What literature classics are a must read before you die?

madcap_magician said:
I think the best books for understanding the foundation of the United States would be John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I'd read those if nothing else. I've only personally read a little more than half of that list... Toooooo much reading to do... and I haven't even really gotten into the fun ones.

Ooh, here's one.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. From the beginning of noir in film and literature. Great novel.
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I'll look those up. Thanks!
 
Not to hijack the thread, and this in no way even begins to cover "fun fiction," but it's not a bad start for a Utah redneck. Notice that I've added occasional titles to authors, since I've often read others of their works.

Books I've read from Guyon's "Monster List:"

The Epic of Gilgamesh
Holy Bible (King James Version)
The Apocrypha
Bhagavad-Gita (in English)
Homer. Iliad; Odyssey
Aristophanes; Lysistrata
Aesop. Fables
The Koran (Al-Qur'an) - parts
Beowulf (30 years ago, in HS)
Dante. The Divine Comedy;
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote;
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D'Arthur

Shakespeare, William. Plays and Poems

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels;
Scott, Sir Walter. Waverley; The Heart of Midlothian; Redgauntlet; Old Mortality , NO but Ivanhoe!
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities; ; Great Expectations;
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems - selected
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre again, in school…
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Essays; Kidnapped; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island; . The Master of Ballantrae;
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Fairy Tales - most
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer - also Mohicans and Leatherstocking
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden
Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; ; ; Pudd'nhead Wilson A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Hardy, Thomas. ; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim; Collected Stories; Puck of Pook's Hill; Complete Verse. KIM…. The best. I THINK I’ve read ‘em all..

Joyce, James. Dubliners; ; Finnegans Wake
Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum;
Aleichem, Sholem. Dubbyuk?
Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. ; The Great Gatsby;
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.
Marquand, John P.. H. M = Wickford Point
Bellow, Saul. ; Herzog.
Vidal, Gore. Myra Brechinridge;
Salinger, J. D.. The Catcher in the Rye
Guin, Ursula K. Le. The Left Hand of Darkness.
Theroux, Paul - Riding the Iron Rooster
 
Guyon said:
I think a better question here might be, "What three books would you take to a desert island?" Two are easy--the Bible and a complete Shakespeare. The third one is the tough one for me.
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A dictionary? ;)
 
kamagong said:
A dictionary? ;)
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That's actually not a bad choice if it were the OED. Of course, we're talking multi-volumes here.
 
Treasure Island by RLS
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Rendevous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Ox Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
 
Poe, Get an anthology
The dark Tower, a series by Stephen King - It is totaly unlike anything else he has written. Must read.
 
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Demian - Herman Hesse
Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

Also various short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, most notably Call of Cthulhu, Quest of Unkown Kadath, Shadow over Innsmouth, and the Dunwich Horror.
 
Lots and lots of excellent literature!

I don't think these have been mentioned:

Charles Dickens - everything. I haven't read all of his work yet but what I have read is incomparable. A Christmas Carol; David Copperfield; Great Expectations; Dombey and Son; etc.

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights. The passion, the drama!

Jerome K Jerome - Three Men in a Boat - The funniest book I have ever read! I was literally stopping every page to wipe the tears from my eyes.

Andy
 
Madcap, a few of the books on your list are used by the writers of LOST.

A couple of my favorites that have not been mentioned (or maybe they have) ;

Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
Planet of the Apes - Pierre Boulle
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
 
A.W.U.K. said:
Charles Dickens - everything. I haven't read all of his work yet but what I have read is incomparable. A Christmas Carol; David Copperfield; Great Expectations; Dombey and Son; etc.

Andy
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Speaking of Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities is my favorite work of his.
 
All the works of Edgar Allen Poe and the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock.
 
Along with the Bible you should read the Koran. It's nice to try to understand the other guys point of view.
 
^In this case, from what I've read, the other guys pov isn't much different.

Well, I really haven't read very much, but here's my list based on my few experiences:

Walden
House Of Leaves
 
Kon Tiki - Thor Heyderdahl (sp?) The book that gave me a thirst for adventure that has never abated.
 
ABTOMAT-47 said:
Most of the great and popular works have been mentioned, and I'm sleepy so I'll skip adding anything. But...

Can someone tell me why Catcher In The Rye is so highly regarded? Don't give me any of that landmark teenage angst BS. Maybe it's because I was an adult when I read it, but I though it had no right to be held in such high regard. A short, not terribly well written story about a lazy, obnoxious prick who starts off going "Home Alone" and spirals into paranoid insanity. Didn't speak to me.
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I fully agree. I read the book recently as an adult and while it is well written, it is very overrated, IMHO.

Not sure if I saw these mentioned:

Dune - Frank Herbert
Ringworld - Larry Niven
Ghost Story - Peter Straub

Mark
 
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