Books that are 'Classics'

Penguin, in association with the UK newspaper The Times, have recently drawn up a list of what they regard as the 50 greatest classics of all time. They are:-

The Confessions - St Augustine
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Emma - Jane Austen
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Iliad - Homer
Beowulf
The Odyssey - Homer
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli
The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Paradise Lost - John Milton
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Republic - Plato
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
The Divine Comedy Vol 1: Inferno - Dante
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Oedipus the King - Sophocles
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Faerie Queene - Edmund Spenser
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Medea - Euripides
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Aeneid - Virgil
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
Candide - Voltaire
Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Prelude - William Wordsworth

Anyone have a favourite in there?

Was curious as to how many of these people had read. I confess to only having read a very small number of them, but hope over the forthcoming years that that changes.

Of course, such a list is really rather subjective (and depends quite significantly on what the definition of 'classic' is), so I wondered if anyone disagreed with any that made it on to the list, and what people's favourite classic books are.

T1000

PS Fascinating fact that most will prolly know already: The musician Moby takes his name from the fact that he is the great-great grandnephew of Moby Dick author Herman Melville.

I count 24 that I've read (not all by choice). Several others I started but never got through.

I guess I'd agree with most of the choices, but I thought George Eliot was a real snore.

My favorite is Anna Karenina.

my favourite classic is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
but its not on the list, so Moby Dick

That list is absurd. Unless I am mistaken, not one of those books was written in the 20th century. I also can't help noticing that the Times was not shy about packing the list full of Englishmen (and women).

Well they are a lot better than the majority of the popular trash novels we mostly get from publishers.

-mike

I've read about 25 or so of them. i'd say, probably like most, there are some good ones and some not so good ones on there. My favorites are probably Dante's Inferno and Crime and Punishment

Originally posted by rwingett
That list is absurd. Unless I am mistaken, not one of those books was written in the 20th century. I also can't help noticing that the Times was not shy about packing the list full of Englishmen (and women).

Originally posted by T1000
I'm not sure it's meant to be taken toooo seriously!!

Originally posted by rwingett
What!?! Not meant to be taken seriously!?! That list is an affront to humanity. It is a blot on civilization. Its compilers should be dragged through the streets and then forced to eat a copy of War and Peace. If they survived that ordeal, they should be forever banned from compiling any future lists of any sort. Then for the rest of time they would be deri ...[text shortened]... nown as, "the cabal of literary poseurs who cobbled together that extraordinarily silly list".

Hmmm, i'm a big reader, but I've only read 3 of those 😕 (though war and peace should count as 4 or 5 in itself).

Originally posted by trekkie
Everyone has there (sp.) own tastes, so a top 50 could never be agreed upon.

Rob, In you (sp.) enormous wisdom, that you keep reminding everyone of, what would be in your top 50 ?

-mike

it seems pretty clear that the decision to exclude 20th century works was a conscious one, not an oversight. Hence I assume there was some rationale behind it.

Hm... I went to the Times webpage to get more info on the list, but it turns out that to view it I have to subscribe to the online Times for 40 pounds (!!!) a year....

Originally posted by T1000
Penguin, in association with the UK newspaper The Times, have recently drawn up a list of what they regard as the 50 greatest classics of all time. They are:-

The Confessions - St Augustine
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Emma - Jane Austen
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Iliad - Homer ...[text shortened]... ame from the fact that he is the great-great grandnephew of Moby Dick author Herman Melville.

So if there is no 20 century in it ... where is Schiller???