What is a classic novel that you recommend everyone read?

Question

I respect your answer, but I didn't care for 'The Great Gatsby'. I had to read it in high school.

I think everyone should read 'The Shepard of the Hills'.

Answer 1

animal farms
for whom the bell tolls

Answer 2

Yes, I can! I love the classics and I have read quite a variety, so I hope this will help you out. -Brave New World (Alduos Huxley) -1984 (George Orwell) -Animal Farm (George Orwell) -Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) -Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) -Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen) -Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) -A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) -The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) -Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) -Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) -The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) -Night (Elie Wiesel) -I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou) -Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) -In Cold Blood (Truman Capote) -As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner) -Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) -Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaurbert) -Vanity Fair (William Thackery) These are just a select few that I have read and enjoyed. The list is far greater and broader than these. Good luck and happy reading.

Answer 3

sense and sensibility. Learn from it.

Little Women. Yes, even guys.

But above all:

THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

so many different levels, a new read every time. The theme is so simple and earnest, yet all the little subplots and themes are so intriguing. really gets you thinking if your brain can get past the superficial goings-on. As Tolkien explains (and illustrates on the fields of Pelenor as Eowyn battles the Witch-King of Angmar) there are two seperate plains coexisting and functioning at once, overlapping eachother. The physical and Spiritual plains. Trying rereading and watching only for the unseen. You'll be surprised!

Answer 4

2 suggestions: All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Any war is horrible but Remarque brings the horror of the trenches and atrocities of World War I into your brain through the eyes of a young German soldier. It is an important book.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A frightening distopia

Answer 5

Tough choice, but I'll go with a book I've read more than once and taught a few times:

"The Great Gatsby
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem."

It's a darn near perfect novel.

OK, then - how about "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway - see link 2, please
The Old Man and the Sea" excels at several levels. On the surface, it is a fine story about an old, down on his luck fisherman catching a huge marlin. But it also has deeper meanings including man against the elements, man fighting failure, man's relationship with nature etc. It is also a story well and efficiently told. One of the great books of all time in only 120+ pages.


or Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
Here are a couple of reviews from some pretty good judges of literature:

Thomas Mann
What a monument is this book! How its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A more profound and powerful work than this is not to be met with...The final and greatest utterance of the human mind

see link 3 please

Answer 6

"To Kill a Mockingbird," by Harper Lee.

The characters are beautifully and realistically portrayed, and the themes of racial inequality, children's perceptions versus adult reality , and the loss of childhood innocence are all brilliantly-handled. The story seesaws from comedy to tragedy and sorrow, but Lee manages to keep a perfect balance between the two.

If I was going to be marooned on a desert island for a year and could only have one novel with me, this is the one I'd choose. It's got enough humanity, wisdom and beauty to keep me company for a long, long time.

Answer 7

I love Jane Eyre and Pride & Prejudice. If Victorian drawing-room romances aren't your style, then try The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is basically James Bond of the French Revolution. Only cooler.

Answer 8

Hands down, I think everyone should read "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas. The book appeals to every type of reader, whether male or female, and it has some excellent morals. It is one of my favorite books that never grow old.

Nice question, and Merry Christmas!

Answer 9

I'm also partial to Dostoevsky. Dante's trilogy is the Divine Comedy, Inferno being the first of the three. However, that one I recommend you take a class. There's a lot you can miss unless you study it with a professor.

Answer 10

In this day and age, in our current political climate? A thoughful reading of Animal Farm by George Orwell would certainly be educating.
(Or maybe, considering that it is soon to be an election year, The Emperor's New Clothes. lol)

Answer 11

A Clockwork Orange

Only if you have the stomach for it, of course. It tends to be excessively violent. Still, it is an absolutely fantastic novel with a wonderful theme. It's rather short, too!