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

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.