[QuickTidal]

Macros, on 18 December 2024 - 07:29 PM, said:

Shogun

Seconded.

[Macros]

*casts summon PG*

[JPK]

Hammerhead88, on 17 December 2024 - 11:48 PM, said:

Also adding in master and the Margareta - Bulgakov

Macros, on 18 December 2024 - 07:29 PM, said:

Shogun

I've read both of these. I liked MASTER AND MARGARITA and plan to reread it at some point. I loved SHOGUN though and have gotten two other family members to read it as well.

[polishgenius]

Macros, on 18 December 2024 - 09:47 PM, said:

*casts summon PG*

Moot point since JPK has read it, but double stamp, motherfuckers.





It is not in any way a similar book- different setting, different themes, different structure- so I don't know why I think this, but I always felt Lonesome Dove goes hard in similar ways to Shogun. Although I see JPK has read that too so I guess that rec is just for the others.

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 18 December 2024 - 10:00 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Thanks for updating the list with those you've read.

Most of my top classic literature recommendations would be outside the realm of "novel-like fictional narrative". (For example: poetry of Basho, Sappho, Catullus, Horace, etc.) Or plays (with narrative content), short stories, allegories---they seem like a bit of a gray area.

My top recommendations for "novel-like fictional narratives" (not counting plays):

Gilgamesh

Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh (probably mid-14th century, "Attributed to Shi Nai'an, Water Margin was one of the earliest Chinese novels written in vernacular Mandarin Chinese. [...] Water Margin is based on the exploits of the outlaw Song Jiang and his 108 companions (The 36 "Heavenly Spirits" (三十六天罡) and the 72 "Earthly Demons" (七十二地煞)). [...] The opening episode in the novel is the release of the 108 Spirits, imprisoned under an ancient stele-bearing tortoise. [...] the novel is notable for its gruesome and often gory and over-the-top depictions of violence. [...] It has introduced readers to some of the best-known characters in Chinese literature [...] Water Margin also exerted a significant influence on the development of fiction elsewhere in East Asia, such as on Japanese literature. [...] Water Margin is referred to in numerous Japanese manga")

Journey to the West ("Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is regarded as one of the great Chinese novels"), and has been described as arguably the most popular literary work in East Asia")

The Talisman - Sir Walter Scott (or Ivanhoe for literary-historical significance)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - Edgar Allan Poe

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

Middlemarch - George Eliot (female author)

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce (Ulysses if you dare)

Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille (French)

At the Mountains of Madness - H. P. Lovecraft


More of literary-historical than purely literary interest for me (relative to other texts), but I'd also recommend:

Aenid - Virgil

Satyricon - Petronius (ancient Roman)

Beowulf

The Tale of Genji - by "lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu around the peak of the Heian period, in the early 11th century", arguably the first novel

Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, Aphra Behn ("the foremother of British female writers[...] Oroonoko is a crucial text in the history of the novel"---the text claims to be a "true story", but scholars agree that it is almost certainly fictional)

Dream of the Red Chamber (mid-18th century, by Cao Xueqin)

The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe, 1794 ("The Mysteries of Udolpho is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror: remote crumbling castles, seemingly supernatural events, a brooding, scheming villain and a persecuted heroine.")

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe

Dracula - Bram Stoker

Madame Bovary - Flaubert ("Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." (- as translated by Francis Steegmuller))

All Quiet on the Western Front ("Im Westen nichts Neues, lit. 'In the West, nothing new'" - WWI narrative)

The Stranger - Camus

(Quotations above are from Wikipedia, except where indicated)

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 18 December 2024 - 11:57 PM

[pat5150]

No Dan Brown??? WTF!

[worry]

Azath Vitr (D, on 18 December 2024 - 10:24 PM, said:

Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille (French)

To each their own, but I would anti-recommend this one, unless you reaaaaaaalllly like eggs.

[Abyss]

Maybe the real Classics are the friends we made along the way?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Oh, I forgot a few big ones (add to my list of top recommendations):

Don Quixote - Cervantes

Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

The Metamorphosis - Kafka

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths, literally "The Garden of Paths that Themselves Bifurcate") - Borges

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 18 December 2024 - 11:34 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

Macros, on 18 December 2024 - 07:29 PM, said:

Shogun

Seconded.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Perhaps I should add that Don Quixote is generally regarded as the first European novel (by many scholars at least), and Oroonoko similarly is now widely considered to be the first English novel (widely in academia, that is).

(Robinson Crusoe used to be the consensus pick for the first English novel, but no longer. For one, Oroonoko was written long before Robinson Crusoe. Christian conservatives might complain that Pilgrim's Progress came before Oroonoko, but that's more in the tradition of abstract Christian allegory---the characters are named after what they represent, for example Obstinate, Pliable, Hypocrisy, etc.

Quote

The entire book is presented as a dream sequence [...] The allegory's protagonist, Christian, is an everyman character, and the plot centres on his journey from his hometown, the "City of Destruction" ("this world"), to the "Celestial City" ("that which is to come": Heaven) atop Mount Zion. Christian is weighed down by a great burden—the knowledge of his sin—which he believed came from his reading "the book in his hand" (the Bible).

Pilgrim's Progress - Wikipedia

In contrast, one arguments against regarding Oroonoko as a novel is that it claims to be a true story. However scholars are pretty certain it's fictional. "Anti-woke" types would probably argue that contemporary academics prefer Oroonoko as the first English novel because it's written by a woman and is about a Black slave. Here's a chronological list of candidates proposed by academics (via Wikipedia):

Quote

Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (a.k.a. Le Morte Darthur), (written c. 1470, published 1485)

(Despite its French title, Le Morte d'Arthur is written in Middle English.)

Quote

William Baldwin, Beware the Cat, (written 1553, published 1570, 1584)[1][2]

John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) [3]

Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (a.k.a. Arcadia) (1581)

[Note: Don Quixote was published in 1605]

Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, (a.k.a. The Blazing World) (1666)

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come (1678)[4]

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688)

List of claimed first English novels

While I'd love it if the first English novel were called Beware the Cat, it's a bit too short to be a novel (160 pages), so it's arguably the first modern English novella. Among other things, it satirizes Catholicism. I confess I haven't read it (yet!), although reading the Wikipedia entry I now wonder whether it was an influence on Redick's Chathrand Voyage series.

Beware the Cat - Wikipedia

The Lyly books iirc are mostly focused on flowery satirical rhetoric and wordplay, with very little plot. Sidney's Arcadia

Quote

is a romance that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model of Heliodorus. A highly idealized version of the shepherd's life adjoins, on the other hand and not always naturally (in its literary sense), stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. As published, the narrative follows the Greek model: stories are nested within each other, and different storylines are intertwined. [...] According to [the preeminent English poet] John Milton [Paradise Lost and so forth ...],Charles I quoted lines from the book, an excerpt termed "Pamela's Prayer", from a prayer of the heroine Pamela, as he mounted the scaffold to be executed. Although Milton praised the book as among the best of its kind, he complains of the dead king's choice of a profane text for his final prayer. [...] By the beginning of the Romantic era, the grand, artificial, sometimes obstinately unwieldy style of Sidney's Arcadia had made it thoroughly alien to more modern tastes.

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia - Wikipedia

I like some of Sidney's verse poetry a lot (and the poetry and plays of his close friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, even more), but I wouldn't recommend Arcadia for most people. Granted, I've only slogged through short excerpts.

As for the Blazing World---I don't recall having read about it before...

Quote

Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner of science fiction. It can also be read as a utopian work. [World on fire = utopia? Well... if that's the case, then we're on the right path!] [...] The Blazing World is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world (with different stars in the sky) that can be reached via the North Pole.


[...] The Blazing World incorporates many different genres, "which include not only travel narrative and romance but also utopia, epic, biography, cabbala, Lucianic fable, Menippean satire, natural history, and morality play, among others…" [...] that "the term 'hybridisation' aptly captures Cavendish's method of blending established genres and categories into a new order, and of presenting her fantasy empire as versimilar."


[...] In Alan Moore's graphic novels chronicling the adventures of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Blazing World was identified as

Spoiler

the self-same idyllic realm from which the extra-dimensional traveller Christian[...] had come in the late 1680s.

The Blazing World - Wikipedia

... that bit in the spoiler seems like a probable throwback to Pilgrim's Progress too.

[JPK]

Thank you for adding more suggestions, I'll update later tonight again.

[Abyss]

Tiste Simeon, on 19 December 2024 - 09:04 AM, said:

Macros, on 18 December 2024 - 07:29 PM, said:

Shogun

Seconded.

Thirded.

[JPK]

Alright, updated again. There were some good suggestions there that I'm surprised I missed like DRACULA, GILGAMESH, AENID, and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS that I'm surprised I missed. Thank you Azath.

Current update: I'm now at 25% read on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and really enjoying it. The amount of snark in the novel is right up my alley. I'm starting to form some opinions, but I suspect they're the opinions that are intended by the author at this point as I suspect we're definitely missing some information regard Mr. Darcy. Negging is not a good way to attract a person Mr. Darcy.

[Gabriele]

Looking at my shelves, I miss some German and Scandinavian books on that list.

Thomas Mann is an author that appears on all German Classics lists, usually with Magic Mountain, though I'd recommend The Buddenbrooks as starter, that one is more accessible (shorter, too ); if you like it, you can always move to either the novellas (fe. Death in Venice) or his longer works like Doktor Faustus or Magic Mountain.

Siegfried Lenz, Deutschstunde (The German Lesson) - a fictive character's memories of a childhood in WW2.

Theodor Fontane: Usually it's Effi Briest on those lists, but his last novel, The Stechlin, is a lovely, quiet and thoughtful Alterswerk (work of an older author), as we call it.

Another often suggested book is Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter). Definitely recommended.

I see you got Goethe's Werther. That is the work of a very young Goethe, still part of the Sturm und Drang-movement. I'd suggest to add a later one: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. You could also pick Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften) but personally, I could never get into that one.

Don't miss out on Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. Under the Glacier/Christianity at the Glacier is a good one to get into his writing (not a big book, either), or Iceland Bell. I also like Wayward Heroes (well, I like most of his novels, but that one is quite a bit of fun). I'd also suggest to pick some Icelandic sagas, most have at some point been published by Penguin - some of the best ones are: Laxdoela saga, Njals saga, Egils saga and Gísla saga Súrssonar (also Gisli the Outlaw).

If you like Austen, I'd suggest to check if there is a translation of Selma Lagerlöf's Charlotte Löwenskjöld. A shorter and a bit 'ghostly' book by her would be The Treasure (Herr Arnes penningar). The usual candidate on the lists is Gösta Berlings saga.

Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants (Utvandrarna).

Lars Gustafsson: Bernard Foy's Third Castling (Bernard Foys tredje rockad). I wrote an 80 page essay about that one back when I studied, among other subjects, Scandinavian Literature and Culture.

---

I also got a lot of Honoré de Balzac. Père Goriot (Father Goriot (unfortunately, I can't find any English translations on the spot, but there should be), Cousin Bette, The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans/A Harlot High and Low are the best starters into his vast work.

From my Classics shelf: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Vergil's Aeneid (since you already got the Illiad).

This post has been edited by Gabriele: 25 December 2024 - 01:02 PM

[JPK]

Updated again with new suggestions. Thank you both Gabriele and PG. Lots of very intriguing books here.

I'm now right about halfway on P&P. Overall, I find this one to be an ok novel. I don't hate it, but I'm also not finding a lot to love. Clearly there's been a lot of setup in the last quarter though, so maybe the events during the second half will win me over more. I will say that I do see the importance of the work overall though.

Spoiler

Elizabeth's headstrong nature really stands out in a society in which women can't inherit or own property and walking away from known money can't be easy, even though it's clearly the right move.

[JPK]

I'm now a bit past 75% on P&P. I've liked this quite a bit more into the second half.

Spoiler

Ffs though, Lydia. You're an idiot.

[QuickTidal]

JPK, on 21 December 2024 - 08:02 PM, said:

I suspect we're definitely missing some information regard Mr. Darcy. Negging is not a good way to attract a person Mr. Darcy.

My fave moment in the 2005 movie that's not in the book is still so very Darcy..


Lizzie: Do you dance Mr. Darcy?

Darcy: Not if I can help it.

[Macros]

surely you mean the only adaptation worth watching, the '95 series
no one of any kind of taste actually enjoyed the '05 fiasco

honestly, such peasants at times

[JPK]

I finished up P&P today. Overall I'd say that this book was not so much my cup of tea but it was well written and pushing my boundaries to read things I wouldn't usually was kind of the point of this project.

My favorite character has to be Mr Bennett. I completely understand the desire to hide from everyone and seclude myself in my library.