Now that the semester is over, I'm reading for pleasure again. What a concept! I've begun Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice. It's about time, too; I've never read it before, but I'm liking it a lot. Those 19th century women folk certainly knew their way around the quill and ink bottle, what? I mean to say, Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), The Age Of Innocence (Edith Wharton) --- three of my favorite novels, and all exquisitely phrased, each one displaying great craft, a knack for tone-setting, and an astonishingly broad (to the modern reader) scope of vocabulary.
Five more of my favorite classics:
1. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
2. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
3. The Picture Of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
4. The Catcher In the Rye – J.D. Salinger
5. Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy O’Toole
Those books are extremely pleasurable to read, especially the first. I personally find it next to impossible to open Catch-22 to any page and not continue reading; the bizarre, savage humor draws me in instantly. But there's also pure escapism in books. Here are five series authors, not necessarily of great literature, that I enjoy a lot:
1. P.G. Wodehouse (the unflappable valet Jeeves and his idiot employer Bertie)
2. Bernard Cornwell (several military fiction series: Sharpe, King Arthur, etc.)
3. Lawrence Block (alcoholic PI Matt Scudder delivers rough justice)
4. George MacDonald Fraser (Victorian hero and cad Harry Flashman)
5. Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes!)
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3 comments:
My tastes tend to run less classic (my wife, the English major, dispairs of me). I do enjoy Pride and Prejudice, though.
Have you read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. Since you do classic lit you'll probably enjoy it more than I did.
Based on your great reading list, I bet you would love The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth.
Hey, thanks for the recommendations, people!
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