The Classics

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. I have read a few by both and have loved and reread them.

I love The Custom of the Country by Wharton because it’s so timeless. The story could be set in New York of today and it would be believable. It’s like a juicy society gossip story but with psychological depth. It is my favorite book by her, by far, and her best, I think, but The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence are usually what people think of first.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:On a different note, I just read "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and it was so good. The author's mind is so different than my own to have come up with that story.

FYI I watched the movie, and it was different enough to not be like the book at all. It wasn't a bad movie, but it was distressing to me how different it was, psychologically-speaking.

Go for the book!

There are 4 or 5 more books that follow Mr. Ripley and what he gets up to. They are excellent.
Patricia Highsmith is so devilish!

I liked one of her books called The Ones Who Walk Away, set in Venice. She had an interesting life that’s worth reading about too. I read a short book by one of her partners, Marijane Meaker, called Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. A very different time. She was a maverick.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I love Trollope, too.

Not too long ago I finally read War and Peace, and it is stunning. Just so good. I don’t always love the Russians (I recently tired to read The Brothers Karamazov and couldn’t get into it) but War and Peace is outstanding.

That’s on my reading “bucket list.” I read Anna Karenina this past year, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It took a few months for me to read, but I did it. I now have Crime and Punishment on my bedside table, but I keep putting it aside for quicker reads. I do love immersing myself in richly detailed long-ago worlds.

My favorite Russian classics are:
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
War and Peace by Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
Dead Souls by Gogol
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

I had a hard time with Doctor Zhivago, though I think it's because it was a Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. I read their Anna Karenina as a reread and absolutely hated how they did it.

I also had a hard time with Brothers Karamazov, but I may have been too young - in my 20s.

What other Russians should I try?

DP: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

[Anonymous]

Reviving this -

I've recently read
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (does that count as a classic yet?)
The Belton Estate by Anthony Trollope
The Ladies' Paradise by Zola

What other classics are people reading? Always trying to fill in the gaps of great books I've missed.

[Anonymous]

I'm really enjoying rereading classics through audiobooks. I've reread all of Jane Austen (these work so well on audio), Middlemarch, and To the Lighthouse this way. I find the audio format brings something new to old favorites, and they keep my attention unlike when I try to listen to new-to-me books.

[Anonymous]

Somerset Maugham is still good. The Moon and Sixpence. The Razor's Edge.

But there are a lot of classic authors I can't read anymore - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, John Updike. The dicks with a thesaurus as David Foster Wallace put it. Didn't age well.

The Russians are still good though. The Brothers Karamazov. And Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Somerset Maugham is still good. The Moon and Sixpence. The Razor's Edge.

But there are a lot of classic authors I can't read anymore - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, John Updike. The dicks with a thesaurus as David Foster Wallace put it. Didn't age well.

The Russians are still good though. The Brothers Karamazov. And Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

100% agree on the men you mentioned. Also Thomas Pynchon and Phillip Roth. No interest.

[Anonymous]

I have no interest in reading Pynchon at the moment, but I don’t regret reading Pynchon.

DFW was using irony, no?

[Anonymous]

I'm starting Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels. I've read several of the more well-known ones (Germinal, Nana, Pot-Bouille, Ladies' Paradise, The Beast Within) and I've loved them all, so I'm excited to start at the beginning. Just finished the first - The Fortunes of the Rougons - which sets up the characters ancestry and the political times that they are living in. It was good, but I'm glad I was already hooked on Zola, because it's not as captivating as his later works.

Any other Zola fans?

[Anonymous]

Anyone reading any classics currently?

I just picked up The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian classic from the 19th century.

[Anonymous]

Reading now: Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Reading now: Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I read that recently and enjoyed it very much (though probably not my favorite Dickens.)

[Anonymous]

Kate Chopin's The Awakening.
I came away from it wondering if it was rich people's problems.

Then there's Charles Dickens. Almost all his works seem to include hidden/unknown identities and massive bequests or inheritances based on that revelation. I suppose this was the dream for the average English working class Victorian.

[Anonymous]

I am going to re-approach Ulysses by James Joyce. I studied one chapter as part of my undergrad degree and I think it needs to be read / looked at in pieces, slowly. My mother said she could sit down and read it start to finish, but I don't know genuinely how much she was able to take in that way.

Anyone else read the whole thing, got advice?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really enjoyed Middlemarch recently. I read Silas Marner years ago and always wanted to read more George Eliot but like others kept turning to shorter options. Once I started I was smitten and happy to go along for the journey. The dialogue was amusing and clever. I found the characters very relatable and the relationships felt authentic.

Middlemarch is so good!

did middle march not make you so sad though?? Like reading David copper field just gives me a lump in my throat of dread. I remember reading middle march through one of those epic everything shuts down Dc winter storms and stopping to bawl my eyes out. I wouldn't callout enjoyable.

I do like dickens other books and find him hilarious- the one about the debtors prison little dorrit is SO SO funny and making references to it kept my siblings up while we went through probate for a dead parent. I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway for bookclub - inspired by the Wedding People.