Classic Oldies (1 Viewer)

[psychosuperfly]

I'm talking about "Moby Dick" "Alice in Wonderland" "Huckleberry Fin" "There's a Hippopotamus on my roof eating cake" and there are many more.
It's my goal to read through all the old greats out there. I'm sick of seeing and hearing advertisement after advertisement of great novels being ruined by some asshole director (Although being a director is my dream career choice) thinking he can create a better picture of the novel than somebodys imagination can.
For example there is Lord of the Rings. You can't show such a fucking diverse world in a film. Don't get me wrong Lord of the Rings was visually impressive with hellacious cinematography but thats all it was.
So anyway getting back to the main point, i want to get back to the roots and read the original version of all the old greats out there and create my own world from their text.
What i'm asking is for some names of old classic novels and their authors, not necessarily ones turned into films, just any of the old classics.
So.........Hit me

 

[Kwayera]

Hmm. Dostoyevsky shows a pretty bleak world in his works, particularly 'Crime and Punishment'. Daaark, but intriguing. As is Wilde's 'A Picture of Dorian Grey'.

DON'T read George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. Boring as fuck.

Austen, if you're into chick-books, is fabulous, of course. Guys should take inspiration from Darcy.

Moby Dick.. was boring. I got about half-way through before I became fed up with Melville's style and sidetrackingness and annoying annoyingness. I'm not sure I could have stomached the whole gory whaling tale, anyway.

If you want some REAL classics, try some Greek plays, like Lysistrata and the like; Ovid's Metamorphosis is fabulous.


And that's about all the variety I can think of right now.

 

[mugnet]

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy is good...
and my brother raves about anything by Alexandre Dumas: the man in the iron mask, the three musketeers and the count of monte christo..but you'd probably have to be braced for a fair bit of swashbuckling and revenge in those books
There's this really good collection of classics that some publisher has released..they have black spines and usually a classic artwork on the cover, and they're in most bookshops. Usually i just browse the titles and pick up some ideas of ones i want to read!
next on my list is Les Miserables by victor hugo..

 

[Perfect Element]

Candide is an awesome novella by Voltaire.


Would love to see that made into a movie, hahahahahaha.

 

[Sarah168]

i recommend wilde's picture of dorian gray.

to kill a mockingbird is often quoted as people's fav book for a reason. I love Atticus

 

[Lundy]

I adored Little Women when I first read it years ago. Although it might be a bit girly for a bloke to read.

Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is a great novella. I saw a weirdass adaptation on SBS a while ago.

 

[Sarah168]

yeah, i read little women and it was just one of a few books that have managed to make me cry. I always read about people getting emotional over the death but i never thought i would be convinced of it

 

[666_blessings]

'Ulysses' and 'A portrait of the artist as a young man' by James Joyce
'As I lay dying' by William Faulkner

Only if you're into stream of consciousness.

 

[Sarah168]

and if you're able to decipher what he says whether you are "into" the stream of consciousness or not lol

 

[keladry]

can't believe no-one's mentioned dickens yet! great plots those... and sherlock holmes was always fascinating to me ^^

There's this really good collection of classics that some publisher has released..they have black spines and usually a classic artwork on the cover, and they're in most bookshops. Usually i just browse the titles and pick up some ideas of ones i want to read!

yeah those books (penguin classics) are quite good, with all the annotations and introductions and stuff. pretty much any classic worth reading should be currently published in a "classics" collection. just go browsing in the bookstore one day. they're fairly cheap too, as books go.

 

[M-turkey]

Yeah, there's a whole stack of Dickens novels, "Great Expectations" and "The Tale of Two cities" are pretty good.

The Bronte Sisters wrote some good works. Oscar Wilde's plays are good too, like "The Importance of being Ernest"

Newer classics would be Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "Animal Farm", but you'll have to read about the context of when they were written to understand them properly.

Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are good, Tom Sawyers the better thou.

Find a catalog of Penguin Classics and you'll find pretty much all of the great books.

 

[etc. etc. etc.]

Frankenstein !!!

Well, at least I enjoyed it

 

[duckofdoom]

Hairy McClary. he was a cool dog.


Little Women was okay.

The Wizard of Oz. The book has differences to the movie. Like the fact the original shoes were silver, not ruby. And there are more witches involved.

Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid - such a sad story but I can't help but feel how stupid she was. Screw the prince. Live forever and play in the sea numnuts.

back to play school classics - Franklin the turtle.

Infact most of Hans Christian Anderson's stories - I mean the orginals, not the new versions, are quite good.