What literature classics are a must read before you die?

a few of my favourites,

Red badge of courage
9 stories, by salinger
Brothers Karamazov, and the rest of Dostoyevsky. (Not nearly as heavy as I thought, just lots of big long names.)
All quiet on the western front
Siddhartha
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
Never cry wolf, Farley Mowat
Grapes of wrath
Robinson Crusoe
Island, Huxley
Zombie survival guide (thats just a down right fun read)
 
Just a few brief classic additions:

The Ascent of Man - Jacob Bronowski
Dialogs - Plato
The Harmonies of the World - Kepler
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Animal Farm - Orwell
Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Man and Superman - George Bernard Shaw
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Stranger - Albert Camus
The Story of Civilization - Will and Ariel Durant
Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre
The I Ching - Fu Xi (?)
Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
Das Kapital - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edgar A Poe
The Art of War - Sun-Tzu
Everything by Dostoevsky
Everything by Faulkner


Some poets for Esav....

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience - William Blake
Paradise Lost - Milton
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rubiyat - Omar Khyam
The Sonnets - William Shakespeare



And some modern reads:

Tales of the Cthulu Mythos; At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror - HP Lovecraft
On the Beach - Neville Shute
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Last Aid: The Medical Dimensions of Nuclear War - Various
Alaska - James A Michener
Coming into the Country; The Pine Barrens - John McPhee
Focault's Pendulum; The Name of the Rose - Humberto Eco
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
The Ninja - Eric van Lustbader
I Robot; The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
By Reason of Insanity: The Anvil Chorus - Shane Stevens



And lastly, Marley and Me by John Grogan, for anyone who loves dogs!!!! :thumbup:





:D
J
 
java said:
Just a few brief classic additions:

The Story of Civilization - Will and Ariel Durant


And lastly, Marley and Me by John Grogan, for anyone who loves dogs!!!! :thumbup:

:D
J
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Java. Have you really read all eleven volumes :eek: of Will & Ariel durant's Story of Civilization? If you have, you are my new hero. That would be a truly daunting task.

I'll have to read Marley and Me. I do love dogs.
 
Zip7 said:
SG - I've read most of Faulkner - the guy is a genius. BUT, you really have to get into "Faulkner Mode" to follow it. Some of his books you need to read a couple of time. Also helps if you are from the south.

I think most people attempt Faulkner too early in life. As I Lay Dying is one of the best books I've ever read, but I didn't think so when I was in high school.
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Zip. It's been a long time since I've read any Faulkner. Perhaps I'll have to give Billy another try, sometime. I have a nice little Viking portable Faulkner in my personal library, maybe that would be a good place to start.
 
stevengregory said:
Java. Have you really read all eleven volumes :eek: of Will & Ariel durant's Story of Civilization? If you have, you are my new hero. That would be a truly daunting task.

I'll have to read Marley and Me. I do love dogs.
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Used to be a voracious reader back in me younger days. My Aunt Sue had to chase me out of the house to keep her Brtannica set with its World's Greatest Books safe. Burned up an entire summer reading through Rousseau and Revolution when I was seventeen. Never got around to The Age of Napoleon....guess I'm just waiting for someone to finish the series....... In spite of the fact that the Durants interjected their own conjecture and made a few brash leaps of reason, it still remains an impressive albeit unfinished work.

You won't regret Marley and Me.



:D
J
 
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Conell
its a short story that you can read if you google it
 
I may have forgotten one: Treasure Island by RLS. Too often dismissed as a child's book, it is (IMHO) the best adventure story going. If you haven't read it, check it out.
 
Goethe's Faust is good.

Edgar Burroughs is also a fair science fiction writer Tarzan and John Carter are great characters.

Clavell's Shogun is a great read.

As for "read before I die" how about the Iliad in greek?
 
java said:
Used to be a voracious reader back in me younger days....Burned up an entire summer reading through Rousseau and Revolution when I was seventeen....

You won't regret Marley and Me. :D
J
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So, you read ten out of eleven volumes, in one Summer, to boot. Pretty darn impressive! OK, you're just a hero and not a super-hero, since you didn't finish. I have the set in my personal library, here at home, but I haven't started it. Looking at it reminds me of, like, walking to China. It can be done, but how much time would it burn up? A Summer, I guess. :)
 
E. Howard - Conan, Bran Mac Mor (?). Kull
E.R. Burroughs - John Carter Books
A short History of Byzantium, Can't recal author
Isacc Assimov - The Ugly Little Boy, Nightfall
Barbarians Speak (Roman History)


Patrick
 
I didn't particularily like your list. Here are some of my "must reads".
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
The Alexandrian Quartet by Laurence Durrel
Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens
The Five Rings (or something like that. It is a book by a Japanese Samurai swordsman)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Tom Jones
The Nigger and the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad

This could go on for some time but I gotta go. Cheers, Alex.
 
On your list list I like Dostoevsky and Huxley but maybe tthe best of all is Anna Karenina by Tolsoi. Of the Russians don't miss Nikolai Gogol who wrote The Nose and The Overcoat. As for American authors one of the best is Arthur Miller in The Tropic of Cancer (or is it Capricorn?). Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven is one of the best things ever written in any language. A real must is Guimarães Rosa and the Argentinian author who wrote something call Cecropias????
 
Talmud
Ethics of the Fathers
The Road to Serfdom Friedrich A. Hayek
Historical Manual of English Prosody George Saintsbury
The Book of Forms Lewis Turco
The Velocipede J.F.B.
short history of the saxophone weatherly
Collected Poems H.D.
The Sacred Fire B.Z.Goldberg
Every Goodbye Ain't Gone ed. Nielsen and Ramey
Stars Fell on Alabama Carl Carmer
Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian Harry James Cargas
Sea Garden H.D.
The Sabbath Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Imagist Poem ed. William Pratt
Declaration of Conscience Margaret Chase Smith
Collected Poems Robert Hayden
 
Anything by Voltaire
One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn
Maus, A Survivor's Tale - Spiegelman
Godel, Escher, Bach - Hoffstadtler
A Brief History of Time - Hawking
On The Shoulders of Giants - Hawking
Anything by Douglas Adams
The Gunslinger series by Stephen King

Dont know if they count as 'classics'.... but are all great reads.
 
Hardy: Jude The Obscure, Tess of the D'urbervilles
Nietzsche: On the Birth of Tragedy, On the Geneology of Morals
Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation
Freud: On Civilization and its Discontents
Joyce: Ulysses
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, The Tempest
Beckett: Endgame, Waiting for Godot
Aristotle's Poetics
Conrad: The Secret Agent, The Heart of Darkness
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Grey
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Against Nature, A Farewell to Arms
Marquez: 100 years of solitude
Goethe: Faust
Dostoevsky: The Prince, Crime and Punishment
Camus: The Stranger
Sartre: The Flies, No Exit
Hegel: Science of Logic
Kant: Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Judgment
Stendhal: The Red and The Black, (although I like The Charterhouse of Parma better)
Marx: The Communist Manifesto
Dickens: Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities
Emerson: Nature
Thoreau: Walden
Darwin: the Origin of Species
Umberto Eco: Baudolino
Dante: The Inferno

More will come to me, but thats all for now (pretty much that's what I have on my bookshelf next to my bed)
 
Wow - what a great thread. I've read many of the books listed, but still have a long way to go. Let me add some that may not be classics per se, but left an impression on me when I read them:

Lords of Discipline - Pat Conroy
Arthur Trilogy (Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur) - Bernard Cornwell
Gates of Fire - Steven Pressfield
The Alienist - Caleb Carr

Keep up the good work - I've got to start reading...!
 
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