what was the last 'classic book' you got and were knocked out by?

Re the op question: Petrarch's sonnets (Canzoniere) - I really don't know why there aren't considered as essential as say Shakespeare, and are usually reduced to historical importance only, they are absolute genius and far more complex and difficult than the reputation of "Petrarchan love", - and Comte de Lautréamont's Maldoror, which broke my brain. Can't ask more from a book than that.

The Golden Notebook for me, I expected it to be incredibly worthy and to drag so much more than it did, in the end I devoured it in a week.

Glumdalclitch, thank you for yr kind words! And yes, the revelatory nature of good literature is very much an echo of and party to the revelatory nature of the quotidian, imho...

I do wonder what of mine you've read! Feel free to private message...

Oh. And as for the original question, two strike me as fitting, but one more than the other.

The first is Silas Marner. Found a copy of it in a free box, started reading it, and found it to be a much more enjoyable experience than I'd ever imagined it to be.

The second is a book by Christa Wolf, 'Accident: A Day's News,' which is a psychological portrait of a woman living in the German countryside in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, while in the meantime, her brother undergoes surgery for a brain tumor hundreds of kilometers away. It is considered a classic by many writers, at least, and I have to say: it is a deeply affecting book. Highly recommended.

I read old poetry all the time, most recently did a close read of 'Fra Lippo Lippi' and a load of John Clare, ever my favorite.

I dodged required reading of Silas Marner in high school, and deprived myself of Eliot for many years, until finally got to The Mill on The Floss and omg Middlemarch. Should give Silas his due, I be thinkin'.
A Rebours seemed a little silly in the translation I read, and the illustrations didn't help, but testimonial urgency came through, and point more or less taken, although I still have school myself with episodes of Hoarders.
Cather talk on this thread has gotten me back to her, more on that later.

I wrote this bit several years ago on the queerness of reading.

O Hell Yes.

Recently re-read Bulgakov’s ‘Heart of a Dog.’ Very prescient for our times, especially when the dog started spouting incoherent, popular political jargon.

Alfred - If only reading was that kind of virus.

I haven't thought about that kind of attitude in depth but maybe people feel the same way about reading in public as they do with mobile phones, as if it's rude and antisocial? Was it when other people were coming to you and wanted your attention or was it even just the idea of you reading in private?

I wonder how many people glued to mobile phones are reading books on them?

i was reading an article about shirley jackson a few nights ago and realized that i hadn't actually revisited "the lottery" since first encountering it in seventh grade, when it disturbed me so much i'm pretty sure i had nightmares about it. so i reread it. really a remarkably effective story, even if you know what to expect. the last couple of paragraphs still make my stomach lurch. also loved reading about all the hate mail the new yorker got after running it.

Just re-read The Lottery myself. Going to teach it along with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in the first week of my short fiction class this fall.

"The Lottery" was b-a-a-ck in The New Yorker recently (maybe latest issue?), a few weeks after her son was in there, talking to Elizabeth Moss about Mom (Moss was in that recent movie based on a novel about Shirley Jackson, got very mixed reviews).

Mine would probably be Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which has stayed with me and continues to worry away at various things at the back of my mind. That and O Pioneers! I must read more Cather.

I tend to organise myself and my thoughts (if those things are different) through reading as well: it helps me think, essentially - might even be 'how I think'. Seamus Heaney put it well: "We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves... What is at work in the most original and illuminating poetry is the mind's capacity to conceive a new place of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity".

Ugh I should've started asking for book recommends in this thread and not the thread where we're talking about authors we avoid

I've mostly been reading books written by friends these days, they've all been great but impossible for me to be objective about. I'm gonna re-read Borges collected fiction starting this evening

Never a bad time to read Borges! Or Cheever for that matter. If you're after short fiction: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson if you've not read it. It is a thing of wonder.

Oooooh this looks good. Thanks for the recommendation!!!!

Last week I described my taste in books as English 201 haha

Fgti, have you read Gass? Heart of the Heart of the Country is essential, imho

the stories of kleist; among which earthquake in chile, michael kolhaas, the foundling and marquise of o are some of the best things i've ever read.

Seconded, Kleist's short stories are marvellous. Nothing else I've read by him gets on the same level.

Heartburn, for the pleasure and Wodehouse-level density of jokes

Two Serious Ladies, for the voice

Rereading Seamus Deane on Joyce. Insight and intellect but also, as always, sometimes gnomic to the point of meaning very little.

Apologies: that was for the What Are You Reading thread?

Joyce knocked me out, but not Deane.

i asked this and never answered it and it's nearly the time of year where i pick something foreign and enormous to read so it's on my mind

Les Mis was great, all the things i like about Dickens but with a French twist. lots of memorable set pieces. didn't like the digressions - here are 3 chapters about the different kinds of nuns, here are 9 about the Napoleonic war...

similarly the Count Of Monte Cristo, the injustice, the prison, the reversal of fortune and using that to extract a slow revenge. bit too slow in parts 2 and 3 tbh, but 4 and 5 picked it up again.

shorter, and English, but probably the one, is Hardy's Tess. again the injustice burns all the way through this, the second half, the winter turnip picking, is bleak, the revenge self-destructive.

torn as to what to pick this year though. Anna K last year was a slight let down which has kind of put me off attempting War and Peace. i have Life and Fate but that might be too modern. Musketeers? Hunchback? given that the French have impressed me (also loved Toilers)?

The ONce and Future King though it does have some hangovers from a less enlightened age plus I did have it hanging around for an age.
Meant to read it for ages too.
BUt enjoying so far, though possibly not so much the Robin Wood bit.
ah well

I've heard about the Count of Monte Cristo being a great novel but not the most coherent or consistent.
I think it was written in parts spread out over a monthly or whatever magazine. Which may have been a bit of a norm at the time.
Does UMberto Eco have an article on the nature of the text in one of his collections, I know I've come across somebody like that writing about it.

Koogs: Balzac?

i never know where to start with the 300 things that balzac has written. i have a list somewhere where people had tried to sort it into chronological order and have the first 6 parts on the ereader and did start but got bogged down in The Chouans.

https://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/suggested-reading-order-of-the-human-comedy/

Koogs: I have heard that THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE is a good one to read. Maybe you could report back on that.

Also big titles: PERE GORIOT, EUGENIE GRANDET, LOST ILLUSIONS. I admit I write in ignorance: have always meant to read these and still not done it. A good reading ambition for one day.

Les Mis was great, all the things i like about Dickens but with a French twist. Les Mis was great, all the things i like about Dickens but with a French twist.

Ahem, Dickens is Victor Hugo with a British twist, surely.

i read dickens first (and more), so that's my perspective.

totally fair, just figured someone needed to #standuptoanglocentrism

read war and peace this summer. p good, it turns out!

my answer to this would be 'austerlitz,' last fall. a high water mark of beauty.

short story edition: "the singers" by turgenev. so much beauty in twenty pages or so.

Turgenev never gets the readership he deserves. On the Eve is a magical thing.

I know it's English and thus not what you are looking for, but I will always recommend The Last Chronicle of Barset, Trollope's epic about a clergyman struggling w/poverty and clinical depression who finds himself accused of theft. It's the only Victorian novel I can think of that centers on a character with a serious mental illness, and Trollope absolutely does justice to it; Mr. Crawley is at times irrational, intensely focused on his own problems, very hard on himself and his family, and yet he's also a very compelling and sympathetic character, and everything about him rings true.

Trollope always deserves notice.

I can't read Dickens but can read three or four Trollopes, if we're in the biz of comparing them.

I like some aspects of Dickens, but he's not good at writing women, and he's also unfair to his female characters in a way that really rankles with me. Our Mutual Friend would be such a great book imo if not for the ending; the idea of everyone in Bella's life putting on an elaborate act in order to trick her into falling in love with someone is horrifying.

Trollope, otoh, is amazing at writing women, and he's also able to veer away from the traditional marriage-plot when he thinks it would make more sense for the character to stay single.

yes, i love Dickens, but it is very true that his hatred for women shines through in his novels.

Trollope clearly appreciated women. i do think they suit very different reading moods, and i love them both.

The women in Trollope have the money and know how to administer it.

> read war and peace this summer. p good, it turns out

ade edmondson, of all people, was raving about it recently. he had to read it for work, wasn't expecting to enjoy it.

> I will always recommend The Last Chronicle of Barset

it's been on the list, and my kobo, along with the other one, since your last recommendation. but it's a long list (and yes, maybe too english (and maybe too short, but i could read both))

Oh, cool! Sorry for repeating myself - I get very evangelical when it comes to Trollope, clearly.

Last year at some point I read Slaughterhouse Five.. never was a Vonnegut fan but I read this at the right time, really really sucked me in.

20 pages into Tristram Shandy and this is a knock out.

Just wait until he tells you all about his life and times!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Wish I'd read this years ago, its so fantastic.

> read war and peace this summer. p good, it turns out

ade edmondson, of all people, was raving about it recently. he had to read it for work, wasn't expecting to enjoy it.

― koogs, Friday, February 19, 2021 7:01 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

He plays a father figure in a BBC version from about 4 or 5 years ago which was pretty good

There is an event hosted by the English department at the university I used to teach at called Dead Writers, where you dress up and read a three-minute passage from a dead writer's work. My cousin and I did a performance a few years ago where we cut The Yellow Wallpaper down to three minutes. I wore a nightgown and read out loud, while in the background my cousin played the woman in the wallpaper: first she held up an opaque length of ugly yellow cloth and just kind of moved around behind it, then she dropped it to reveal herself wrapped in a lot of yellow tulle, then at the end she dropped the tulle and was wearing a yellow bikini and yellow go-go boots (made by us with lots of yellow duck tape) and then we both crawled offstage. It was a big hit.

Lol, brilliant

Last fall, after reading Casey Cep's energetic, in-depth profile of Marilynne Robinson and a startling, instantly engaging excerpt of Jack, both in The New Yorker, I proceeded to Gilead and the rest of that cycle to date.

neglected thread

The Old Man And The Sea was as good as they say it is

I'm not sure if Infinite Jest counts but it's certainly heavy enough to do the trick. I was absolutely floored. Left its mark on me for a while afterwards.

It's been a little over a year since I read it, but House of Mirth, Edith Wharton. She crushed it.

Is should also mention The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson, where so much was happening 'between the lines' that I had to stop reading at least once every page or so to absorb it all. Amazing stuff.

Madame Bovary (tr. Davis). Boredom is powerful stuff!

Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy.

Before that Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, tr. Tina Nunnally. Deserves to be better known though a 1000 page novel about a 14th century norwegian woman is obviously not going to fly off the shelves.

Classic. THink it has to be

Diana Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle and Dogsbody which I onoy got to read a couplle of weeks ago. Though I think I had seen teh studio Ghibli animation

Federici Caliban & The Witch book on feminism and the Witch Trials very good book though I'm still wondering best way to navigate text with so many reference points to endnotes. Efficiently without interrupting reading flow like. & most of teh endnotes were significant not just citation.

C Willett Cunnington's Handbook of English costume in the nineteenth century so much so that I think I want to get a permanenet reference copy.

Country music originals : the legends and the lost Tony Russell,
2010 so may not be old enough to be classic though the contents certainly are. Again something I want to get a personal copy of.

Is the idea of classic book time directed as in book needs to be over 25 years old? Cos I think that was the way that the music thread worked.

I'm just finishing an anthology of Linda Nochlin's articles including Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? which itself was from 1971 so the standalone book should be included. I read that before I got the anthology.

> Is the idea of classic book time directed as in book needs to be over 25 years old?

it's just a mirror of the 'classic album' thread on ilm. nobody's going to be arrested by the thread police for posting never books. that said, it shouldn't just be a 'what are you reading?' or 'what have you bought recently?' thread, because we have those.

Either The Count of Monte Cristo or Little Women. Both masterpieces in very different ways.

Left hand of darkness. Works as a book of ideas, works as a book of beautiful sentences, and works as a kickass survival adventure. And so spookily modern on modern-day right wing politics.