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E*F*4L

By E*F*4L
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E*F*4L

E*F*4L

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i have read book on & off for years, but in i dunno the past twelve months i have been reading a lot more, autobiography's, physics & quantum mechanics books, normal fiction books, Shakespeare through to Jezza Clarkson.

however i often see on quiz shows questions that come up about a book or author & when the contestant gets the answer correct, i think "how the hell did they know that" because it just seemed so obvious to them & they give the impression that everyone should know the answer, so i was talking to a chap i work with & he said they are probably "the classics" & have had to read them at uni etc, are there such book as 'classics' & if so what are they as i would like to read more older type books but the good ones, anyone have any opinions on this or advice :)

:)

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KingTutsWWH

KingTutsWWH

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At this moment in time I can recommend Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell. Oh, and JD Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. Superb.

Hey you! You're not allowed to pinch The Catcher in the Rye. My alias is infact J.D. Salinger! Seriously though Emma's right, it is a classic. I don't read many books more than once, but I've read this at least five times. It's an easy read too - albeit pretty emotional. My copy of it was 'acquired' from the school library around 20 years ago. 'Tis very dog-eared indeed.

'To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity'.

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My favourite classics would include:

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Hard Times - Charles Dickens

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

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Behelzebub

Behelzebub

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I really should read more classics as well, trouble is I never get the time to actually do any reading that isn't related to my uni course. I started reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac a few weeks ago but I've been so busy lately that I haven't picked it up in about 2 weeks.

So save the last dance

For me my love 'cause I

I see you as an angel freshly fallen from the sky...

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E*F*4L

E*F*4L

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thanx peeps :)

this is the list i have made so far;

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

1984 - George Orwell

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

£33 from Amazon, are they a good selection ? :)

& i also saw this :shock:

loads of cheap books on amazon look at all them & only £2 !

my aim is to put Steven Fry to shame when it comes to knowledge of books :P

:)

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Emma

Emma

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It's not a classic as such, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss is a very interesting read, as are some of Steven Pinker's books.

You could also check out William Golding's Lord Of The Flies as I'm pretty sure that could be considered a "classic". Oh, and then all of the obvious classics like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Alouette...deployer les ailes;

Alouette...plumerai les ailes.

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KingTutsWWH

KingTutsWWH

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Books/authors I've really enjoyed most recently:

Jonathan Coe - What a Carve Up. Think Serin might like this too.

English Passengers - Matthew Kneale, this book simply blew me away!

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

John Irving - esp Son of the Circus, The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp. This chap is such a good story teller - he's a modern day Dickens.

Michael Chabon - Wonder boys (funnily enough the film of this is pretty good too) and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

William Goldman - The Princess Bride. totally I adore this book.

Older/Classics:

Dickens - Hard Times, Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and many others.

Shakespeare - You have to decide what you're looking for; Do you want a comedy, tragedy, Roman play, History etc.? I adore the comedies, so I'd recommend Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night. However Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Coriolanus are also well worth checking out. You have to act them out in your head as you read them though, even better if you read them out loud. Not to be advised on public transport!

Chaucer - a bit trickier, but The Canterbury Tales are absolutely priceless.

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice and Sense and SEnsibility esp.

Oscar Wilde - anything. I think he was a true genius, all of my UM quotes are from him.

This may take me some time. I haven't even finished on the literature and I'm already starting to think about poetry!

I'm going to have to get back to you on this.

Edit: Very good selection so far Alan.:)

'To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity'.

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Behelzebub

Behelzebub

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Definitely agree with Oscar Wilde, I read The Picture Of Dorian Gray last year and loved it.

Thinking back to the books I did for GCSE English Lit, I'd recommend Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck as something everyone should read at least once before they die. Something else we did in school that I really enjoyed was The Canterbury Tales, some of them are surprisingly rude but they're all very funny. As a sort of 'alternative' classic I'd also recommend A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - amazing film, amazing book, and one that'll really get you thinking.

So save the last dance

For me my love 'cause I

I see you as an angel freshly fallen from the sky...

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Bumble_85

Bumble_85

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Ooh I second The World According To Garp. Proper love that book.

Thomas Hardy - The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club

JM Coetze - Disgrace

Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club. Far far better than the film.

Monica Ali - Brick Lane.

Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South

Cosi by Louis Nowra is a play and ver' good. As is any play by Willy Russell, especially Blood Brothers.

If you want poetry then Thomas Gray is good.

Oh and I always recommend Wuthering Heights, for I luff it.

There/ They're/ Their. Different words.

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E*F*4L

E*F*4L

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thanx peeps :)

this is the list i have made so far;

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

1984 - George Orwell

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

£33 from Amazon, are they a good selection ? :)

& i also saw this :shock:

loads of cheap books on amazon look at all them & only £2 !

my aim is to put Steven Fry to shame when it comes to knowledge of books :P

they arrived today :D

got the bits for my bookcase also & will start it this weekend :)

:)

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Hugh.

Hugh.

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You could try E.M Forster. I'm studying two of his books for AS level English Lit - "A Passage to India" and "Howard's End". They're extremely well written classics, but have remarkably little plot! Forster seemed to like to write books discussing the times he was writing in, rather than writing a book with a thrilling plot/story, whatever you want to describe a plot as. They're a bit boring sometimes, but then you come across a passage which is incredibly well written, usually a little bit of sarcasm, or, in some cases, a lot of sarcasm, as I say, they're very well written.

I'm also reading some H. G Wells stuff. Whilst they're also classics, I find them really different from others, a bit more sci-fi, but also talking about human nature etc. Good reads really, probably more entertaining than Forster, but probably less brilliant at the same time, if it makes sense. I suppose you'd have to read some E.M Forster to grasp what I'm on about :P

The poster formerly known as Robbo

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Emma

Emma

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Good choices Alan! One of my favourite books is Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, I would definitely regard it as a modern classic.

Oooh I think that was also a radio drama, hehe. And a film! I think the film came after the book, shall have to check them out!

Alouette...deployer les ailes;

Alouette...plumerai les ailes.

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Behelzebub

Behelzebub

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Brighton Rock was also a song by Queen if my memory serves me correctly. But that's slightly off-topic.

If you REALLY want to be well-read then you could try ploughing your way through James Joyce's Ulysses, it's widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces in English literature. But it's horribly long and will probably take you a good few weeks/months to get through in its entirety. I should read it myself one day really... after I'm done with uni though, haha.

So save the last dance

For me my love 'cause I

I see you as an angel freshly fallen from the sky...

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Lucinda

Lucinda

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See I don't really find most of these 'classics' that interesting or readable myself. I've read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, which is pretty readable and has a good story to it as well as being very culturally significant given the number of terms in use in modern society that are from it. It's quite short and definitely worth reading.

On the other hand, I ploughed my way through D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love last year because my mum thought I should read it since it's set sort of round here. It was very very hard going with really long chapters where nothing really happened but he just described people's personalities and pasts. Most of the action was pretty slow too. So I'm not so keen on reading something just because it's "a classic".

I like more contemporary literature. Perhaps even postmodern. My favourite author is Douglas Coupland.

'Forget happiness I'm fine, I'll forget everything in time'

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E*F*4L

E*F*4L

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im reading Falling Off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies - Alex Perry

This is an exhilarating journey to some of the planet's remotest and most dangerous places to explore the sharp end of globalization.Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, international corporations and governments have embraced the idea of a global village: a shrinking, booming world in which everyone benefits. What if that's not the case? Alex Perry, award-winning foreign correspondent, travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara to see first-hand globalization at the sharp end - and it's not pretty.Whether it's Shenzen, China's boom city where sweatshops pay under-age workers less than $4 a day, or Bombay, where the gap between rich and poor means million-dollar apartments overlook million-people slums, or on the high seas with the pirates of southeast Asia who prey on the world's central trade artery, or South Africa, where Mandela's dream for a Rainbow Nation is being crushed by a new economic apartheid, Perry demonstrates, vividly and chillingly, that for every winner in our brave new world, there are hundreds of millions of losers. And be they Chinese army veterans, Indian Maoist rebels or the Somali branch of al Qaeda, they are all very, very angry."Falling Off the Edge" is an adrenaline-charged journey through the developing world, which reveals with clarity that globalization starts wars. Far from living in a time of peace and prosperity, Perry suggests, the boom is about to go bang.

very good book, especially if you are at Uni & doing poiltics or economics, if not its a very interesting book & a eye opener :shock: to say the least.

:)

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Lucinda

Lucinda

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im reading Falling Off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies - Alex Perry

very good book, especially if you are at Uni & doing poiltics or economics, if not its a very interesting book & a eye opener :shock: to say the least.

It sounds like an interesting book. I'd like to point out that it's all in the realm of Geography.

No Logo by Naomi Klein is an interesting book about the negatives of globalisation that I read last year for one of my modules.

'Forget happiness I'm fine, I'll forget everything in time'

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