Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Greatest Classical Novel?

Okay, a friend was commenting that she'd heard The Great Gatsby was listed as the all around greatest novel...and she didn't like it. I don't either. She then listed a 100 classics and noted which ones she had read. Here is the list, and the asterisk indicates which ones I have read. How many have you gotten to? Although, I have to say, I don't think that just because something was written ages ago qualifies it as a classic.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
* The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Gulliver's Travels by Johnathan Swift
Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
* The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
The Odyssey by Homer
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Candide by Voltaire
Oedipus The King by Sophocles
* The Hunchback Of Notre Dame [Notre-Dame De Paris] by Victor Hugo
The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Collected Poems by Robert Browning
The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James (I've tried reading Henry James, but I don't think it was this one...ugh)
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
* Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
* Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Collected Poems by John Keats
On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Collected Poems by Robert Frost
* The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
* Animal Farm by George Orwell
* Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
* Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (I've read Sense and Sensibility...)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Iliad by Homer
Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (I feel like I've read this one, my kids have told me all about it.)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
* Aesop's Fables by Aesop
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Politics And The Poetics by Aristotle
The Aeneid by Virgil
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Pygmalion And Candida by George Bernard Shaw
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
* Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Cherry Orchard And The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Beowulf
* Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Necklace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The History of Early Rome by Livy
* Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
* Alice's Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Rubáiyát Of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
The Red And The Black by Stendhal
A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickins
The Republic by Plato
Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Confessions by St. Augustine
Tales of Mystery And Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Ludwig and Wilhelm Grimm
* Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ( I feel like I've read it, my kids have had to for school and I've heard all about it)
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I guess some would say that I'm woefully lacking in my classical reading. And, perhaps I am. My english classes in high school did not require the classics for reading, so I started after I graduated from college. However, there are books I've read that were not listed that I think should be, and so I list them now.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (why wasn't that listed?)
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Unfortunately, these are the only ones that come to mind and as I look at them, I realize they are probably the feminine reader. Oh well...lol
How many of the great books have you read and encourage your children to read?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That is an amazing list. We read the classics at school in England, way back when, but I can't remember too much about them anymore. Reading classics as an adult has been much more interesting.

By the way, I'm giving away treats on my blog today to anyone who wants one. It's that time of year, so beware, it could be a trick :-)

Sandra said...

So I am going to snag this list and post it on my blog-- eventually.
I have read quite a few of them, and of all the ones I have read I think that I HATED Great Expectations the most. It was so boring and tedious that I had to force myself to pick it up and then I could only get half way through before I returned it to the library.

Wow... really??

so - I didn't realize it has been that long since my last post.  I think I kind of gave up on it, knowing I don't have many follower...