Classics for Beginners discussion

My to-read list (the classical part of it ;)):

A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Birds & Other Stories - Daphne du Maurier
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales - Edgar Allan Poe
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Queen of Spades - Alexander Pushkin
The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Emmuska Orczy
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Under the Greenwood Tree - Thomas Hardy
Villette - Charlotte Brontë
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Xerxes Invades Greece- Herodotus
X-ing a Paragraph - Edgar Allan Poe
Zicci - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

The rest of the plays by William Shakespeare I have yet read (nerdy I know, but oh so fun XD)

Part of my have-read classics:
William Shakespeare
- Macbeth
- The Merchant of Venice
- Hamlet
- Love's Labour's Lost
- Romeo and Juliet
- Much Ado About Nothing
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Julius Caesar
- King Lear
- The Tempest
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
George Orwell
- 1984
- Animal Farm
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist
- A Christmas Carol
- Great Expectations
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice
- Persuasion
- Sense and Sensibility
Herman Melville - Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Carlo Collodi - Pinocchio
H.G. Wells - The Time Machine
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Bertolt Brecht - The Caucasian Chalk Circle

That's a hefty list. What's your deadline?

Vannessa wrote: "That's a hefty list. What's your deadline?"

I don't really have a deadline, but I hope I can get through them in the next 3-4 years. I mean, a lot of them a fairly short (luckily), while some of the longer ones are audio-book material (how I cleaned my house before audio-book I will never know XD). Slow and steady and always reading in between everything XD

The Handmaids Tale is brilliant!

Nicolle wrote: "The Handmaids Tale is brilliant!"

I'm glad :D I'm really looking forward to it, if for nothing else than just the conesept of the story. I know it's not the only place it's been done, but I don't think it was common in the time it was written. Not to mention how of course the views of the time must have influenced the topic. :) I really like reading stories about women written in a time when we didn't have so much say as we do today.

Me too, though I can't say I've read many books like that.

I haven't read the book yet, so I don't know with what to compare it to, but I think all classical books written by women in some part reflect the issue about women in their time.

If you don't mind reading plays I would recommend A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, which is about women rights in Victorian-ish Norway. Or Lysistrata which is brilliant if you don't mind talk about sex. The consept of it is that to stop war, the women decide to stop having sex with men and therefor "force" them to bring peace. What is interesting is that when this play was written, the norm was that women couldn't controll their sexuall-urges (the idea that women weren't into sex didn't come until about the Victorian-age), and so to be able to actually say no to sex these women would need god-like intervention. And the play discusses this XD Really funny, if you don't mind the topic.

I'll add it to my to read shelf. Thanks for recommending to me. :)

Nicolle wrote: "I'll add it to my to read shelf. Thanks for recommending to me. :)"

Isn't that half the fun with groups like these? ;) I would love to hear what you think about it when you've read it.

An updated list, now with part of the have-read list of classics. :)

Shakespeare isn't my style much so I really appreciate the large amount of him you have on your TBR list.

Erin (Paperback Stash) wrote: "Shakespeare isn't my style much so I really appreciate the large amount of him you have on your TBR list."

Thank you. I know that he is an acquired taste, like most things I guess XD. I just love his language, and set the challenge to read all of his plays at least once because of it. Mostly to prove to myself that I can and to see all the sides of his work XD As I said, nerdy I know.

Read X-ing a Paragraph and The Yellow Wallpaper.

I really liked x-ing a paragrab, even though most people didn't like it. Not his best work, but funny in how he plays with words and language (have to love that XD) and scary how he hints of the destructive power playing with language like that can have (and again, have to love that XD). Maybe I like it more for what I read into it than what I actually read, but I still enjoyed it very much.

The Yellow-wallpaper, I have to admit I was sitting stunned after reading it, not really sure what had happened, and then the story just hit me and I loved it. (I don't love everything I read, I promise :P) The narrator is done perfectly, and just like her we aren't sure what has happened until it has happened. That sentence makes sence for the people who have read it, I hope XD