What classic literature should we be sure not to miss?

The Bible
Huckleberry Finn
Moby Dick
Treasure Island
Crime & Punishment
The Oddysee
The Iliad
Sense & sensibility
Alice in Wonderland
A brief history of time
The time machine
Animal farm
Mein Kampf
Works of Edgar Allen Poe
Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Works of Steinbeck
Catcher in the Rye
and the list goes on and on and on and on…..

it’s awesome because everything you put in your mind adds to who you are.

I have a fuzzy place in my heart for Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Hugo was an amazing man: historian, statesman, observer of human nature, and veritable architect of fictional narrative. In Notre-Dame, he engages the reader directly, all but grabbing you by the collar and sucking you back to medieval Paris, where he acts as your personal, avuncular tour guide through its labyrinthine passages, the perfect metaphor for the human heart.

A Tale of Two Cities has always been my favorite classic. All the dual symbolism always impressed me, and the French Revolution is a pretty cool part of history.

Catcher in the Rye, Atlas Shrugged, 1984, Animal Farm, The Iliad, The odyssey. I also agree with all of @DrBill‘s list.

Voltaire Candide
Dickens A Tale of Two Cities
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Kipling Gunga Din
Melville Moby Dick
Conrad Lord Jim
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers
Shaw Major Barbara (play)
Moliere Le Misanthrope ou l’Atrabilaire amoureux
Defoe Robinson Crusoe
Plato The Republic
Dante The Divine COmedy

It is impossible to come up with even a sem,i-comprehensive list here.

Joyce – Dubliners
Camus – The Plague
Borges – Ficciones
Abbott – Flatland
Coover – Pricksongs and Descants
Barth – Lost in the Funhouse
Cortazar – Blow Up and Other Stories / Hopscotch
Dreiser – Sister Carrie
Mann – Death in Venice

@Marina: I know, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t ask you to try.

King Lear.

@EP; I have been reading since i was six and still haven’t covered everything. I didn’t get to Joyce’s Ulysses until I was in my forties. When I reread many of the books I loved, I have entirely different take.

Here’s the Modern Library List of lists..100 best novels, 100 best non-fiction (all originally written in English. You can move on to books in translation if you live long enough).

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best.html

DICKENS DICKENS DICKENS…. oh and Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White – brilliant!!

Everything already listed, plus pretty much anything by the following authors:

Isaac Asimov
Jane Austen
Ray Bradbury
the Bronte sisters
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Lord Byron
Orson Scott Card
Lewis Carroll
Geoffrey Chaucer
Dante
Charles Dickens
Emily Dickenson
Frederick Douglass
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alexandre Dumas
TS Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson
William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Benjamen Franklin
Robert Frost
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robert Heinlein
Ernest Hemingway
O Henry
Homer
Victor Hugo
Aldous Huxley
Henrik Ibsen
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Rudyard Kipling
CS Lewis
Jack London
Richard Lovelace
Sir Thomas Malory
Arthur Miller
Sir Thomas More
Flannery O’Connor
George Orwell
Plato
Edgar Allan Poe
Alexander Pope
Sir Walter Scott
William Shakespeare
Mary Shelley
Percy Shelley
Upton Sinclair
Socrates
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jonathan Swift
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Henry David Thoreau
JRR Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Virgil
Jules Verne
Voltaire
HG Wells
Walt Whitman
Oscar Wilde
Tennessee Williams
William Butler Yeats

I’m sure there are hundreds more, but that’s a good start (and I apologize for any typos/misspelled names)

@gailcalled I love the list, but technically a lot of those books can’t be called “classics” since they’re relatively new. To be “classic” a book has to stand the test of time, which implies that it’s been around a while.

I’ll offer two children’s choices I don’t believe should be missed:

The entire collection of Beatrix Potter
The Wizard Of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I truly loved reading Catch-22 and A Good Man is Hard to Find. They were a pleasure, a beautiful, funny, depressing pleasure.

@Alyanna: That list was an example. You can find dozens more (even a few that mention Beowolf) on the various literary sites.

I am a home schooler. There are many resources for “Great Literature” and even more for curriculums based ont the “Great Books”

Here are “The Authors of the Great Books” (according to most colleges):

Adam Smith
Aeschylus
Aquinas
Archimedes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Augustine
Austen
Bacon
Balzac
Barth
Beckett
Bergson
Berkeley
Bohr
Boswell
Brecht
Calvin
Cather
Cervantes
Chaucer
Chekhov
Conrad
Copernicus
Dante
Darwin
Descartes
Dewey
Dickens
Diderot
Dobzhansky
Dostoevsky

Eddington
Einstein
Engels
Epictetus
Erasmus
Euclid
Euripides
Faraday
Faulkner
Fitzgerald
Frazer
Freud
Galen
Galileo
George Eliot
Gibbon
Gilbert
Goethe
Hardy
Harvey
Hegel
Heidegger
Heisenberg
Hemingway
Henry James
Herodotus
Hippocrates
Hobbes
Homer
Huizinga
Hume
Huygens

Ibsen
J.S. Mill
Joyce
Kafka
Kant
Kepler
Keynes
Kierkegaard
Lavoisier
Lawrence
Levi-Strauss
Locke
Lucretius
Machiavelli
Mann
Marcus Aurelius
Marx
Melville
Milton
Moliére
Montaigne
Montesquieu
Newton
Nicomachus
Nietzsche
O’Neill
Orwell
Pascal
Pirandello
Planck
Plato
Plotinus

Plutarch
Poincare
Proust
Ptolemy
Rabelais
Racine
Rousseau
Russell
Schrodinger
Shakespeare
Shaw
Sophocles
Spinoza
Swift
T.S. Eliot
Tacitus
Tawney
Thucydides
Tocqueville
Tolstoy
Twain
Veblen
Virgil
Voltaire
Waddington
Weber
Whitehead
Whitehead
William James
Wittgenstein
Woolf

Yoicks. That list makes me feel like a simpleton. How much of one author do you have to read to make it count? Neils Bohr, Berkeley and Wittgenstein should provide some giggles.

i don’t know a lot of classic literature, but some that i really really took to were
the great gatsby
the catcher in the rye
1984
Fahrenheit 451
huckleberry finn
the alice in wonderland books
animal farm
i started reading something by franz kafka, but i can’t remember what it was, and i didn’t get a chance to finish it. but it seemed very interesting.

@tiffyandthewall: This possibly?

The Metamorphosis

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections.

@gailcalled Woooooow! I’ve never read that one.

I have read many of those listed here, heard synopses of more, and heard of even more, but The Metamorphosis is one I’ll have to check out!

I agree with the people who said Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis is a crazy book (not even a book more a short story) makes me feel bad for bugs, now when ever see a bug stuck on its back i grab piece of paper or something to help the little guy.

I also think Dubliners by Joyce is good, and finnegans wake if your fine with not having any idea what the Hell Joyce is talking about.

and im not sure if anybody said To Kil a Mocking bird but thats one of my favorites

and also sombody said The Plague by Camus i would also say The Stanger by Camus, The Cure even wrote a song about The Stranger

I can and do read almost everything that has been printed. Finnegan’s Wake is gibberish and will put you off literature forever.

Read Dubliners (short stories), then Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” (protagonist is Stephen Dedalus) and the Ulysses. That takes place during a twenty-four hour period* in Dublin and has a cast of thousands, but the main ones are Stephen Dedalus again and Leopold and Molly Bloom. Dedalus is Joyce’s literary alter ego.

*Bloomsday is celebrated all over the literate world, often with a marathon reading of the entire (long) novel.

“Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on 16 June in Dublin, Ireland and elsewhere to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce’s first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday

Camus’s novels are easy to read in French. He uses short sentences and simple vocabularly.

Lots of people have sure enumerated lots of good literature but if we stay with the Children’s Classics… first I would choose the Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen. Aesop’s Fables next. Then you can literally read anything and enjoy.

My all time favoute book is The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

I’ll keep it short and simple to make it more actionable and less overwhelming:
Great Expectations
Wuthering Heights
Stranger in a Strange Land
Fountainhead

All great reads that I have read multiple times.

Let’s not forget the tales by the Brothers Grimm, in their original form. They make good children’s tales, as well as great adult metaphors.

To Kill A Mockingbird

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest