i was shopping for books last night with my son and we stumbled across a section of classic works for kids. he and i have read together since age 4 and he is now 9. in this section we found things like jungle book and Tarzan. and it got me thinking, i haven't read many classical works myself, or anything more than like 60yrs old (LoTR) so what am i missing out on.

my father recommended things like; Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, Edgar Burroughs, Thoreau, and Whitman. now from what i know that most of these tend to border on strong independent male leads. of which my father heavily leans towards but i wanted some of the views of others on the board.

so give me some, hit me with it, authors and books that highlight some classical thought.

Oh man...the thing is that there are so many genres and types of classic literature that it's hard to just toss stuff out. So...here are my attempts to suggest some things.

So, here are some of my recommendations:

Poetic Edda
Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory
Hamlet
anything John Donne wrote
H.P. Lovecraft (particularly The Colour out of Space)
Pride and Prejudice
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Hound of Baskerville by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

But again...there's just so much out there. Do you have genres or types of literature that you'd prefer to read?

Are you looking for literature or philosophy?

a little of both, granted i am not the deepest thinker out there, read catcher in the rye, and apparently missed all the point of the story all together.

This is what we read in a 1800-modern British Literature Survey class I had. All are well worth your time, especially if you go through them sequentially.

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (or at least the preface), “Tintern Abbey”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Michael”
Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” “Frost at Midnight”
Byron, Don Juan
Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” “Mont Blanc,” “Ode to the West Wind”; Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn”
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Newman, The Idea of a University
Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters,” In Memoriam
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Robert Browning , “My Last Duchess”
Arnold, “Dover Beach,”
Huxley, “Science and Culture,” “Agnosticism and Christianity”
Hardy, “On the Western Circuit,” “The Darkling Thrush”
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums”;
Hulme, Flint, Pound and H.D. Yeats,
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Joyce, “Araby,” “The Dead”
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Reed, “Naming of Parts”
Auden
MacNeice
Larkin
Lessing, “To Room Nineteen”

Actually, if you want to read/have a good selection of classic works, go for A Norton Anthology. They have a British and American anthology and both are worth owning. I believe they're 6 volumes each. Alternatively, you can get each anthology in two giant books, but I'd recommend the smaller volumes. You could find an older edition for a lot cheaper.

These anthologies are great. You get historical background, author information, and a good selection of the most influential poetry/prose from each era of literature. They each have short works and longer selections (e.g. Heart of Darkness is in the second volume of the Brit Lit one).

My recommendations:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius

The complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne

Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne

The Lost World, by Jules Verne

You'll want to find good translations of Dumas, Verne and Aurelius as they were originally written in other languages. Dracula may be a bit dark for your son but only for a few more years now. Meditations is very straight forward philosophy and very much worth a read. A bit of a warning when reading Jules Verne: he liked to show how big his science dick was. There are long, dry paragraphs (and even pages) listing geographical features or species of fish using scientific nomenclature. Just skim those and get back to the adventure.

Plays
Henrick Ibsen - A Dollhouse
William Shakespeare - Othello
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex

Philosophical Fiction
Mersault - The Stranger
Voltaire - Candide

Literary Fiction
Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Bronte - Jane Eyre
Atwood - Oryx and Crake
Cervantes - Don Quixote*

Pre-novel Fiction
Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdom
Mallory - Le Morte d'Arthur
Shi Nai'an - Water Margin

Light Reading
Desai - A Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard
Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird

Poetry
John Donne - Everything ever written by him.
William Blake - Avoid like the plague.
T. S. Elliot - The Love Song of Alfred J. Proofrock

Note that some of these are slightly modern, but tend not to be well known and are worth looking into. To Kill a Mockingbird is well known, but is also absolutely worth reading if you haven't read it already.

*If you speak Spanish, read this in Spanish.

Knaight gave a pretty darn good list. I dislike some of those on it, but they're still worth reading at least once.

Oh, and John Donne is fantastic.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you don't like both Voltaire and Mersault, and don't like both Bronte and Atwood?


In my case John Donne redeemed the entire poetry unit Junior year of high school. His work is wonderful, particularly in how it has everything from thinly veiled sexual innuendos using imagery about flies to love poems for an actual understanding of love - which themselves use nautical instruments. Neither of which should work, and neither of which would work in the hands of an inferior poet.

I didn't like Voltaire (but I read Candide in high school, so that may have been the problem). I actually haven't read any Mersault and Bronte, and I haven't read the Atwood book you listed but I've enjoyed some of her other work (namely, Handmaid's Tale and "Gertrude Talks Back").

Also bear in mind that it's been years since I read it, but I hated The Dollhouse. That was the one I was thinking of.