We all know those famous (or infamous) books on the high school reading list that just make you a better person for having read them. like the "this and that" books: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, etc. What's your favorite? Read any good ones recently? How about childhood classics like The Chronicles of Narnia, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz; you know what I'm talking about.

Personally, I finished Wuthering Heights a couple weeks ago. I found it to be a perfect example of a "rainy days" book. realistic characters, sad story, slightly depressing throughout... but overall an excellent read.

I actually liked the Count of Monty Cristo a lot. I guess you could call that a classic.
My all time favorite book is Ender's Game though :D

Ah, Wuthering Heights was just an all around good book. I'm currently working on 900 Days to get my Russian dose, I was really starting to miss Russia, lol ;)

The extent of my "classical" reading is basically my Ayn Rand collection. Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, and We The Living. Anthem is closer to a short story, We The Living is your standard novel size, The Fountainhead is 800-some pages, and Atlas Shrugged is 1160 or so. I've read them all at least twice, but I consider The Fountainhead to be The Greatest Book Known To Man... so everybody read it.

I'm currently reading "Madame Bovary", but my favorite classic is probably...well, besides "Lord of the Rings" it would be "Brave New World". My favorite children's book was "The Westing Game." That book is awesome. :w00t:

I've been reading quite a bit of French literature lately. Flaubert, Voltaire, and Camus. Candide, ou l'optimisme is very funny, and you should all read it, even if you have to have someone translate for you ;)

gah! translations....how i loathe thee. It is very (VERY) difficult to find good translators, seth. thanks to certain dear friends of mine -cough cough- i know this well. ;)

She loathes translating, not tranlators ;)
At least, that's what I got out of it.

Good work... I was afraid he was gonna start suspecting the conspiracy working against him... whew.

:o do you honestly think i'd loathe you? lol. pas possible, seth!

theres a conspiracy? er...theres -not- a conspiracy.... :ph43r: do we get to call in the ninja monkeys? i have a friend that claims to train them just for things like this...

You know guys, if we overdue our refutation, he'll just begin to believe it again...
:ph43r:

The Stranger by Camus is probably the most perplexing book I've ever read. Atlas Shrugged is certainly the longest. Rand has some very new and interesting ideas that everyone should be exposed to, but I'm not sure if immersion in a 1100 page book is the best way to go about the exposition.

I started One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest twice and I was interrupted twice. Once by required reading of Huck Finn in English III, and once by reading a biography on Gandhi for a research paper.

Mark

I just finished Huck Finn, which I must say i enjoyed quite a bit, though it's not my favorite "classic."

That honor (probably a rather dubious one) goes to The Old Man and the Sea. I just love the way Hemingway describes the contest between man and nature so concisely and poignantly (woohoo! two big words in one sentence!). It probably also helps that I'm what might be called a "fishing enthusiast."

I haven't read a whole lot of Rand's stuff, but I do have copies of a fair amount of it lying around. I'm certain that I have Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, at least. Mayhap I should read them.

But yeah, can't go wrong with Hemingway.

Oh yeah, the longest book I've ever read was the biography of Adolf Hitler by John Toland. If memory serves, it was about 1300 pages long. Very informative book, if not the most exciting.

Mike

I read the first couple chapters of The Old Man and the Sea and I couldn't take it anymore. I'm not one to quit reading a book only a couple chapters into it, but this was absolute torture. I can't say that I remember what my complaints were about it, but I do remember that they were pretty severe.

Mark

Yeah for people who like Hemingway! I read A Farewell To Arms and now i am hooked on his stuff. but school is evil and they all asign fairly dumb books to read! :(

Personaly I really like The Great Gadspy, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye.
The longest book I ever read was Executive Orders by Tom Clancy 800some pages! 3 months! I started to read it a few days before September 11th :ermm: That was scary and strange.
I know they aren't classics, but is anyone a John Grisham nut?

woohoo! great accomplishment- i finished Gulliver's Travels. finally. overcame the loss of the initial copy (i should probably pay for that soon...) a serious lack of reading time thanks to the acquisition of a small web-footed water animal that cannot be left unattended for any amount of time, and two or three centuries of language shifts.

Great book, fun satire on humans and politics/ society/ government. i'd suggest it. also, if your school does AR or some form of computer reading tests...its got a high level of difficulty and is worth decent points. -shrug- thats why i read it anyway...no one is going to tell me that something is outside of my reading range now :D

I think one of my favorites is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I read it about once a year, and every time I do I find something else intriguing about the characters. Fantastic author...
Another great one is A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.
Oh! and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre. I've also seen the BBC version of it which is by far the most engaging 8 hours of my life. :D
And Seth, I agree about the French classics, they're fabulous. Especially Le Petit Prince and Candide.