english writers please.
2006-12-20 05:22:02 · 15 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
Top books by English writers?
Emma - Jane Austen
reason: It is a great coming-of-age story that shows that the minds of teenagers have not really changed in the last hundred or so years.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
reason: It is a chilling look into the reality (or what could become the reality) of the myth of free will.
1984 - George Orwell
reason: Read this book, then read a newspaper.........
OK, I have to put one person on the list who may or may not qualify as an English writer, though he was technically English when he wrote it.....
The Pathfinder - James Finnemore Cooper
reason: Thrills, chills, romance. One of the first true American heroes (Natty Bumpo, aka Hawkeye, aka Longrifle) was the first real macho man superhero.
2006-12-20 06:32:17 · answer #1 · answered by rawson_wayne 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
People/readers have different tastes. Some like Agatha Christie type books, others prefer Sherlock Holmes. Still others would prefer thrillers I used to really enjoy with friends, James Hadley Chase and Nick Carter, Dennis Robbins, Kingsley Amis and the like.
So I can only quote an example of my favorite classics/authors that I'd urge a close buddy or my students to thumb through: Homer's Iliad; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin; Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; George Eliot's Middlemarch spiced with Dickens, Austen, punctuated with Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda; Borges and Jose Guimares served with Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris and Roger Mais with some "pudding" of Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Dangerembgba, Anita Desai, Mori Yoko Clarice Lispector, and Ding Ling. . . . you see how it gets world literature depends on tastes or gets awkward! But even Ibsen, Goethe, Moliere and Peter Abrahams are here. In short, I'd urge folks to read as widely as they can. It is fascinating to peek across the border and get to know the neigbors dirty and clean laundry. The contact may make you revise your own stereotypical assumptions too. Look! the Emile Zola's knocking on your door with La Comédie humaine!!
What should everyone read? Here's an apt quote:
"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation." (1866)
2006-12-20 06:58:09 · answer #2 · answered by ari-pup 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
All great suggestions so far. Let me add:
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (I have Volume 1 which contains: Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove)
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Roughing It by Mark Twain
I could go on for hours. What a great question! I assume by English you mean books in English as opposed to British authors. If I've misunderstood you, I apologize.
2006-12-20 06:37:21 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
At least one from different genres!
British: Tom Jones - Fielding
Russian: Brother Karamazov - Dostoyevski
US: Huck Finn - Mark Twain
Sci-Fi: Stranger in a Strange Land - Heinlein
Romance: Pride & Prejudice - Austen
Post-modern: Lolita - Nabokov
Poetry: Odes to Common Things - Neruda
Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice
Modernistic: Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
2006-12-20 08:57:01 · answer #4 · answered by hotdoggiegirl 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway
Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison
Stranger on a Train: Patricia Highsmith
2006-12-20 05:44:17 · answer #5 · answered by Bob 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
King Lear by Shakespeare
Paradise Lost by John Milton
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2006-12-20 05:34:11 · answer #6 · answered by angel_deverell 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee
Cath-22, Heller
Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut
Invisible Man, Ellison
2006-12-20 06:25:17 · answer #7 · answered by Claire 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Catcher In The Rye
A Clockwork Orange
2006-12-20 05:30:03 · answer #8 · answered by <3leighwhannell 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Catcher in the Rye
The Brothers Karamazov
The Sound and the Fury
The Old Man and the Sea
Little Women
Lord of the Flies
2006-12-20 05:37:11 · answer #9 · answered by allaboutthewords 4 · 2⤊ 0⤋
King Fortis the Brave, Harry Potter and Eragon would all be excellent choices
2006-12-21 06:18:58 · answer #10 · answered by Caveman 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋