What are some good classic books that a person should read?

Question

I'm a college graduate, and I'm looking at going to Grad School for a Masters in Education. I've read a lot of American Classics, but I am looking for an extensive list of International & American Classics, that I should make sure I've read, so that I may consider myself a "well-read" individual. I'd be interested to hear, also, what books you have been "made to read" as part of your studies. What books are Classics that you enjoyed the most? Please help me come up with a good list of books I should tackle with the rest of this summer. Thanks y'all! :)

I speak and read French, Spanish, German & Romanian, so please feel free to recommend foreign authors. :)

Answer 1

Gone With The Wind: Margaret Mitchell
Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte
Frankenstein: Mary Shelly
Dracula: Bram Stoker
Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen
The Crystal Cave: Mary Stuart
The Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood
Memoirs of a Geisha: Arthur Golden
The Joy Luck Club: Amy Tan
The Woman Warrior: Maxine Hong Kingston
Outlander: Diana Gabaldon (the first in a six book series)
Roots: Alex Haley
Little Women: Louisa May Alcott
Alice In Wonderland: Lewis Carroll
The Jungle Book: Rudyard Kipling
Animal Farm: George Orwell
Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe
The Cancer Journals: Audrey Lorde
The Old Man and the Sea: Ernest Hemingway
Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck
The Color Purple: Alice Walker
Nectar in a Sieve: Karmala Markandaya

Answer 2

1. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
2. The Little Prince
3. Barrel Fever
4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
5. Man and His Symbols
6. The Power of Myth
7. The Elegant Universe
8. Happy Birthday Wanda June
9. Maniac Magee
10. A Wrinkle in Time
11. The Westing Game
12. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
13. Notes From Underground
14. Death be not Proud
15. A Farewell to Arms
16. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
17. Speak
18. The Stranger
19. Look Back in Anger
20. Equus
21. Siddartha
22. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
23. The Origin of Species
24. Me Talk Pretty One Day
25. A People's History of the United States
26. Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
27. Less Than Zero
28. On Bullshit
29. Steal this Book
30. The Prophet
31. Evasion
32. Dear Mr. Henshaw
33. Call it Courage
34. Oh the Glory of it All
35. A Prayer for Owen Meany
36. The Corrections
37. Guns, Germs and Steel
38. Blameless in Abaddon
39. Norwegian Wood
40. Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World
41. A Seperate Reality
42. Civil Disobediance
43. The Phantom Tollbooth
44. A Dirty Job
45. The Slaughter House Five
46. The Cat's Cradle


are some of my favorites

Answer 3

Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A Confederacy of Dunces
Of Mice and Men
The Tempest
Billy Budd
Grapes of Wrath
The Scarlet Letter
Mutiny on the Bounty
Through the Looking Glass
Stranger in a Strange Land
Inherit the Wind
Taming of the Shrew
The Brothers Karamazov
A Night to Remember
Hamlet
The Ox Bow Incident
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
To Kill a Mockingbird
Death of a Salesman
Catch 22
Macbeth
The Glass Menagerie
Tom Sawyer
The Caine Mutiny
Native Son
The Fixer
Romeo and Juliet
All the King's Men
Lord of the Flies
On the Road

I think I read all these in High School....some by choice, some not. Some I enjoyed, some I did not, but they are all classics (well some more than others).

Answer 4

There are sooo many books... hummmm...

* Dante's Inferno

* Plutarch's Lives

* Pilgrim's Progress

* Imitation of Christ

* Les Miserables

*Vicar of Wake Field

* Vanity Fair

* Pride and Prejudice

* The Count of Monte Cristo

* The Left Hand of Darkness

* As I Lay Dying

* A Song of Ice and Fire

* The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

* The Hobbit

* All Quiet On the Western Front

* Beloved

* Catch-22

* Catcher in the Rye

* Heart of Darkness

* The Red Badge of Courage

* The Scarlet Letter

* A Seperate Peace

* War and Peace

* The Jungle

* To Have and To Hold

* The Princess Bride

* Frankenstein

* Any Dickens Novel

* Any H.G. Wells Novel

* Of Human Bondage

* A Passage to India

* To The Lighthouse

* Rebecca

* Animal Farm

* Lord of the Flies

* The Once and Future King

* The Man in the Iron Mask

* The Three Musketeers

* Madame Bovery

* Carmen

* Journey to the Middle of the Earth

* Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

* The Stranger

* Death In Venice

* Steppenwolf

* Dracula

* The Picture of Dorian Gray

* Ulysses

* Angela's Ashes

* The Lady of the Lake

* The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

* Treasure Island

* The House of the Seven Gables

* Moby Dick

* Little Women

* An American Tragedy

* Winesburg, Ohio

* The Good Earth

* This Side of Paradise

* The Great Gatsby

* The Sound and the Fury

* Any Hemingway book... X-P ( I don't like Hemingway)

* Any John Steinbeck

* Fahrenheit 451

* One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest

* Wathership Down

* (and of course) To Kill A Mockingbird

Answer 5

Looks like you have a LOT of answers already, and I am not sure what I can add, but here are some of my favorites (some long, some short; some fiction, some non-fiction):

The Alchemist
The Little Prince
The Lord of the Rings
To Kill a Mockingbird
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Think and Grow Rich
As a Man Thinketh
Charlotte's Web
Don Quixote
Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
My Experiments With Truth (Mahatma Gandhi)
Lolita
The Sun Also Rises
The Grapes of Wrath
Siddartha
The Gulag Archipelago
The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)
Into Thin Air
Autobiography of a Yogi
The Celestine Prophecy
War and Peace
Alice in Wonderland
All of the "Oz books by L. Frank Baum
From Here to Eternity
The Brothers Karamazov
The Prophet

Have fun reading!

Answer 6

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

Answer 7

Good Classic Books

Answer 8

Death in Venice
Hamlet
MidSummers Night Dream
King Lear (These 3 will give you a decent taste if you are short on Shakespeare.)
The Natural
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Candide
The Little Prince
On The Road
The Metamorphasis
They Yellow Wallpaper
The Bell Jar
Little Women
There Eyes were Watching God
Women of Brewster Place
The Color Purple
The Stranger
Great Gatsby
The Sun Also Rises
The Grapes of Wrath
Notes from the Underground
Narrative Slave Journals
Bridge to Terabithia
The Giver
Huckleberry Finn
The Illiad
The Oddessy
Pride and Prejudice
Shogun
The Thornbirds

I am sure you read a good chunk of the American stuff. I could go on, but these will give you a good start. It's august.

Answer 9

Apart from the Nobel prize winners you can find anywhere such list... but let me give you a subjective one of my favourites:



Camus: The Stranger - This book gave me a new perspective of life

Dostoevsky: The Idiot - The Russian soul...

Fontane: L'Adultera - Great sense of humour, but not a comedy

Golding: anything by him - Perhaps my favourite writer

E. T. A. Hoffmann: Devil's Elixir, The Sandman - Want to read real mystery stories? Forget Stephen King and check out these :)

Joyce: The Portrait Of A Young Man As An Artist - Simply good

Kafka: The Trial - The best atmosphere ever

Kastner: Fabian - Great sense of humour, but a bit dark

D. H. Lawrence: Rainbow - This is where I understood what a lyrical novel means

Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers - God portrayed realisticly. Very intellectual

Maugham: Moon and Sixpence - Based on Gaugin's biography

Rilke: Malte Laurids Brigge's Notes - It's like a Munch painting

Sartre: nearly anything by him - Philosophy covered with literature



U. S. favourites:

Hawthorne's short stories
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Jack London: Martin Eden
Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night
Steinbeck: Grapes of Wrath

Saul Bellow and Paul Auster are good too, but they are not classic yet, I'm afraid...

Answer 10

Well they're not all classics but you should read them! Happy reading:
1. Things Fall Apart
2. The Scarlet Pimpernel
3. The Scarlet Letter
4. Nectar in a Sieve
5. A Seperate Peace
6. Tuesdays with Morrie
7. Odyssey
8. Iliad
9. The Tempest
10. Romeo and Juliet
11. Othello
12. The Count of Monte Cristo
13. The 3 Musketeers
14. Freakonomics
15. Of Mice and Men
16. The Westing Game