I just got into reading classics this past school year because of a literature classic I’m taking. I didn’t realize how much I’d like them, but now I’m trying to read like every literary classic that exists. I’ve already read: Fahrenheit 451, Hamlet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sense and Sensibility, Candide, Emma, Beloved, The Color purple, The Handmaid’s Tale, Pride and Prejudice, Into the Wild, The Joy luck club, Frankenstein, Julius Caesar, A Doll’s House, The Outsiders, A Separate Peace, The A.B.C Murders, To kill a Mockingbird, and Anthem.
by historicallypink16
13 Comments
You have to read The Picture of Dorian Gray ITS SO GOOD!! and then read Oscars Wilde’s plays, specifically The Importance of Being Earnest.
I haven’t read 1984 yet but I’ve read Animal Farm, one the best books to ever exist honestly. Should be mandatory reading in every school.
If you like or are interested in Shakespeare and like Margaret Atwood’s style a lot, you could read Hag-Seed. It’s her retelling of The Tempest. You could read The Tempest too, but if it’s your first Shakespeare you might enjoy tackling a well known story like Romeo and Juliet so you can focus more on the language and not language plus plot.
I second The Picture of Dorian Gray! A few more I enjoyed: Anna Karenina, 1984, Anne of Green Gables, North and South, The Bell Jar
The Count of Monte Cristo, Jane Eyre, Atlas Shrugged.
Jorge Amado: Captains of the Sands
Mikhail Bulgakov: the Master and Margarita
Stephen Crane: the Red Badge of Courage
Daniel Defoe: A Jounal of the Plague Year
George Eliot: Silas Marner
EM Forster: a Passage to India
Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton
Graham Greene: the Quiet American
Ernest Hemingway: for whom the Bell Tolls
Rudyard Kipling: Plain Tales from the Hills
Chaderlos de Laclos: Dangerous Liaisons
W Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
John Steinbeck: the Grapes of Wrath
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
Oscar Wilde: the Picture of Dorian Gray
Tom Wolfe: the Right Stuff
E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby…
Tim Sawyer, Adventures of Huck Finn, Gone With the Wind, Wicked, there are 3 books,
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
Omg the island of doctor moreau is insanely good
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Good Earth, The Fat and the Thin; read some Charles Dickens? –there are so many oldies that are my favorites. The first is a russian prison, the second is starving in China–but so much more.
David Copperfield, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Bell Jar, and East of Eden
*Their Eyes Were Watching God*
*A Tree Grows in Brooklyn*
*The Parable of the Sower*
*The Woman Warrior*
Madam Bovary
The Age of Innocence
The Sound and the Fury(tricky)
Another vote for Dorian Gray
The Sun Also Rises