I need to read more books. Do you have any recommendations? I'd really appreciate it if the books are among the classics and are easily available. Thanks! :)
This is a limited list in a lot of respects and I’m not sure what you’d be into but a few suggestions:
Hauntings & Horrors: Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories might be worth a look, or Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca or Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, you can also take a meander through Angela Carter’s unapologetically sumptuous and decadent prose in The Bloody Chamber
If you want to sink your teeth into something lengthy and/or more challenging you can also try: Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Middlemarch by George Eliot, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Cortazar’s Hopscotch, or, more modern reads: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, American Gods by Neil Gaiman
…or alternatively if you prefer something shorter: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, First Love by Turgenev, Mrs Dalloway & Orlando by Virginia Woolf (while on Woolf: also The Waves and To The Lighthouse), The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
If short story collections are your jam: The Fairytales of Hermann Hesse, Dubliners by Joyce, The Garden Party & Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories by Chekhov
Dystopia/Satire: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, We by Yevgeny Zematin (1984 before 1984), Brave New World by Huxley, Animal Farm by Orwell, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Lord of the Flies by William Golding
or for the bawdy/ ridiculous/ delightful: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams), At-Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O’Brien), The Princess Bride (William Goldman)
Mythology: Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, The Bakkhai, and Antigonick but if you want something not related to Ancient Greek and Rome try: Beowulf(or for a different spin on it, John Gardener’s Grendel), Ciarán Carson’s translation of The Táin is great (Celtic Ireland’s version of the Iliad but instead of Helen of Troy, it’s a giant fecking bull), The Epic of Gilgamesh, A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarok, or The Egyptian Book of the Dead (I’m currently reading Normandi Ellis’ new translation which is fab so far)
Modern classics: The Neapolitan Trilogy by Elena Ferrante, The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Famished Road by Ben Okri, If on a Winter’s Night, A Traveller by Italo Calvino, Silence by Shusako Endo
Personal faves, plus other people’s recs: Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, A Doll’s House by Ibsen, Persuasion & Emma by Jane Austen, Narrow Road to the Interior by Basho, Go Tell It On The Mountain & Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, An Oresteia (Anne Carson / Aeschylus), Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald.
I hope you find something you like, anon x
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