Ask HN: What are your favorite classic books? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your favorite classic books?

28 pointspyzhianov46 comments

I'm looking to read more classic books. What are your personal favorites? Extra points if it's something not commonly recommended. I'm open to pretty much anything

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Does it have to be old to be a "classic"?

If not, by far, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez is my favorite novel by a Nobel winner. It's great, epic, and lovely to read.

If you include epics, Mahabharata is actually a grand, epic book with war, friendship, love, sex, politics, realpolitik, strategy, and has a reach story line with scores of great side-stories.

I also genuinely enjoyed Iliad and Aenied.

I was also surprised at how good Candide by Voltaire was to read. Had a ton of fun reading it.

I just finished the sublime Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset, in the Tiina Nunnally translation. If you have any interest in the medieval period or specifically medieval rural Norway, it really brings that setting to life and this is reason enough to give it a try. Much more than that though, it deals with so many profound themes -- mostly related to family and faith -- in a very natural and poignant way. I feel like reading it gave me one big long meditation running parallel to my life, to which my mind would dip in and out throughout all sorts of other goings on (it took me almost a year to finish). I would say the cumulative effect was transformative.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Written in 523 while he was imprisoned and awaiting execution by the Ostrogothic King Theodoric, it is often described as the last great Western work of the Classical Period.

What do you want to get out of reading "classics"? I can think of three types of book that are called classic. First, there are things that are simply old. Second are things that made substantial contribution to our intellectual heritage. Third, there are books that are exceptionally enjoyable to read because of the quality of writing. What are you after?

Things that were interesting to me for representing older times -- The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Battle of Maldon. Books that I didn't enjoy but I'm glad to know their contents -- all that old Greek and Latin stuff. Books that I enjoy rereading just for their quality -- things by Tolkien, Eco, Wodehouse, Chandler...

> First, there are things that are simply old. Second are things that made substantial contribution to our intellectual heritage

I wish there was a way to easily distinguish one from the other. I find that the age of the book often distracts people from the actual content

There is a bookshelf called The Harvard Classics.

The collection of literary works, philosophical texts, and scientific writings was initially titled "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf." It was assembled by Charles W. Eliot, who served as Harvard University's president.

Almost all the books can be read for free in Gutenberg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/40

My favourite will always be the plays of William Shakespeare. It has it all.

I wonder if there are reading lists, similar to the Harvard Classics, but curated for a more contemporary audience based on which books are important now. After all, the first volumes of the Harvard Classics came out over a century ago, and the world has changed considerably since then.

Does anyone know of any ?

Not a bookshelf. But i'm a part of a local book-club where we discuss books based on "topic of the month"

Not sure if it would help. But you can find some very good recommendations there.

https://poongabook.club/meeting-archives-3.html (not a HTTPS website)

Twitter - https://twitter.com/poongabook?lang=en

I personally recommend this book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. It was an old book but it is really classic. I think Naval's philosophy in this book has inspired me a lot and change my mindset in daily life.

Definitely not a classic by most definitions, but I agree that it's really good

Oh, have you ever read this book? You make a fair point. I agree that by conventional definitions, this book may not be widely considered a 'classic'. Maybe just'personal classic'. After working for 8 years and finding myself at a career low point, this book completely transformed my mindset.

Keep an eye on this topic so that I can explorer which book I can read during the flight! Thank you

NYRB had the wonderful idea of taking the first and last few chapters of Henry Adams's history of the US 1801-1817, and printing them in a form you can slide into a windbreaker's pocket. Look for The Jeffersonian Transformation. For that matter NYRB's War and the Iliad is excellent brief reading, though I say less for Simone Weil's famous essay that for Rachel Bespaloff's "On the Iliad" and Herman Broch's "The Style of the Mythical Age".

Wow, so many great responses, thank you all for that! I'm going to throw in my personal favorite: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Somehow it touches me in a way that no other book does. It's also quite short, I think I've read it at least 3 times in the last few years and found something new and insightful each time

The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character by Thomas Hardy (1886)

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hardy/the-mayor-of-...

I notice from that link it was on a top 100 Great British novels list.

Blech. I was afflicted with this in literature class. Would not recommend, even to someone who didn't have to read it.

Hardy is better at torturing his characters than he is at giving them much of a personality. (Or so it seemed to me at the time; I haven't re-read it...)

Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin

Regardless of whether you are Protestant or not (or religious or not) - understanding the theological philosophy of one of the great thinkers of the Protestant Reformation is a wonderful addition to your own mental maps fo the world at large

I've had it on my shelves for a while. Maybe next year.

I had it on my shelves for years ... ended up borrowing an audiobook edition from my library and listening to it as my first sequential go-through :)

East of Eden by Steinbeck is great. I found it very approachable, and the characters very familiar.

Great book! I loved Grapes of Wrath even more, but anything by Steinbeck is a safe bet.

I end up re-reading "Brideshead, Revisited" about once a year. It's the rare Christian book where every single character (regardless of their relationship with Christianity) is basically screwed up.

Is that rare? J.F. Powers's Morte d'Urban nearly meets that description.

It certainly seems rare for a book that is "pro-Christianity."

But maybe that's just my own blind spot?

Haven't read Morte d'Urban. It's on the list now, thanks!

"Confessions of an English Eater" by Thomas De Quincey. An autobiographical work in which the author details his unfortunate descent into Laudanum addiction. It all started well, but ended badly...

I think you mean "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater"

Tsk! I did indeed!

This book is amazingly well-written and is worth reading on that basis alone.

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

(ftr - I am using the definition of "classic", as I make suggestions/recommendations, applying to works produced more than a century ago)

The Travels of Marco Polo (I prefer the Modern Library edition translated by Manuel Komroff (it was published in 1931, but the source dates to the 13th-14th centuries))

Anything by Dostoevsky, but specifically "Notes from Underground" and "The Brothers Karamazov".

"Jean-Christophe" by Romain Rolland.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

I really enjoyed both The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London.

The Count of Monte Cristo. Everyone loves it. It aged marvelously!

Not everyone. I found it tedious and poorly written/translated. I read it last year in the unabridged translation. Not for me.

Dumas has a pretty intense fan base, though clearly not universal. I found his novels way too pulpy, but I can see why they were a sensation in the 19th century, when most literature was deadly slow by our standards.

Almost everyone except Blackstrat*

I read it in its original French, so perhaps it played a role. Dumas certainly has a unique writing style.

I recently read Stoner by John Williams. Would recommend.

Pascal's Pensees

Senecas "De brevitate vitae"

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

SICP

Someone else mentioned Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbirdge". It's the one of his 5 major novels I haven't read. "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Return of the Native" are okay, but the two that really are magnificent are:

"Jude the Obscure" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/153

"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/110

You can sense his fury at the society he was depicting. You might not want to read either of these, particularly "Tess", if you're prone to depression.

Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Frontier in American History" (1921) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22994

This collection leads off with Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). It's considered by some the most influential historical essay about America ever written. Historians went back and forth on his claims for decades, and people pointed out many issues with them. It seems like the critics predominate now. But it's still worth reading, particularly since (right or wrong) his ideas influenced the way we think of ourselves. Turner was a very good writer - he was a noted orator, and his essays have an oratorical quality - and the other essays in the collection are pretty good, too.

Owen Wister, "The Virginian" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1298

Zane Grey, "Riders of the Purple Sage" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1300

And the sequel: "The Rainbow Trail" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5067

"The Virginian" (1902) and "Riders" (1912) established many of the themes and tropes for the "standard" western, and they're still fun to read. But the genre comprises many other kinds of writing - e.g. A. B. Guthrie, Elmer Kelton, and the next writer.

Willa Cather's novels:

The "plains trilogy" (the stories are set in Nebraska and Colorado, but otherwise unrelated):

"O Pioneers!" (1913) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24

"The Song of the Lark" (1915) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44

"My Ántonia" (1918) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19810

And not quite a hundred years ago, but a wonderful novel:

"Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69730

A few brief mentions: James Joyce's "Ulysses", though I had a tough time getting through it; some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories (e.g. "The Minister's Black Veil"); "Njal's Saga" (I liked the Penguin edition with the translation by Magnusson and Pallson); the great works of classic fantasy (Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, William Morris, Arthur Machen); the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The old man and the sea

The Odyssey.

By I D.

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