What famous novels, short stories, and plays should I read?

I decided to spend some serious time reading the works of famous authors... but where should I start?

Hamlet?
Heart of Darkness?
Medea?
War and Peace?
Frankenstein?
Blood Wedding?
The Catcher in the Rye?


Where do I start???


Peace,

It is so good. A movie will be coming out about it soon. It is a must read.

...

on secret societies that really exist. A catholic society, Opus Dei and the Priory of Scion. (sp) It is a murder mystery. Da Vinci and many great men were members of the secret society and is was basically a sect that believed that Mary was married to Jesus and that Mary was a woman of stature and had Jesus's child. The book is stocked full of interesting facts.

It's okay for what it is-a thriller/detective story, but I wouldn't call is classic lit.

This is a must if you are interested in the classics. You could try James Joyce, but I always found him hard to read. He didn't use punctuation.

probably the greatest American novel

?

... I never pass up the chance to read a good book... are you suggesting "Alice in Wonderland?"

"The Fall", "The Plague" - Albert Camus
"Nausea" - Jean Paul Sartre
"Gravity's Rainbow" - Thomas Pynchon
"Slaughterhouse Five", "Cat's Cradle" - Kurt Vonnegut
"Ghosts", "Hedda Gabler", "The Doll House" - Henrik Ibsen
"1984" - George Orwell
"The Naked And The Dead" - Norman Mailer
"Six Characters in Search of an Author" - Luigi Pirandello
"Endgame", "Waiting for Godot", "Malloy", "Malone Dies", "The Unnamable" - Samuel Beckett
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"On the Road" - Jack Kerouac
"Naked Lunch" - William Burroughs
"A Farewell To Arms", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" - Ernest Hemmingway
"Native Son", "Invisible Man" - Ralph Ellison
"Tom Saywer", "Huckleberry Finn" - Mark Twain
"The Trial", "The Castle" - Franz Kafka
"The Magic Mountain", "Doctor Faustus" - Thomas Mann
"Siddhartha", "Narcissus and Goldmund", "The Glass Bead Game", "Steppenwolf" - Hermann Hesse
"The Symposium", "The Republic", "The Apology" - Plato
"Oedipus Rex" - Sophocles
"Candide" - Voltaire
"History of the Peloponnesian War" - Thucydides
"The Histories" - Herodotus
"Henry V", "King Lear", "Hamlet", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Romeo and Juliet" - Shakespeare

Glass Bead Game." Fantastic read.

Hesse was compulsory hip lit in the early 70s.

The Skin

Native Son is by Richard Wright, not Ralph Ellison. Ellison only published the on book before his death. He was working on the 2nd, but I don't recall if it was ever published.

was published posthumously. So far it has not had close to the impact on the reading public that Invisible Man has.

Furthermore, Juneteenth went through a very long and difficult gestation and birth. The original working manuscript was lost in a fire that destroyed Ellison's farmhouse in 1967. Ellison did keep an extra copy at his apartment in New York City, but the lost manuscript was THE working manuscript, and Ellison had a tough time recreating what he had lost. Furthermore, the fire devastated him not only materially and professionally, but also psychologically, according to friends.

In addition to Invisible Man, I also recommend:

Roxana, Moll Flanders -- Daniel Defoe
The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved -- Toni Morrison
Go Tell It On the Mountain -- James Baldwin
The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Color Purple -- Alice Walker
Dubliners -- James Joyce
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest -- Ken Kesey
The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day -- Gloria Naylor
The Godfather -- Mario Puzo
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf -- Ntozake Shange
The Piano Lesson, Fences -- August Wilson
The Catcher In The Rye -- J.D. Salinger
Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Zora Neale Hurston
The Glass Menagerie -- Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman, The Crucible -- Arthur Miller
The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
Brown Girl, Brownstones -- Paule Marshall
The Street -- Ann Petry

"The Fall", "The Plague" - Albert Camus
"Nausea" - Jean Paul Sartre
"Gravity's Rainbow" - Thomas Pynchon
"Slaughterhouse Five", "Cat's Cradle" - Kurt Vonnegut
"Ghosts", "Hedda Gabler", "The Doll House" - Henrik Ibsen
"1984" - George Orwell
"The Naked And The Dead" - Norman Mailer
"On the Road" - Jack Kerouac
"Naked Lunch" - William Burroughs
"A Farewell To Arms", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" - Ernest Hemmingway
"Native Son", "Invisible Man" - Ralph Ellison
"Tom Saywer", "Huckleberry Finn" - Mark Twain
"The Trial", "The Castle" - Franz Kafka
"The Magic Mountain", "Doctor Faustus" - Thomas Mann
"Siddhartha", "Narcissus and Goldmund", "The Glass Bead Game" - Hermann Hesse
"The Symposium", "The Republic", "The Apology" - Plato
"Oedipus Rex" - Sophocles
"Candide" - Voltaire
"History of the Peloponnesian War" - Thucydides
"The Histories" - Herodotus
"Henry V", "King Lear", "Hamlet", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Romeo and Juliet" - Shakespear

The Old Man and The Sea - Ernest Hemingway (it's pretty short too.)

All Quiet On The Western Front- Erich Maria Remarque

Love In The Time Of Cholera -Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Novels

Dostoevsky: "Crime and Punishment" and "Notes From Underground"

Faulkner: "Light In August", "As I Lay Dying", "The Sound and the Fury"

Ralph Ellison: "Invisible Man"

Kurt Vonnegut: "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater", "Jailbird", "Galapagos", "Breakfast of Champions"

Umberto Eco: "The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum"



Plays

Shakespeare: "King Lear", "Julius Caesar", "Henry V", "The Tempest"

Arthur Miller: "The Crucible", "Death of a Salesman"

Samuel Beckett: "Waiting for Godot", "Endgame"

Poetry

collected works of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton

Philosophy

I can't recommend most English translations of the better known German philosophers, but if you come across any of Walter Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche I very highly recommend them.


that should be a good beginning, at least.


Oh, and if you want to browse what's available in public domain as etext, here are a few good websites:

http://www.gutenberg.net


http://www.blackmask.com

I just this past semester got introduced to "Invisible Man" "Death of a Salesman" and Ginsburg, now I'm only regretful I didn't read them sooner.

Shakespeare is never a bad idea.
Have a look at Heinrich Mann - especially the empire trilogy, Henri IV and The Small Town Tyrant.
Sebastian Haffner is always worth a look, "Defying Hitler" is novel-like.

The really famous German authors, like Schiller and Goethe, are IMHO not worth reading in translation - I have yet to see one even coming close. Goethe's Faust 1 might be worth it nonetheless.

Grass is never a bad idea either, Sebald, Schlink and Feuchtwanger are always worth reading.

So much on German literature (no, Shakespeare is not part of it - I know) ;-) :hi:

The best American writer, imho. Here are a few titles you should check out....

Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Sexus
Plexus
Nexus

The last three are known as The Rosy Crucifiction.

you will hit your stride

my personal favorites are Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Margaret Atwood

I am just getting around to reading Shogun ---wow! that is one good book but it is over 1000 paged <sigh>

I like good historical fiction, and "Shogun" and "Tai-Pan" are two of my favourites.

I was just offering up my favorite...

Some more that I think are worthy:

On the Road (especially if you're in the 'finding yourself' stage of life)
Don Quixote
The USA Trilogy, by Jon Dos Passos
Anything by Twain

and I'd re-read "The Pearl" long before I'd re-read the Hemingway's "Old man and the Sea".

A sort of contemporary classic is Mark Helprin - his "A Soldier in the Great War" is excellent, and doesn't show any of the author's unfortunate conservative politics.

And for a suprise, look for a good translation of Cervantes' "Don Quixote" - it's one of the oldest novels going; it's a lot more than windmills, and it'll surprise you. Hope someone can recommend a good translation.

Everybody knows the name, but most people haven't read his work. Most of his work is in the form of essays (although he wrote some poetry as well, which I'm not as "in to").

While some of his work shows the biases of the time, it's still very uplifting, very affirmative of the human spirit. The other nice thing is you can get one of the books from the library and read just one essay (20-40 pages or so) to see if you like it.

You mentioned Hamlet... I tend not to get so much out of reading plays. You might consider getting a video for those - there's no shame in it, since they were intended to be viewed being acted out.

Catcher in the Rye (from your list) is a fantastic book. Very quick read.

If you're looking for some newer stuff, you might consider some Kurt Vonnegut (I'd recommend Breakfast of Champions). It's kind of hard to over state how great some of his books are.

Also, consider a good anthology (like Norton's), that way you can sample a smattering of what the "experts" think are important works and authors and see whay actually speeks to you. I really liked one called "Postmodern American Fiction". It's a good into to very modern stuff.

One other thing. I *really* like this author named William Kotzwinkle -- any of his books are great reads and actually fun. I'd recommend a book called "Fan Man". It's my favorite book in the whole world.

Have fun!

He wrote the only plays that are probably a better read than performed. It's all about the language.

The Metamorphosis

I haven't finished "The Brothers Karamazov" but many say this is his greatest work, so you may also want to check this out.

Les Miserables -- great novel. I've read it several times.

Anything Shakespeare (and see the plays). Shakespeare truly captures the human experience and his writing is just incredible.

Hemmingway is an easy read. I prefer Steinbeck--The Grapes of Wrath is an all time great.

I've read so many books it is hard to remember them all. Charles Dickens has much to say about the human condition, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities.
(He can be soap opera-ish but remember he was writing these as weekly serialized columns in newspapers)

JRR Tolkien--Lord of the Rings Trilogy

That's just a few. Welcome to the world of reading. I have read hundreds of books and tried to catch a lot of the classics but haven't gotten them all.

Now I read a lot of political science because of the current mess in our country.

"Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim" by Conrad (who, BTW, did not learn English until his early 20s).

"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers (who wrote this novel at age 23).

"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren (one of Will Pitt's favorites, too).

Everything suggested here is very good.

A great novel I read many yrs ago is "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarch (Spelling?) It is told by a german is WWI and is heartbreaking. It made a deep impression on me.

Also I recommend Leon Uris "Exodus" This is a great novelization of the Jewish experience leading to the founding of the state of Israel. It doesn't have a happy ending. I cried at the end.

These are two books that moved me deeply.

Yes. I re-read it as the bombs started falling on Iraq. I read it in Vietnam in 1970. It is the quintessential anti-war novel.

Some readers lead toward the fast, crisp read. In that case, I might suggest Catcher in the Rye or The Old Man and Sea or a volume of Poe short stories to start with. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo has almost too much relevance for today's world, so you may wish to start with that if you haven't tried it already.

Some readers like a big heavy book with lots of mass -- and if it is a series of books, all the better. In that case, I might suggest the Martha Quest (Children of Violence) series by Doris Lessing.

Medium-sized book that is hard to stop reading: Libra by Don DeLillo. But he has shorter books if you're in the fast, crisp read category...he's sort of a man for all seasons and reasons.

Hamlet? - Yes.
Heart of Darkness? - Yes.
Medea? - If you want to, go ahead.
War and Peace? - No. The only reason to read that book is to be able to say you have read it. It's way overrated. Read something else instead.
Frankenstein? - Dunno, havne't read it.
Blood Wedding? - Same as above.
The Catcher in the Rye? - No.

"Where do I start???"

Something by Dostoevsky. Start with "Notes from the underground." It is short, and will give you a brief taste of him, so that you can decide whether you want more.

~mention~ This guy was a major radical back in the day. His novels tend, as someone else just said, to a short crisp read, and a couple are major anti-war rants. I'm of the humble opinion that Hemingway was overrated (and Frank Lloyd Wright, but that's another thread altogether), and better choices are London & Steinbeck. Besides, I like their political philosphies a lot better than Hemingway's.

"Araby" Joyce
"A Simple Heart" Flaubert
"Kneel To The Rising Sun" Caldwell
"The Sutton Pie Safe" Benedict
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" O'Connor
"Mojave" Capote
"Wash" Faulkner
"Paul's Case" Cather

.. but, for my money, the final story "The Dead" is probably the greatest short in the English language.

The movie by John Huston is worth seeking out, too.

Enjoy.

The Skin

has had all sorts of repercussions through British and American literature. It's surprisingly readable too.

Of course you might want to read The Iliad and The Odyssey and Dante's Inferno first. Those are also very readable. And they also have had major impacts on world literature.

And when you're done with Milton, go on to Frankenstein for some pleasurable light reading, and enjoy the resonance with you've just read.

I don't think these were mentioned yet...

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul (actually, almost anything by Naipaul is worth reading...)
Blindness - Jose Saramago
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevski
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
Paul Theroux's travel writing

Any collection of short stories by Maxim Gorky or Leonid Andreyev

And for comic relief - Peter DeVries' novels, if you can find them...

-SM

Just a suggestion.

DOG SOLDIERS by Robert Stone is exceptional. 92 IN THE SHADE by Tom McGuane.
Someone mentioned Steinbeck I see. CANNERY ROW and SWEET THURSDAY are really good. Conrad? By all means. Give the Traven a try. John Huston made a good film of the book in '48. Well worth seeing. Yadda yadda yadda...Never read more than thirty pages of a book you're not enjoying...

Two of my literary faves.

for starters

.. although I like the later novels like "Bleak House" and "Our Mutual Friend" better than the David Copperfields and Oliver Twists. Dickens is both a funnier and more sardonic writer than he's often given credit for. I'm also re-reading and enjoying "American Notes" at the moment. Still a fascinating insight into we Brits' love-hate relationship with the States.

Thomas Hardy is also worth trying. I'd begin with "Tess of the D'Urbervilles".

If you develop a taste for Victorian lit, Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope (particularly the political novels) are highly enjoyable.

The Skin

(or, for that matter, pre-movie & radio) in that they really paint you a very thorough picture. And most of their books & stories were serialized in weekly magazines, so people would subscribe to a coupla 'zines and when they arrived, sit in the parlour in the evening & read the next installment out loud to each other. Sounds like great entertainment to me. I did that with my kids every evening. Oooh! Speaking of stuff meant to be read out loud, nobody's mentioned Homer! Homer was this balladeer/story teller/historian, who used the devices of poetry and singing to help him remember his tales in what was essentially a pre-literate time. I read Robert Fagles' excellent translation of The Iliad to my kids, and Fagles has since come out with the Odyssey as well. Really fine stuff, much more readable & understandable than I've ever seen it done.

Ficton

Michael Moorcock - Elric of Melibone; Erekose; Gloriana (although hard to track down). And the rest, but those 3 will get you started.
The strange incident of the dog at night (or whatever it's called). Best book I've read in ages.
Terry Pratchet (start at the beginning, work forwards)
Ed McBain - genius, genius, genius.


Non-fiction
The Templar Revelation (the facts behind the Da Vinci Code). Worth picking up, as well as the Coptic Gospels.
Stupid White Men (Michael Moore). For obvious reasons, although I suspect that every member of DU has this book.


Comics (aka Graphic Novels)
Batman - No Man's Land
Rex Mundi (a spin on the Holy Grail thing)

I've read too many books that I was supposed to read, and you know what? They mostly sucked.

Read what grabs you. Fuck the rest.

Red Badge of Courage
Call of the Wild
Innocents Abroad

collected short stories. Excellent reading.

a sample of some good writing by ol' Ern, you could do a lot worse than "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".

Anything by Willa Cather, Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neil.

Read "The Road to Wigan Pier", "Homage to Catalonia", "Animal Farm", "1984", and his collected essays. Many of his essays are on an Orwell site on the internet.

Also, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Mantissa, Daniel Martin

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Portrait of a Young Man As an Artist by James Joyce

The Confessions of Nat Turner by Willain Styron

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass - also The Flounder

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis - also London Fields

Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price

How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman

The Riders by Tim Winton - also Cloud Street

The Brothers Karamozov -Dostoevsky
V - Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow is great, but I think V is better for getting your first taste of Pynchon)
Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maughm
The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

Mark Twain's essays and short stories
Dickens
Doestoyevsky Crime and Punishment
Issac Babel short stories
Margaret Atwood most of her novels and shorts are really good
Henry Miller
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway, The Waves
Sartre and Camus if you are in the mood
Harper Lee TO Kill A Mockingbird
Eudora Welty - great southern voice
John Updike - I prefer his earlier novels and short stories
E.M. Forster
DH Lawrence - atmospheric and erotic, too
Doris Lessing

lighter (mysteries, but really good ones)

Reginald Hill
Ian Pears

The Sirens of Titan
Slaughterhouse-5
Breakfast of Champions

All good places to start.