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Worthy "Classic" Novels
Muppet King:
--- Quote from: Spluff on 22 Sep 2010, 05:04 ---Catch 22 is unflinchingly brilliant.
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Agreed.
Anything from Mark Twain is worth reading.
The Dead by James Joyce is a short story and lags a little in the typical Joyce way, but once you hit the end the story all of a sudden becomes amazing.
Lolita is pretty excellent.
Confederacy of Dunces.
The Collector by John Fowles. It's not the best book, but it's worth a look.
As for crimes against humanity, Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. She may have been partially responsible for some of the greatest writers ever, but she could not write a decent story to save her life. She also once said that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his wanting to enact lebensraum.
Inlander:
A lot of classic novels get a bad rap because people are made to read them in high school, and frankly there's some literature which you can't appreciate until you're a little older and a little more experienced in life. When I first read Thomas Hardy (the Return of the Native) for school when I was around 15 I hated it - partly in a genuine way, and partly because the accepted wisdom in the classroom was that "it sucks". It took me more than ten years to give Hardy another go: I picked up the Woodlanders in a bookshop just to give it the first page test and see if I'd changed my opinion since high school, and I was just floored by the quality of the writing. Even now it's impossible for me to read that first page (here it is) and not be absolutely seduced.
DavidGrohl:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a great read if you like mystery.
jimbunny:
See, the thing is, most books that are considered "classics" are that way because, for those who can attain a certain state of mind and get a grasp of the idiom (eg Elizabethan, Victorian, Modern, etc. English) these works are - really - good. Lots of things are worth reading that don't make it into the canon, but there aren't many things that do make it that don't deserve to at least be read, if not revered.
That said, Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground is riveting. I can't give you an informed opinion about the various translations of Russian literature, but Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have done an absolutely spectacular job with everything I've encountered of theirs so far.
JD:
--- Quote from: Buttfranklin on 21 Sep 2010, 23:41 ---
--- Quote from: Tom on 21 Sep 2010, 22:37 ---Frankenstein, seriously. The best Industrial Revolution allegory ever written.
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Also, Brave New World.
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1984 while we're at it.
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