F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’ve only read The Great Gatsby, but the way this man writes makes me see what he is describing. When the narrator is wistful, I am wistful. when he is angry, I am angry. I didn’t particularly like the book, but the way it was written took my breath away.

Awww F. Scott is my favorite as well, I have a book of his short stories at home. He’s just… Perfect.

But I also like the poet, Robert Frost.. Check out his poem “Acquainted with the Night”.

….love it

Stefan Zweig was a famous Hungarian author, but is less known in North America. Also, I’m reading 65 of W. Somerset Maugham’s stories right now. Does Ray Bradbury count, because he is one of my favorite writers.

@chelsea: I have read Acquainted with the Night and it was amazing.

Yay! Sounds like we have the same taste in literature

Ok, really nerdy but da Vinci’s assorted notebooks are win for me. I read them all the time. But that’s not like a novel or anything.

I lean more towards fantasy usually so besides the guys you mentioned Tolkien and Asimov. They wrote classics in their genre.

The two books I’m reading right now though are fantastic. The Ghormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peakes and The Magic Mountain whose author escapes me at the moment.

I completely agree with Katawa on F. Scott Fitzgerald but I more impresed with his imagery than his narrative.

Oh, silly me. Forgetting Mister Shakespeare. My senior year of highschool we read Hamlet. My teacher would read it as it was written and I got to be the one who translated into modern English for the class. I loved it. I love that style of speech, it’s just completely to romantic to me.

(The Magic Mt. is by Thomas Mann.)

@as: I know what you mean. In Great Gatsby, there is this one scene where the narrator is describing a voyage he took on the ocean and I can see the sky and feel the salt spray.

@chelsea: have you read The Telephone? It’s one of my favorite Frost poems.

Oh, and I totally forgot about my favorite poet of all time: Langston Hughes. As I said in previous post (can’t remember which one) his poem Let America Be America Again makes me proud to be an American.

I’m an aspiring writer so I have like 53838584929310374 books of all different works. And katawa, I’ll check to see if
I’ve read it before. I love Frost.

http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/The_Telephone.htm

Here you go, chelsea. enjoy. :)

Wow, other than Mr Shakespeare, I’m seeing a whole lot of 20th century authors. Do they qualify as “classic”?

I love Charles Dickens. I like his sprawling narratives. And Jane Austen I like for exactly the opposite reason. She doesn’t waste a word; her tales are told in about 200 pages. Yet both of them created characters that are clearly, memorably drawn, whether or not they’re likable (Mrs Norris? I’ve wanted to pop that bitch upside the head the moment she entered the story of Mansfield Park). When I read a book by either, I feel like I’m visiting old friends. I like feeling that I’m stepping into another time, too.

@katawa, thank you for linking, was considerably helpful thanks to mr being on my iPod, and I love that poem, not sure if I ever read it though.

Me*

@Gail

I’m anxiously waiting for you to answer. :-)

Tomorrow; elchoop. I am too pooped to pop right now. Just assume, for the moment, that I have read almost everything readable (altho, oddly, not The Magic Mountain.)

Okay.

It’s practically a cop-out because she’s all over the place these days, but I love Jane Austen. I think she’s just great for some trashy romance reading.

Dostoevsky, definitely!

If they count, I love Salinger, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Orwell which I consider classical. I don’t know if they are or not.

@chelsea: no problem. that poem makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy inside when i read it. :)

Steinbeck’s East of Eden nearly made me weep…it was so beautiful. Edgar Allan Poe. Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain.

Same here katawa

@binary: Lurve to you for mentioning the Beat generation! Definitely some of my favorites. I also really like Albert Camus and Ian Fleming.

Nabokov & Flannery O’Connor.

Homer
not the yellow one

Ray Bradbury

A few of my favorites have been mentioned. Some that haven’t: Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Oscar Wilde…

I haven’t read any Edith Wharton but my therapist gave flailing reviews when I asked for recommendations of classics (because I have a goal of reading 15 that I’ve never read before by my 25th birthday and I’ve only three months to go and I’m way behind) so I plan on it…

Oooh, how could I forget O. Henry?

What? No Tennesse Williams, Hemingway or Truman Capote?

Faulkner all the way. I am such a sucker for his writing. I’m also a huge Capote fan.

Poet wise, I’m going to go with Pablo Neruda.
Otherwise, this is tough…Charlotte Smith, Harper Lee, &...Hawthorne.

@wondersteph: I totally agree on Hawthorne. I always thought that The Scarlet Letter was one of the most romantic stories ever. Forget Romeo and Juliet.

(Neruda would faint, if he weren’t already dead, if he saw the usage “poet wise.”)

J.D. Salinger, James Joyce, Tolstoi, the Bronte sisters, Anthony Trollope, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, A Huxley,

Here’s an eclectic list of worthy 100 books: http://www.listsofbests.com/list/5884

@gail: Thanks for the author. My copy was all the way out in the car. It’s freezing outside, no thank you. You have to read it. I’m about halfway through, I love it to bits.

So many! Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, for openers.

@gailcalled, Speaking of lists, here is a book I keep at my bedside, ‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die,’ by Peter Ackroyd. Like all lists, it’s easy to come up with lots of quibbles. But it’s pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/1001-Books-Must-Read-Before/dp/0789313707/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228256497&sr=8–4

@Tabby; Waaah! I want to see the list but not buy the book. I’ve read 74 of the books on my list.

Faulkner, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Fielding, Homer, Austen, Achebe

Edith Wharton all the way.
Thomas Merton.
Achebe YES good call.
and for both enormous quantities of information and huge language orgasms,
the whole Aubrey/Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian (Gail, you will love them)

Hi, Dear Susanc; When I was recovering from chemo and radiation and waiting for my hair to grow out, I read all twenty volumes and bought the hard pack companions…life in the British Navy during that era, description of all 42 sails and 700 ropes on the various sailing ships,nautical terms, history of the Admiralty, Maritime Paintings, maps of the voyages, etc.I became an addict.

Darling Gail, I’m sorrier that P O’Brian is dead than I can say. I’m probably going to start the serious at the beginning again this winter. The first and second times through, I was too greedy to take them slowly. What a gorgeous experience they are.
And yet I think his other novels are quite awful. Apparently he took them more seriously than these. Big lesson there…..

Dostoevsky and Kafka

@gailcalled A fellow “Der Zauberberg” fan! Also Mann for “Death in Venice” and “Jacob and His Brothers”. No one has mentioned Hermann Hesse yet, I guess he is out of style with post-Boomers. But “Narziss und Goldmund” and “Der Glasperlenspiel” (Glass Bead Game) are worthy reads even for the current generation. Personally I am also captivated by ‘Peter Camenzind”, “Untern Rad”, “Siddhartha” and “Journey to the East”. Many of Hesse’s works suffered from poor English translations for many years.
Aleksandr Solsenitsen’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” is also a great readable classic.

@susanc @gailcalled Second your endorsements of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series. Another good series is Eliis Peters “Brother Cadfael” mystery series; she really did her homework on 12th century England and Wales (Derek Jacobi played him so well on the BBC series).

@stranger_in_a_strange_land: Bro Cadfael is one of my all-time favorites. I had forgotten.

@gailcalled I’ve got the recording of Derek Jacobi reading Mallory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur”, brilliant performance. Another author I forgot was Robert Graves, his most famous being “I Claudius” (also played by Jacobi on BBC) but my favorite of his was “Goodbye to All That” his recollections of his service in WW1 and his friendship with the other “war poets” Owen and Sassoon.

@susanc Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain”- yes.

Love Thomas Hardy( esp. Return of the Native), Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton (esp House of Mirth), Willa Cather (esp My Antonia), Saul Bellow (esp. Adventures of Augie March)

also, I know these two might not be considered classic authors but if you want great prose I would say Cormac McCarthy and Charles Frasier (Cold Mountain)