd certain recommend the Berkoff stage adaptations of Kafka. They read very well, works as a book as well as a play.

Read the Ancient Mariner, read it again if you haven't for a while.

Read the Heaney translation of Beowulf and read the Legend of Gilgamesh.

Read Guliver's Travels and other Swift and Read Robinson Crusoe.

The big problem with the grands projets is that I never do them.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) - Robert Louis Stevenson
Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818) - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Notes from Underground -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sult aka Hunger (1890) - Knut Hamsun
Russ Abott Abott (Flatland)
The Torture Garden - Octave Mirbeau

There was a 19thc novelist called Russ Abott Abott?!?!

Flatland is one of the very few novels about math and philosophy that can appeal to almost any layperson. Published in 1880, this short fantasy takes us to a completely flat world of two physical dimensions where all the inhabitants are geometric shapes, and who think the planar world of length and width that they know is all there is.

I was going to concoct some exceedingly joke about there not being v much 'Atmosphere'. :(

Entire text online!
http://www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/

You can find may of them there classix at the Project Gutenberg website, as zipped text files. Grebt for skiving off work not too obviously. I read the entirety of Aldous Huxley's 'Crome Yellow' when I had absolutely no work to do a couple of weeks back. Not as good as reading an entire book in the bath, but getting paid for it.

i liked Wuthering Heights, which surprised me.

I felt as though I'd been robbed by the time I'd got to the end of it, I was in a mood for days.

Madam Bovery on the other hand is a cracking good read.

well i liked it anyway

tom read RUSKIN!

The only book pre-1900 i've tried is 'crime and punishment'. it wasn't very good.

''well it wasn't v good''

I think he had an idea but I just don't think you could write (now this judgemental comes from a reader so dismiss it if you like).

I better have lunch.

And who is this mediocre man referred to in Matt DC's post?

Jan

Age of Innocence too.

Shakespeare is good when you want a bit of light reading- I mean, the plotlines are pretty predictable, but you can find nifty obscure sentences to quote in everyday life and stuff.

Also, I feel obliged to give props to the country that birthed me and the one that adopted me, so:

Germany:

* German author Heinrich Von Kleist had a gorgeous writing style (which will no doubt be lost in translation haha!) and handled the themes of fate, despair, resignation and comfort better than most. I'm reading his short stories right now, which are great and amazingly up-to-date ("Michael Kohlhas" is a good dissertation of 19th century terrorism!), but apparently those are not to be found on amazon.uk- just a few plays, which I haven't read, but I'm sure they're great, too.

* Goethe's cool, but avoid The Sorrows Of Young Werther, which is totally Emo.

Portugal:

* The Maias by Eca De Queiroz is an epic, heartbreaking, wonderful, wonderful book that IMO easily holds up to English and French literature from the same era. I don't think you'll be able to grasp the full scope of it without actually *living* in Portugal, but it's a fantastic read even if you don't.

* Travels In My Homeland by almeida Garrett is like a 19th century On The Road! Except there's no jazz or sex and the food is crap.

(all books more chaotic than ususal until new shelves installed)

"Epitath of a Small Winner" by the Brazilian novelist De Assis, who was a contemporary of Twain's, is also very great.

Tolstoy.

Hawthorne is great, if you're interested in American writers.

Mark is dead right with Ruskin: try "The Storm Cloud of the 19th Century".

But really, never mind pre-1900, pre-1700 is where you want to be: The Anatomy of Melancholy, any collection of John Donne's prose (for spooky sex/death stuff), Thomas Browne (The Major Writings from Penguin: the man who invented the word "suicide" and wrote the most gloriously convoluted prose ever).

I was going to mention Bouvard et Pécuchet, but I think the edited-highlights panel beat me to it.

If no one has named Middlemarch yet*, then make it my submission: probably the best pre-C20 book I've ever read. Unless Shakespeare counts.

[*New Messages: they just have.]

[Luzhin]had fallen in love [with these two books] for his whole life, holding in them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained.

Re: classics. I second the back in the day shout out to Dante. I find old poetry easier to read than old fiction so a good anthology of British poetry (the one by Christopher Ricks looks good). Rabelais is fun.

Hahahaha. "This is the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilised world".

Yesterday I decided that the sequel would read thus:

"This is the poisoned and watered down wound of the civilised pint" - Octave Mirbeau - The Beer Garden.

Tom I suggest you read THE TEMPESTUOUS LOVELINESS OV TERROR! - you can read a sample chapter in my WAMPYRES book.

The collected Sherlock Holmes - fantastic

News from Nowhere - by someone famous, about a utopia, enjoyed it at the behest of my politics teacher. and did.

(has anyone on ilx read any of morris's fantasies: viz the glittering plain etc etc)

The Sufferings of Young Werther by Goethe
The Red & the Black by Stendhal
Germinal by Zola

And, you know, Moby Dick and probably Scarlet Letter and Huck Finn. But that's my Americanism coming thru.

also-huck finn sux

never read a word of nabokov so that doesn't mean much to me.

[Overwhelming note of intellectual despair -- and how to read all these anyway when there are all the new books and the new movies and the old movies and the music and the net chats and ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH. Moderator, delete all culture please.]

Sure thing. Can you burn all your Xenakis albums too?

-- Aaron W

Aaron, have you already posted that? At some other point? Or have I just had the worst case of deja vu ever?

Anyway Tom, you hate fiction. Why no go for Non-fiction grebt books.

[insert someone amusing] = the tacitus of the top 40

I suggest the Charles Jarvis translation in the Oxford's World Classics series. Most of the new translations are a bit too bald for my tastes, use clunky sentence structures in an effort to be more "modern" and don't flow well. The old translations tend to achieve a more consistent and fluent narrative voice, and so are preferable to most of the new stuff, but tend also to archaize a bit too heavily and lack some final polish. Jarvis seems to straddle these two tendencies fairly well and seems the most readable to me.

sure ned *coughs*.

''Julio the thing is it is a pretty easy thing to have listened to an 100-strong canon of albums, less to to have read 100 great books.''

you're saying that you finished the whole of the Clash's 'London calling'. you actually made all the way through things like 'Automatic for the people'.

seriously though: albs and CDs aren't the same but the canon is there. like the plague. its always so damn...oppressive (I can't think of a more 'sane' wording so don't kill me).

There is also the Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan: good selection, though I'd perfer something more philosophy-heavy, and the newest edition haphazardly adds stuff from the "Eastern" traditions (Confucius but no Lao-Tse, what the fuck?). Fadiman's own prose...well...let's put it this way: Fadiman was one of the original targets of the anti-middlebrow jeremiads back in the fifties, and unfortunately his stuff reads like it deserved the ire. Personable, intelligent, and hopelessly square. Forget anything connected with Mortimer J. Adler, the pompous ass.

OK, OK..I have to go back to work so I'm going to have to go fast. Novels, eh? You cannot go wrong with Madame Bovary or Don Quixote -- fiction's first hapless victims of pop culture?

I think every intelligent person should try their hand at the first book of Euclid's Elements.

1001 Nights - a book bursting with delights. Warning: 2,500 pages.
Most of Shakespeare - certainly the tragedies, the magical ones and the sonnets, at least.
Hugo - Les Miserables. Even better if you remember Jean Gabin playing Jean Valjean. Read Notre Dame too, and The Toilers Of The Sea.
Twain - Huck Finn first, then Pudd'n'head Wilson. Then everything else.
Ulysses
Proust - A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Not nearly the hard work you imagine a 5,000 page novel to be, a real thing of beauty
Dostoyevsky - start with C&P, then The Idiot and Karamazov too
Don Quixote
All of Oscar Wilde's plays, plus Dorian Gray
Odyssey, possibly Iliad too
Tristram Shandy
All of Jane Austen
All of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series (what's that, 27 or so? I confess I have not read all of them yet)
Candide
Madame Bovary
Dead Souls
Moby Dick
Kafka - Trial and Metamorphosis at least
Chekhov - at least a best of story collection
All of Emily and Charlotte Bronte
Some top Greek plays, like Sophocles' Oedipus plays, Lysistrata.

That's from memory. When you've finished all those, come back and I'll have a proper look for more.

esp. Job, Revelations, & the Psalms are great reads

the canon != this is great and you must have it all and if you don't like it then you is sux0r.

the canon = if you wanna get into something and don't know quite where to begin, you should maybe check this stuff out- loads of people like it, maybe you will too.

Martin took Farenheit 451 very seriously.

And don't neglect Shakespeare. The guy has his rep for a reason. Start, maybe, with "Henry IV pt. 1," which wows me every time. And the SONNETS!!

Second to Ptee's Tom Jones by Fielding, Alang's Vanity Fair and -- tho' Matt DC disagrees -- especially strong second to Martin's Moby Dick (ahem!)

Search also Daniel Defoe, particularly Journal of the Plague Year (huhhuh he said "turd" ) and Moll Flanders and, though not perhaps a Classic, Henri Murger, Scenes from the Latin Quarter -- Scenes de la Vie de Boheme. Momus to thread!

I have always wanted to read Pamela and Shamela, "The Spanish Tragedy" (Revenge Tragedies: Classic or Dud?) and Nana. Opinions?

Lots to unpack here. Every year Mortimer J. Adler would come to our college give one of his interminable super-bleedin' obvious lectures on whatever the hell he wanted to pontificate about. And every year there would a be a prank set up by the senior class which would, in some way or another, temporarily interrupt Adler's lecture.

When it came time for our class to come with ideas for that year's Adler prank, I said, hey, let's just get right to the point and off the motherfucker -- surely it couldn't be too hard to scare a ninety-plus-year-old man to death. The expectation that he might DIE ONSTAGE was to my mind the only reason people were still doing the yearly prank anyway, so I thought we might as well get the damn thing over with. I can't exactly remember the general reaction, but I remember this (and the other, completely unworkable prank idea I had based on the "Be Our Guest" scene from *Beauty and the Beast*) much better than the actual prank itself.

Silly College Traditions: Classic or Dud?

I'm sure I've wheeled this out before, but for anyone interested, Alessandro Manzoni's "The Betrothed" is accepted as the great Italian novel, and is a superb realist text filled with rollocking adventures across several decades and regions of 17th century Italy.

Then again, Stephenson got a mention... so I'd also add Stoker's Dracula as a dead important book which is also pretty good (continuity errors and slightly lame ending notwithstanding).

At the other end of history, I still wonder what the 'best' Homer translations are. I have only read Fitzgerald's Iliad and two versions of the Odyssey, Cowper and Andrews (the latter's out of print, I expect). I prefer the Odyssey of the two, as a genuine, wide-ranging epic (and it doesn't have that interminable list section). I'm not in a mood for reading this kind of thing lately, but in the back of my head the Lattimore versions still ping my curiosity.

I have performed the arguably masochistic act of reading the entire Shakespeare canon over time (excepting the Two Nobel Kinsmen). But I'm still going to be unoriginal and say that the essentials are Hamlet and Othello (the shock bit being my missing out Lear, maybe; I'm not as crazy about that one as most seem to be).

Also, how about POPE. I can't say I've read him since I was at school but I did enjoy it. Some of his cattier pieces are like ILE gone wrong.

Paradise Lost: someone sell me on Milton's 'Homer does the Old Testament' riff. I'm being dismissive; I've only ever managed to read maybe half of it. But, you know, 50-odd years after Shakespeare, a similar form of English, but what strikes me is that everything that had power in Shakespeare seems here merely clunky and leaden. (I'm not even saying Shakespeare was never clunky and leaden here and there... but he sure had his moments.)

So what am I missing? Why is this good? Or is it not?

The other one...

Faust: again, only read half of this (i.e. part one and a bit of part two). There's an inherent problem of translation here -- can't remember the translator's name, but they're Penguin editions. Still, I've seen an intellectual or ten (and I don't consider myself one) cite Goethe as a genius. Maybe I need to learn German to get it. I thought it was interesting but it just didn't move me or excite me or even intrigue me very much.

Again, I'd like to know what I'm missing. :)

As my opinion stands, I rate these two as Interesting Duds. But I know I ought to read the lot before even thinking that.

oh Caroline, No

Ayn Rand- The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand- Anthem

Don't try to change my mind...I REFUSE TO COMPROMISE!!!

That is an objective fact!

Agreed, although that's pretty much the agreed critical orthodoxy these days. Aren't we lucky we had a massive cataclysmic event in the first year of the 21st Century to make things easy for artists and historians?

If you're going to read Twain, Huck Finn is obviously first but then go onto 'Connecticut Yankee... '. The VU to Huck Finn's Sgt Pepper.

I think he creeps in before 1900, Jack London's 'Call of the wild' is essential. His journalistic style pretty much sets up the template for the next century.