What are your top three classics?

[Chongshipei]

Dracula

Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Oliver Twist

Tess 

 

I have four favourites.

[woolf woolf]

I'll consider books with at least 50 years, as a rule of thumb to consider pieces that have impacted and endured multiple generations. As a personal rule, it should also be a book that I read some years ago and still resides in my usual thoughts, creeping in while I'm daydreaming or thinking about a personal situation. I haven't read many of the books here mentioned, although it seems I have read most of the more often mentioned.

 

Alphabetical order:

 

"Crime and Punishment", Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Jane Eyre", Charlotte Brontë

"Wuthering Heights", Emily Brontë

 

Like so many others here, I'm fond of gothic fiction.

[France]

Top three classics as in the best you've ever read or classics you'd be happy to read again or already have?

 

Dracula, War and Peace and The Three Musketeers are definitely up in the best stories I've read but I have no inclination to pick them up again.

 

But these I'd be happy to read again, (in fact Bleak House is the only one I haven't).

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Persuasion - Jane again

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

[Madeleine]

Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

[Vilandra]

Off the top of my head, I would say:

 

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

[friendofbooks]

Erich Maria Remarque's novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front,'

Fyodor  Dostoevsky's book 'Crime and Punishment,'

Charles Dickens' tale 'A Tale of Two Cities'."

[Limp]

On 2/4/2024 at 6:33 AM, woolf woolf said:

I'll consider books with at least 50 years, as a rule of thumb to consider pieces that have impacted and endured multiple generations. As a personal rule, it should also be a book that I read some years ago and still resides in my usual thoughts, creeping in while I'm daydreaming or thinking about a personal situation. I haven't read many of the books here mentioned, although it seems I have read most of the more often mentioned.

 

Alphabetical order:

 

"Crime and Punishment", Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Jane Eyre", Charlotte Brontë

"Wuthering Heights", Emily Brontë

 

Like so many others here, I'm fond of gothic fiction.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It's truly a literary classic. I love that novel to the core of my being.

[PYX]

On 6/12/2008 at 9:45 AM, kernow_reader said:

 

My favourite Edith Wharton novel is "Ethan Frome".

Very readable and one of her shorter novels.

A plan gone wrong if ever there was.

Edith Wharton's 'Ethan Frome'. It's beautifully written, really touches the heart. That's all I really need from literature.

[Chongshipei]

They are:

Dracula

Tenant of Wildfell Hall

A Study in Scarlet

[dizzybee]

These are my top three, in order:

‘Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker’ by Charles Brockden Brown.

 

‘Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself’ Robert Montgomery Bird.

 

’Aurora Leigh’ by Elizabeth Barret Browning.