Great Literature

[Virtuouso]

What are the greatest books of all time, in your opinion? Personally I haven't read as much as I feel inclined to, but I was just wondering what some of the really great literature in the world is.

[incandenza]

In sheer, it totally changed literature as we know it, I'll go with James Joyce's Ulysses. My other great work would be David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I prefer Wallace, but Joyce redefined what a novel was, and what you could do with language.

[JayB]

Well two of the texts we did for our WL, "Bodas de Sangre" by Federico Garcia Lorca and "Dakghar" by Rabindranath Tagore, have become my favourites.

We did "Oedipus the King" and "Death of salesman" for our part three and they were absolutely brilliant! Not to mention "State of Siege" by Mahmoud Darwish, which we did for our part four!

[AGBellamy]

The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, The Oresteia...

Anything by Catullus. OH! And for the more contemporary reader, the Declaration trilogy by Gemma Malley

[bigbangfan]

I personally love Orwell's 1984. I guess I'm not the only one, but I believe it is a key novel to undersanding the abuse of power in many aspects, not just political. It opened my mind into the reality of the world and where the world might be heading at these times where power is a very controversial issue.

Another novel that I loved is Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. I feel sympathy toward Holden's situation and I think that he is right about his perception of phonies revolving in the high classes, although he is sometimes a phonie too. Sometimes I felt that Holden was a friend of mine trying to communicate with me. I understand how he feels by being alienated from the world and how he searches is own peace.

[Julia32]

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Sallinger

[Guest 1529]

Personally, I loved reading the Aeneid by Vergil and I consider it as a masterpiece but the portuguese epic poem Lusiads by Camoes is also really good (maybe for people out of Portugal might be even more interesting...). However, Hamlet is something really out of this world, the best book written by Shakespeare! I think that Hamlet was the book that I most enjoyed reading. But yeah, I'd stick myself to the Classics of the Literature... there is a reason because of which they are called Classics

[pink panther]

I agree, Classics are called Classics for a reason, but still, some are really tough to get through. It all depends on the reader. Some of my personal favorites include:

- Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid (epic poems), as well as Dante's Divine Comedy (best part is of course Inferno)

- Catch-22 - maybe not a "classics", but it's definitely high-ranking in my opinion

- Anything by Oscar Wilde, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray. Master of English language, and I like his philosophy.

- Notre-Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo, maybe also not strictly a classic, but definitely worth knowing

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, or anything by G.G.Marquez, it was a well-deserved Nobel Prize that he got.

Those are only some examples of really good literature that doesn't have to be boring. Those are maybe not strictly, canonically Classics with a big "C", but they are much valued and definitely worth knowing

Edited May 20, 2011 by pink panther

[febreezick]

The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, The Oresteia...

Anything by Catullus. OH! And for the more contemporary reader, the Declaration trilogy by Gemma Malley

I had no idea that The Declaration was part of a trilogy! And here I was, wishing (for years!) that there was a sequel or something.

[AGBellamy]

The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, The Oresteia...

Anything by Catullus. OH! And for the more contemporary reader, the Declaration trilogy by Gemma Malley

I had no idea that The Declaration was part of a trilogy! And here I was, wishing (for years!) that there was a sequel or something.

YAY! I'm not the only one who knows about its awesomeness! The sequels are called The Resistance and The Legacy. Enjoy, mon ami!

[An Almost Graduate]

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, A Doll's House (yes, it's a play, but it was still amazing), The Handmaid's Tale, The Edible Woman (it's obscure and less famous, but it's worth reading), Atlas Shrugged (even though it's long), The Color Purple, and Wuthering Heights.

[Arrowhead]

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Emma by Charlotte Brontë, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, the Black Magician trilogy is one of my favourites as well by Trudi Canavan, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, the Pellinor series by Allison Croggon (a very well written series of a world of sorcery and politics for adults). Those are the ones I remember off the top of my head...And of course War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

[sweetnsimple786]

Why is P&P so high on people's lists? I recently read it, and Austen's much wittier than I would have thought, but I definitely wonder what people see in the novel. Care to enlighten me?

[AGBellamy]

The Phantom of the Opera!

[Daedalus]

The problem with these threads is that people inevitably put down one of few good books they're read.

I honestly doubt anybody here has read all of Dickens and all of Shakespeare and all of Joyce and so on (I haven't either!! Except for Joyce), and then most of a dozen contemporary writers, and the modern/semi-modern classics like Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22, and in any case these things come down so much to personal taste. So what we see as usual is a mix of classics, the like of which you come across in 'best 50/100 books' lists (Ulysses is a prerequisite mention for such a type of thread), some random people who've never read past The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter, and a few books nobody has ever heard of which just strike me as odd.

In other words, /thread.

[Arrowhead]

Why is P&P so high on people's lists? I recently read it, and Austen's much wittier than I would have thought, but I definitely wonder what people see in the novel. Care to enlighten me?

The book is famous for what it represented. From a literary standpoint, P&P showed a strong female character way back in Austen's time, which was unconventional. It was also an atypical view of a woman. She wasn't a blonde airhead that just rolled over for the self-discovering journey of the more complicated, more important man. To have a book written by a woman about a woman in that time period was unheard of, in fact her brother was publishing them as his and it was later revealed to be hers when she was nearing her end. Other women were also writing, but women like Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, published it under her husband's name who was also a famous writer. People actually doubted that she wrote it because she was a woman and it was a traditional gothic, horror novel that was once again male driven.

P&P was a book that highlighted the weakness of men and how they were essentially at the beck and call of women, but still somewhat equals. Mr. Bennett rarely disagreed with Mrs. Bennett but there was still this subtle power that he chose to follow her and not argue with her. Darcy was the quintessential wet dream of every woman because he was everything: rich, handsome, brooding, mysterious, righteous. Elisabeth was intelligent, witty (another rare quality for a female protagonist at the time), opinionated, and had the guts to say 'no.'

P&P was the first of the few rare books that appealed as pulp fiction, but also to the critics and reviewers, its considered a classic because when you open those three volumes, the number of themes, ideas, characters, plot lines, etc are engaging to this day. Not many books were as symbolic in their achievements nor did they lend verisimilitude to their characters to the extent that Austen's did. The others that matched hers, similarly grew to be revered as Classics as well.

But at the end of the day, Literature comes to a matter of choice and taste. I loved it, you have every right to find it uninspiring and decent, but not groundbreaking as some would lead you to believe.

Cheers,

Arrowhead.

[Sandwich]

Why is P&P so high on people's lists? I recently read it, and Austen's much wittier than I would have thought, but I definitely wonder what people see in the novel. Care to enlighten me?

I have to agree with you on this one N, I'm also confused by the high status of Austen. Her writing style is quite witty but in a very transparent way (her writing is hugely formulaic and she introduces characters in hugely stereotyped and prejudiced manner, to the extent that none of them are original or interesting as she's so bare faced in her original description that they're frankly 2D) and once you've got over the historical significance of her novels as a female author writing about female characters, the interest is lost for me. Endless tales of tea parties and boring counterpart male characters lull me into sleep, and in that sense I think it's very much personal taste. I just can't figure out how so many people have a polar opposite taste. I mean, I doubt they sit and watch golf of an afternoon (a mildly more interesting but similarly sedative pursuit) but then they still extoll the virtues of Austen novels. Admittedly, Pride and Prejudice (closely twinned with Sense & Sensibility) is the best of them all -- Austen also wrote some seriously catastrophically painful reads (Northanger Abbey). Compare her with authors who followed on (Hardy, for instance) who wrote about similar material and the story is better, the prose is a thousand times better, the characters almost hard to find an exponent for in terms of how superior they are to Austen's flat set of characters. I dunno, I don't get it.

I honestly doubt anybody here has read all of Dickens and all of Shakespeare and all of Joyce and so on (I haven't either!! Except for Joyce), and then most of a dozen contemporary writers, and the modern/semi-modern classics like Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22, and in any case these things come down so much to personal taste. So what we see as usual is a mix of classics, the like of which you come across in 'best 50/100 books' lists (Ulysses is a prerequisite mention for such a type of thread), some random people who've never read past The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter, and a few books nobody has ever heard of which just strike me as odd.

Can't fault people for trying with this kind of thread though. I don't think it's /thread completely. After all, you don't have to read all of a particular author to know that some of their books are widely acknowledged by most people as being better than others - and whilst the majority may be wrong (e.g. on all matters Jane Austen, in my opinion...) equally people stand a decent chance of having read some very good literature, if not all that exists in the world. I dunno, I think there's a bit of room for cynicism in this kind of thread but not dismissal!

I'm not going to pretend to have read every book ever in existence, but from what I have read, the books I think probably qualify most as 'great' by my own criteria (which is 90% beautiful writing and about 10% storyline!) would be East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri.

All four of them for perfection of writing, beauty of description and a delicacy of phrasing which, if I were even half as good, I'd be well proud of. Steinbeck for his lyricism, Hardy for his unbeatable and unique use of metaphor and idea to totally describe characters and landscape, Ondaatje because if he'd written "a poem" on the front of the novel I probably wouldn't argue too much and Chaudhuri because I don't see how you could read it and not imagine yourself there on warm tropical afternoons, even if you're a Northern European who's never sat through them and hasn't a real clue how on earth it would be to be there.