Yeah, "classics" is a pretty broad category. Maybe pick a country or century you've liked in the past/are interested in and go from there.

Moby Dick!!!

Ugh! I had a copy of it laying around and thought it would be the one. It's not.

So which one of his was the masterpiece and why did you think that?

The book I have explains that name thing you mention in the notes at the start of the book and gave a listing of each characters name to make it less confusing. So far it's not bad, except the part about not being familiar with the names and that being distracting in and of itself.

Of the stuff I've read recently:

Catcher and The Rye - awesome
The Great Gatsby - awesome
Moby Dick - suck
Of Mice and Men - awesome

so I guess, if those are classics the good ones were in the 20th century. BTW, did you like Tale of Two Cities? I have it on my shelf but am a little afraid to read it.

Crime and Punishment. Which I loved, but didn't have any guides in the edition I read. I read it in a college course and the whole class was pretty unanimous in getting confused and annoyed at times. But almost everybody loved the book even if they hated some of the characters or their reasoning or, of course, acts.

Read some of his shorter stuff too but it wasn't a problem there. Crime and Punishment is the only novel of his that I read.

This sums up 99% of people's views of these 4 books. I'd start with Gatsby personally. It's pretty good times. Ya know, as long as you remember that green is symbolic. Hah.

Moby Dick is great if you skip all the whale natural history chapters.

Gatsby, otoh, is bleeeeeeeehhhhhgghh.

You are so unAmerican.

"Lady Chatterly's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence. Its short and scandalous in its time.

Huckleberry Finn by Twain is pretty good.

Just walk into the section on classics and read the book sleeves then open and scan a few lines of prose. If you find you like the writing style then you read it. Reading is like learning to walk. You go with the understandable style first and graduate to the more complicated later. The read really is better if it flows.

Read a book because you like it or you probably won't finish it.

Historical fiction has always been one of my favorite genre's in literature and film. Its even more fun if it is the fiction itself that is historical and not just it's subject. Or so I recently decided when I started reading Dickens.

Sherlock Holmes - the short stories - will tide you over while you decide. Great little reads.

Poe's short stories are often very good too.

Do you think Poe's stories are better before or after you know about his life a little bit? (with regards to women and such)?

I'm assuming you know about Poe already Blarg (hence the Q), but if not, I recommend a quick read up to anyone.

An author's life can be evocative or interesting, but it doesn't change the words on the pages he wrote, and I try to evaluate and experience those first and foremost.

I think there's a lot of unfair hindsight and ghoulish speculation that goes on over the corpses of authors, and it can undermine or exaggerate their popularity and critical acceptance too much. That seems very misdirected to me. I don't really care if Poe and Fitzgerald were drunks and had romantic traumas, Hemingway committed suicide, or Nietzsche went insane. Makes for a whopping good story sometimes, but -- it's a different story than the one I'm usually interested in.

Poe's great love died young, right? All I can remember. I seem to recall associating that fact of his life with The Raven.

IIRC, his mother died when he was a child. His "true" love left him when he went off to college. They met again much later on in life and were set to marry when he died, I believe. His first wife, his cousin, died of the "consumption" (I forget exactly which disease this is) and losing women/love is a pretty prominent theme in a lot of his work. He was an incredibly interesting character, imo, and his poetry is really worth checking out. I'm not a huge fan of poetry in general, but his is very moving and a bit soul-crushing (in the good way). I don't think I've read very many of his short stories though.

Edit: Looked it up; Consumption = Tuberculosis according to wikipedia.

Yeah, as I understood it, pretty much everyone in his life died of tuberculosis. Essentially people around him were coughing up and spewing blood. The guy definitely had some hard times.

And Zutroy, his short stories have the same themes from the few (and just a few) that I've read. I have that big purple book of Poe's works back home, but I haven't read it yet.

Blarg, I agree that the words themselves are the most important. I do also think, however, that sometimes the author's life can really enhance the story. For some reason, Poe is one of those cases. His stuff is already great, but the fascinating story behind his life sort of just adds to the mystique of his stories for me. In some ways, I guess it adds to that "soul-crushing" that Zutroy mentioned (I like that diction btw).

Rhetorical device known as understatement.

I love Poe's detective stories most of all, and I'm also a big fan of his novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. In addition, two critical works on these use a fairly modern (new historical) approach, but the works of John Irwin (links below) almost defy classification. His first book looks at how Borges "rewrites" Poe's detective stories, and his second traces how contemporaneous discoveries in Egyptology influence American Renaissance writers, particularly Poe. His work is a bit theoretical, but it's nonetheless fascinating.


http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Soluti...5975705&sr=1-1


http://www.amazon.com/American-Hiero...5975705&sr=1-2

The other day I was discussing a translation of a Chekov story with a colleague who is a translator himself, looking at the the use of the word "fop." We pretty much agreed that it's so outdated that few students today have a clue what it means. We decided that we would try to "comission" a new translation by someone who recently translated Chekov's complete plays. (By "comission" I mean as an intellectual exercise rather than a capitalist venture.)

BTW, I have read five or six translations of Oedipus Rex, and a couple are downright incomprehensible to the modern reader.

What will you do? Substitute the word "dandy"? Fop or dandy IS an outdated concept. You really don't find them around today so that's probably why there's no more modern term and/or the word "fop" isn't as easily recognized.

consumption = tuberculosis.

Well if you want historical then Dickens' Great Expectations or Twain's Huckleberry Finn are pretty historical. Of course just about anything Henry James wrote and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote are pretty historical.

Stephen Crane if you want the Civil War period and it doesn't get any more historical than Jane Austen but somehow I see her more as a lady's read but now that I said that someone is bound to correct me.

If you want to explore Russian literature there's Tolstoy and War and Peace.

Steinbeck would be ok if you want to get a feel for the Great Depression.

Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls for the Spanish Civil War.

"Animal Farm" by Orwell is very good and is pretty close to historical fiction (the story is based on the Russian Revolution and it's aftermath; it helps to know a bit about the major figures before hand).

Also, while possibly not a recognized classic, "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves is an interesting first-person account of the life of Tiberius Claudius. I'm not sure about it's historical accuracy (seemed fine to me, but I'm not really an expert on the subject) but it paints a very vivid picture of ancient Rome. I'm not sure either of these is truly historical fiction but they are worth reading, imo, and not all that long.

Also, it's been mentioned earlier in the thread, but "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov is an often humorous, occasionally riveting and all-around well written take on Soviet Russia.

I like Poe a lot, my favorite story is "Tell-Tale Heart", I remember my mom crashed the car while I was reading this story in the back seat. I also like "Black Cat" a lot, a story I have read many times, both in English and the translation to Spanish, I like the one in English a lot more. Kafka also has several very good short stories, "The Great Wall of China" comes to mind.