About Me

My photo
I'm a reader who enjoys posting comments and recommendations about the books I read. You will not find a synopsis with my recommendations because you can just click on the book title for a link to www.goodreads.com for a synopsis and reviews by other readers. I prefer the 3 Reason format: the reason I chose to read it; the reason I liked (or disliked) the book; and the reason I recommend it.
Showing posts with label literature before 1983. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature before 1983. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Classics and Contemporary Classics

Read any good books lately? I felt dissatisfied with many recommendations I received from book club members and some best-selling lists. My reaction to my dissatisfaction has been to suggest we find some classics that I have not gotten around to reading yet. I suggested we pick from these lists of Classics and Contemporary Classics pasted in my 1983 journal.
Classic Fiction
Acevedo Diaz, Eduardo – The Cry of Glory (Uruguayan, 1894)
Alcott, Louisa May- Little Women (American, 1868)
Alegria, Ciro-Broad - Alien is the World (Peruvian, 1941)
Anderson, Sherwood - Winesburg, Ohio (American, 1919)
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (British, 1813)
Balzac, Honore de - Pere Goriot (French, 1834)
Baroia, Pia - The Restlessness of Shanti Andia (Spanish, 1911)
Beerbohm, MJt.x - Zuleika Dobson (British, 1911)
Bennett, Arnold - The Old Wives' Tale (British, 1908)
Bernanos, Georges - The Diary of a Country Priest (French, 1936)
Bierce, Ambrose - In the Midst of Life (American, 1898)
Bowen, Elizabeth - The Death of the Heart (Anglo-Irish, 1939)
Bromfield, Louis - The Rains Came (American, 1937)
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (British, 1847)
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights (British, 1848)
Buck, Pearl - The Good Earth (American, 1931)
Bunyan, John - The Pilgrim's Progress (British, 1678)
Burney, Fanny - Evelina (British, 1778)
Butler, Samuel - The Way of All Flesh (British, 1903)
Cabell, James Branch - Jurgen (American, 1919)
Cable, George Washington - The Grandissimes (American, l880)
Caldwell, Erskine - God's little Acre (American, 1933)
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (French, 1941)
Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (British, 1865)
Cary, Joyce - The Horse's Mouth (Anglo-Irish, 1944)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (American, 1927)
Cela, Camilo Jose - The Family of Pascual Duarte (Spanish, 1942)
Cervantes, Miguel de - Don Quixote (Spanish, 1606)
Chandler, Raymond - The Big Sleep (American, 1939)
Chekhov, Anton - Short Stories (Russian, I880s and 1890s)
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening ( American. 1899)
Christie, Agatha - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (British, 1926)
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg- The Ox-Bow Incident (American,1940)
Collins, Wilkie - The Moonstone (British, 1868)
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (British, 1902)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Prairie (American, 1827)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage (American, 1895) Cummings, E.E. - The Enormous Room (American, 1922)
Dana, Richard Henry - Two Years Before the Mast (American, 1840)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe (British, 1719)
De Forest, J.W. - Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
(American, 1867)
Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations (British 1860-61)
Dinesen, lsak - Seven Gothic Tales (Danish, 1934)
Dos Passos, John - U.S.A. (American, 1919-36)
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment (Russian, 1866)
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (British, 1891)
Dreiser, Theodore - Sister Carrie (American, 1900)
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers (French, 1844)
DuMauier, Daphne - Rebecca (British, 1938)
Eggleston, Edward - The Hoosier School-Master (American, 187l)
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss (British, 1860)
Farrell, James T. - Studs Lonigan (American 1932-1934)
Faulkner, William - Absalom, Absalom! (American, 1936)
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones (British, 1749)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby (American, 1925)
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary (French, 1857)
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (British, 1915)
Forster, E.M. - Howards End (British, 1910)
Frederic, Harold - The Damnation of Theron Ware (American, 1896)
Galsworthy, John - The Forsyte Saga (British, 1921-1928)
Garland, Hamlin - Main- Travelled Roads (American, 1891)
Gide, Andre - The Immorailist (French, 1902)
Gissing, George - The Nether World (British, 1889)
Gogol, Nicolai - Dead Souls (Russian, 1842)
Goldsmith, Oliver - The Vicar of Wakefield (British, 1766)
Gonchavrov, Ivan - Oblomov (Russian, 1855)
Gorky, Maxim - Mother (Russian, 1907)
Graves, Robert - I, Claudius (British, 1934)
Hammett, Dashiell - The Maltese Falcon (American. 1929)
Hardy, Thomas - The Return of the Native (British, 1878)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter (American, 1850)
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (American, 1929)
Hemon, Louis - Maria Chapdelaine (Canadian, 1914)
Hesse, Hermann - Siddhartha (German, 1922)
Howells, William Dean - The Rise of Silas Lapham (American, 1885)
Hughes, Richard - A High Wind In Jamaica (British, 1929)
Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables (French, 1862)
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God (American,1937)
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (British, 1932)
Irving, Washington - Short Stories (American, 1820s and 30s)
James, Henry - Daisy Miller (American, 1879)
Johnson, Samuel - Rasselas (British, 1759)
Joyce, James - Dubliners (Irish, 1914)
Koestler, Arthur - Darkness at Noon (Hungarian, 1940)
Lawrence, D.H. - Sons and Lovers (British, 1913)
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt (American, 1922)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild (American, 1903)
Malraux, Andre - Man's Fate (French, 1934)
Mann, Thomas - Death in Venice (German, 1913)
Mansfield, Katherine - Collected Stories (New Zealand, 1945)
Marquand, John P. - The Late George Apley (American, 1937)
Maugham, Somerset - Of Human Bondage (British, 1915)
Maupassant, Guy de - Short Stories (French, 1880s)
Mauriac, Francois - The Nest of Vipers (French, 1932)
McCullers, Carson - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (American, 1940)
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (American, 1851)
Meredith, George - The Egoist (British, 1879)
Mitchell, Margaret - Gone With the Wind (American, 1936)
Moore, George - Esther Waters (British, 1894)
Murasaki, Shikibu - The Tale of Genji-One (Japanese, about 1000)
Norris, Frank - The Octopus (American, 1901)
O'Hara, John - Appointment in Samarra (American, 1934)
Peacock, Thomas Love - Nightmare Abbey (British, 1818)
Poe, Edgar Allan - Short Stories (American, 1840s)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Wav (French, 1913-17)
Pushkin, Alexander - Short Stories (Russian, 1820s and 30s)
Rabelais, Francois - Gargantua and Pantagruel (French, 1532-64)
Radcliffe, Ann - The Mysteries of Udolpho (British, 1794)
Rand, Ayn - The Fountainhead (American, 1943)
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front (German, 1928)
Richardson, Samuel - Clarissa (abridged) British, 1747-48)
Rinehart, Mary Roberts - The Circular Staircase (American, 1908)
Rivera, Jose Eustasio - The Vortex (Columbian, 1924)
Rolvaag, O.E. - Giants in the Earth (Norwegian-American, 1927)
Scott, Sir Walter - Ivanhoe (British, 1891)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (British, 1818)
Silone, Ignazio - Bread and Wine (Italian, 1937)
Sinclair, Upton - The Jungle (American, 1901)
Smollett, Tobias - Humphry Clinker (British, 1771)
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath (American, 1940)
Stegner, Wallace - The Big Rock Candy Mountain (American,1931)
Stendahl - The Red and The Black (French, 1830)
Sterne, Laurence - Tristram Shandy (British, 1760-67)
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island (British, 1882)
Stoker, Bram - Dracula (British, 1897)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin (American, 1852)
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (British, 1726)
Tate, Allen - The Fathers (American, 1938)
Thackeray, William Makepeace - Vanity Fair (British, 1847-48)
Tolstoy, Leo - Anne Karenina (Russian, 1873-76)
Toomer, Jean - Cane (American, 1923)
Trollope, Anthony - Barchester Towers (British, 1857)
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons (Russian, 1892)
Twain, Mark - Huckleberry Finn (American, 1885)
Undset, Sigrid - Kristin Lavransdatter (Norwegian,1920-22)
Verne, Jules - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (French, 1869)
Voltaire - Candide (French, 1759)
Walpole, Horace - The Castle of Otranto (British, 1764)
Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited (British, 1964)
Wells, H.G. - Tono-Bungay (British, 1908)
West, Nathanael- The Day of the Locust (American, 1939) Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence (American, 1920)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (British, 1891)
Wilder, Thornton - The Bridge of San Luis Rey (American, 1927) Wisler, Owen - The Virginian (American, 1902)
Wolfe, Thomas - Look Homeward, Angel (American, 1929)
Woolf, Virginia - To The Lighthouse (British, 1927)
Wright, Richard - Native Son (American, 1940)
Zola, Emil - Germinal (French, 1885)


Contemporary Classics (from WWII until 1983)

Abe, Koo - The Woman In The Dunes (Japanese, 1964)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart (Nigeria, 1951)
Agee, James - A Death In the Family (American, 1957)
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim (British, 1953)
Atwood, Margaret - Surfacing (Canadian, 1972)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on The Mountain (American, 1952)
Barth, John - The Sot-Weed Factor (American, 1960)
Bellow, Saul - Sammler's P1anel (American, 1969)
Boll, Heinrich - Billiards At Half-Past Nine (German, 1962)
Borges, Jorge - Labyrinths (Argentine, 1962)
Braine, John - Room at the Top (British, 1951)
Brown, Claude - Manchild In the Promised Land (American, 1965)
Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange (British, 1962)
Cheever, John - The Wapshot Scandal (American, 1963)
Connell, Evan S. - Mrs. Bridge (American, 1951)
Coover, Robert - The Public Burning (American, 1977)
Crews, Harrv - Car (American, 1972)
Dickev, James - Deliverance (American, 1970)
Didion, Joan - Plav It as It Lays (American, 1975)
Doctorow, E. L. - Ragtime (American, 1975)
Drabble, Margaret - The Garrick Year (British, 1964)
Durrell, Lawrence - Justine (British, 1957)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (American, 1947)
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman (British, 1969)
Friedman, Bruce Jay - Stern (American, 1962)
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - One Hundred Vears of Solitude (Columbian,
1967)
Gardner, John - Grendel (American, 1971)
Gironella, Jose - The Cvpresses Believe in God (Spanish, 1953)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies (British, 1954)
Grass , Gunter - The Tin Drum (German, 1959)
Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter (British, 1949)
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (American, 1955)
Hersey, John - Hiroshima (American, 1946)
Himes, Chester - Pintoes (American, 1965)
Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (British, 1981)
Jona, Gayl - Corregidora (American, 1975)
Jones, James - From Here to Eternity (American, 1951)
Junichiro, Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles (Japanese, 1965)
Kawabata, Vasunari - Thousand Cranes (Japanese, 1959)
Kerouac, Jack - On the Road (American, 1955)
Kesey, Ken - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (American, 1962)
Kim, Richard E. - The Martyred (Korean-American, 1964)
Knowles, John .- A Separate Peace (American, 1959)
Lagerquist, Par - The Dwarf (Swedish, 1953)
Lampedusa, Giuseppe di - The Leopard (Italian, 1960)
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird (American, 1960)
Le Guin, Ursula - The Left Hand of Darkness (American, 1969)
Lessing, Doris - In Pursuit of the English (British, 1960)
Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano (British, 1947)
Mailer, Norman - The Naked and the Dead (American, 1948
Moore, Brian - The Lonelv Passion of Judith Hearne (lrish-Canadian-
American, 1955)
Moravia, Alberto - Mistaken Ambitions (Italian, 1955)
Morris, Wright - Love Among the Cannibals (American, 1957)
Morrison, Toni - Sula (American, 1973)
Murdoch, Iris - Under the Net (British, 1954)
Nabokov, Vladmir - Lolita (American, 1953)
Oates, Jovce Carol - Them (American, 1969)
O'Connor, Edwin - The Last Hurrah (American, 1956)
O'Connor, Flannery - The Violent Bear It Awav (American, 1955)
Olsen, Tillie - Yonnondio (American, 1974)
Orwell, George - 1984 (British, 1949)
PaleY, Grace - Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (American, 1960)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago (Russian, 1951)
Paton, Alan - Cry, the Beloved Country (South African, 1948)
Percv, Walker - The Moviegoer (American, 1960)
Plath, SYlvia - The Bell Jar (American, 1971)
Porter, Katherine Anne - Ship of Fools (American, 1945)
Potok, Chaim - My Name is Asher Lev (American, 1972)
Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (British, 1951)
Powers, J.F. - Morte D'Urban (American, 1956)
Power., John R. - The Last Catholic in Armerica (American, 1973)
Purdy, Jame. - The Nephew (American, 1960)
Read, Piers Paul - The Professor's Daughter (British, 1971)
Robbins Tom - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (American, 1976)
Roth, Philip - Goodbye, Columbus (American, 1959)
Salinger, J. D. - The Catcher in Ihe Rye (American, 1945)
Shaara, Michael - Killer Angels (American, 1974)
Sheed, Wilfred - People Will Always Be Kind (American, 1973)
Sillitoe, Alan - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (British, 1958)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis - The Familv Moskat (Arnerican, 1950)
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian, 1963)
Spark, Muriel - Memento Mori (British, 1958)
Stone, Robert - A Flag For Sunrise (American, 1981)
Styron, William - Lie Down in Darkness, (American, 1951)
Thomas, D. - The White Hotel (British, 1981)
Tolkien, J.R.R. - The Lord of the Rings (British, 1954-55)
Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces (American, 1980)
Updike, John - Rabbit, Run (American, 1960)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Cat's Cradle (American, 1963)
Wain, John - Hurry On Down (British, 1953)
Walker, Alice - Meridian (American, 1977)
Wallant, Edward Louis - The Pawnbroker (Arnerican, 1962)
Warren, Robert Penn - All The King's Men (American, 1946)
Welty, Eudora - Delta Wedding (American, 1945)
White, Patrick - The Aunt's Story (Australian, 1946)
White, T. H. - The Once and Future King (British, 1958)
Williams, John A. - The Man Who Cried I Am (American, 1967)