Literary Masterpiece?

Question

What do you think are the most memorable/famous pieces of literature ever written? A list of classics that everyone should read would be nice, as well as the above XD

Answer 1

I'll do my own list of literary masterpieces by me...

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky (if you do not read anything else on this list, read this. I cried at the end- not because it was touching, but because it was over and i didn't want it to be- i loved it that much)
2. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky (my first Dostoyevsky experience)
3. Les Miserables by Hugo (greuling 2000 pager, but WELL WORTH IT)
4. The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie (the only living author i love also read Midnight's Children)
5. War and Peace by Tolstoy- also WELL worth the # of pages. if you have the persistence to get through a long one- definitely try it

Answer 2

Here are a few 'modern' authors that I think everyone should try to read.
Walt Whitman
Samuel Coleridge
John Keats
W. B. Yeats
Shelley (both Percy and Mary)
Emily Dickinson
Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
George Eliot
Hemingway
Toni Morrison
Jane Austen
Mark Twain
James Joyce
Robert Frost
Flannary O'Connor
Charlotte Perkins-Gilman
The Bronte Sisters
Kate Chopin
Emerson
Thoreau
Henry James
Herman Melville
Tennyson
T.S. Eliot
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Oscar Wilde
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Sherwood Anderson
Stephen Crane
James Fenimore Cooper
Theodore Dreiser
Aldous Huxley
George Orwell
John Steinbeck
Harper Lee
Ayn Rand
Virginia Woolf
Sylvia Plath
Amy Tan
Edith Wharton
Joseph Conrad


Of course other important pieces of literature include "Perceval" by de Troyes, Le Morte D'Arthur by Malory, anything by Shakespeare, Paradise Lost by Milton, anything by Jonathan Swift, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight...the list could truly go on and on.

Answer 3

Plato's Republic and Socratic Dialogues.
All of Aristotle.
Euclid's Elements.
All of D.T. Suzuki
All of Krishnamurti
Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".
Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac"
William Manchester's "Winston Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion"
John Keegan's "A History of Warfare"
Frank Herbert's "Dune"
Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" (these are not literary masterpieces, so to say. But, they are brilliant examples of lucid conceptualization of complex thought.)
Janson and Janson's "History of Art for Young People"

Answer 4

There are so many... But just off the top of my head, these seem like the essentials:

Don Quixote, by Cervantes.
All of Dostoevsky's works, but to pick one, the Brother Karamazov
War and Peace, by Tolstoy.
The Human Comedy, by Honoré the Balzac, Father Goriot, to pick one from the circle.
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.
Shakespeare's plays.
Molière's plays.
The Poems of Pablo Neruda.
The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire.
Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer.

Many, many more... This list is a good starter.

Answer 5

The Most beautiful book I have read is
The Women of Brewster place - Georgia Naylor. A short stroy book on women living in brewster place and the beautiful discription of their lives, swings, humiliations etc.
The Tale of two cities - Charles Dickens. A light romantic twisty story situated in two cities.
To kill a mokinbird - a tough book
Les Miserable - a beautiful book about war and effect on a brooming relationship
The series of Chicken Soup For the soul - it may change you COMPLETLY
Mill on the floss - George Eliot. Classic in its true sense. A story of a family whose life revolve around a mill they own and a shoking ending.
The God of Small things - Arundati Roy. SIMPLY MINDBLOWING. THIS BOOK HAS TRULY TRANSFORMED ME, I STARTED LOOKING AT THE SMALLEST OF THINGS IN LIFE AND HOW THEY MAY CHANGE LIVES. HIGHLY RECOMENDED.
WORLD IN CRISES - J. KRISNAMURTHY. IT CHANGED MY OUTLOOK TOWARDS THE WORLD. HIGHLY RECOMENDED.
The diary of Anne Frank - a must read
The Godfather - who need to say anything more abt this one?
A village by the sea - a light discribtion of bombay and a village in India. Do read.
The Grapes of wrath - Try this one for its dramatic changes
A boy called It - not many know abt this book, but a must try. a book of atrocities on a small kid by his drunkard mother.
Fire on the mountain
OTHELLO - SHAKESPERE. dont miss this one
Shame - Salman Rushdie. If u please.
Thx. Hope it works.

Answer 6

Just in Western Literature, every educated person should read Shakespeare's great histories, comedies, and tragedies; Dante's INFERNO; Milton's PARADISE LOST; Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES; Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE; Rabelais' GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL; Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS; the French epic AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE; the EPIC OF GILGAMESH; MEDEA; OEDIPUS REX; the Iliad and the Odyssey....and that's just for a start!

Answer 7

I think all 100 novels as listed in the web site below should interest you and hope you can find some familiar titles or authors there to read and enjoy.