I'll start by bringing some information over from the other thread.
- Vee said she has read 8 of these books.
- Frieda has read 21.
- I have read 10 of them, but so long ago that I would not want to take a quiz!

I've always been curious about, but hesitant to read Wide Sargasso Sea. I'm afraid of ruining my image of Mr. Rochester, who I fell in love at age 13 when my mother selected Jane Eyre as my first adult novel. Has anyone read it?

It is an interesting selection, especially given that the list was based on opening lines. I've only read a few of them myself. However I would say that thirty is a good number of classics for a list. Ten is just too limiting, and a hundred would be overwhelming for someone who wanted to sample the field.

I have only read six myself, though I have read other books by a couple of the authors listed. Not having enjoyed them (Vonnegut, for example), I did not read further.

Actually, The Telegraph did not refer to them as "classics" but I felt fairly confident using that term - even though I have never even heard of a couple of them.

Kathy, I've read Wide Sargasso Sea at least a couple of times. It was one of the required texts in a women's lit class I took. I found it slow to get into, but it gradually got more and more interesting to me. I wound up liking it quite a lot, but it's no Jane Eyre! although WSS is supposed to be a prequel of sorts.

However, I foisted it on my mother who told me in no uncertain terms that Rhys had upended all of her (mama's) impressions of Mr. Rochester, although she had recognized that Rochester was a seriously flawed man -- cruel in many ways to Bertha, especially, but also to his ward, Adele, and to Jane herself, of course. Like you, Kathy, mama says that she fell in love with Rochester. (I've heard many other readers say that they did, too.) Conversely, my grandmother held no illusions about Rochester (she and mama used to argue about this, heatedly). As a child, I heard all of that, so when I read Jane Eyre myself I was (and still am) split about Mr. Rochester -- I wanted him to be the Gothic hero, but in many respects to me he was so thoroughly unlikeable that I was disappointed in him as a character when I was young and more romantically inclined. As I got older, I appreciated Charlotte's efforts in being realistic -- at least partly -- in making Rochester a complex man instead.

At any rate, Jean Rhys deals with Rochester (he's not ever actually identified in the book as Rochester but that's on whom he was obviously based) as the inheritor of most of the patriarchal attitudes of the time, and that's what makes WSS excellent for a feminist study. She makes the reasons for Antoinette's (Bertha's) madness plausible, I think. That's probably all I should say, in case you want to read the book. I will warn any reader who might be sensitive that it's rather heavy and depressing and there's not much to romanticize about it.

I talked former RPer Janalyn into reading it. She didn't thank me. She loathed it, as I recall. But we had a dandy discussion about it. ;-)

Thanks for taking the time to provide all that information about Wide Sargasso Sea, Frieda. The book does indeed intrigue me. Perhaps one of these days...

I will admit that when I reread Jane Eyre as a middle-aged adult, I saw Mr. Rochester though much different eyes, so even re-reading the book kind of ruined him for me.

By the way, my favorite movie Mr. Rochester was George C. Scott. Be still my heart.

Going to skip Wide Sargasso Sea myself. I decided that long ago and have not changed my mind. I'm not in love with Mr Rochester. I like it that he was taken down a couple of pegs and that Jane was pulled up a couple of notches before they were really suitable for each other. What he tried to do to Jane was cruel and he deserved every bad thing that happened to him.

Also the depiction of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre was not remotely accurate to the reality of mental illness. But people didn't know any better in those days, so I can't fault Charlotte Bronte's errors.

BTW, I named my first daughter Charlotte, and it was not at all after the book Charlotte's Web. It was not entirely after Ms Bronte either, but that was certainly a part of the inspiration..

I have read 13 of the list and seen the movie of two more. I had thought I would someday get around to Wide Sargasso Sea--but maybe not! A few of the ones I have read were for various lit classes.

I'm with Kathy on Mr. Rochester. He makes a better romantic hero to young teens than to grown women. I don't know if any of you have read H: The Story of Heathcliff's Years Away from the Moor, but in his travels he refers to a stay with Mr. Are who turns out to be Mr. Rochester.

Carolyn - I didn't know there was a book about Heathcliff's years away from Wuthering Heights. The suggestion that he stayed with Mr. Rochester strikes me as comical.

Kathy, if Carolyn is referring to Lin Haire-Sargeant's H: The Story of Heathcliff's Journey Back to Wuthering Heights (I'm pretty sure she is), then, yes, the allusions to both WH and Jane Eyre are slyly comical in several instances.

One that tickled me was L H-S's use of two narrators just as in Wuthering Heights. Twenty years after the ending of WH, Mr. Lockwood is traveling by train after he visited Nelly Dean on her deathbed and who but Charlotte Bronte is a fellow traveler! Mr. Lockwood has a letter sent to him by Nelly that he asks Charlotte to read. The letter was composed by Heathcliff to Cathy, telling her where he had fled and what he was doing. Heathcliff takes up as the narrator of the contents of his letter. Cathy never received the letter, so . . . well, if she had, there would never have been a Wuthering Heights, the book, as readers now know it! That's what I think, anyway. And there wouldn't have been a reason for Haire-Sargeant's book, either! It's quite nonsensical to me if I think about it too closely, but somehow I think it works rather well, especially while taking in the humor with it.

Interesting, Frieda!

I would really like to know which of the books each of you has read. Hint, hint.

Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Slaughterhouse Five I read only because my first husband thought they were WOW! books. I suppose the really hip crowd in the 1960s & early '70s thought they were, and each has had some staying power even to the present day -- what with the catchphrases engendered by them and the film adaptations.

As a young wife, although I thought my husband was something of a genius, his and my reading tastes were usually parallel and rarely convergent. Each of the books torqued me in some way that usually amused DH. Slaughterhouse Five especially! I took it very seriously, at first, because of Vonnegut's real-life experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany and his survival of the bombing of Dresden, but then he went off on a tangent that left me sputtering. I felt betrayed. I think anyone who has read it can figure out what part that was. That book hit the ceiling several times and got kicked under the bed because I was so appalled. I still have it, though, for sentimental reasons -- as well as the other two, but I have never reread them and don't intend to.

Frieda, you are correct, of course. Shows me that I should look at the book before posting!

The books I've read, since you asked, are: Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Tale of Two Cities, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, A Confederacy of Dunces, Jane Eyre, Jude the Obscure, and The Old Man and the Sea. I really tried Love in the Time of Cholera but just couldn't read it.

I have read Pride and Prejudice (many times), A Tale of Two Cities (school assignment), 1984 (also school assignment), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (twice, with great pleasure), Catcher in the Rye (despised it), Peter Pan (the play was better than the novel), and Jane Eyre (also many times, a great favorite). I listened to Portrait of a Lady as an audio book, which in my opinion does count. This comprises my eight.

I have attempted several others but gave them up in either despair or disgust.

Rosefolly

I've read thirteen of these. I've heard of all of them except for "Murphy" and "Crow Road."

I have read these (mostly in the distant past):
Anna Karenina
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Bell Jar
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
Metamorphosis
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Red Badge Of Courage
Jane Eyre
The Old Man And The Sea

Carolyn, I forgot to ask: What is your final estimation of Middlemarch?

Rosefolly, I liked the film of The Portrait of a Lady with Nicole Kidman fairly well. But the book put me to sleep. I consider listening to the audio of the book to count in your total.

About Metamorphosis: Kathy, did you choose to read it on your own? I did because I kept hearing how strange and wonderful it is. Strange, yes; but wonderful, no -- not by the usual definition of the word, in my opinion. I later took a class that included it as a set text but, luckily for me, each person got to choose three out of the ten (I think) offered so I opted out on Kafka. It still gives me the willies thinking about it.

Middlemarch was very slow going, hard to keep on with, but I thought it improved toward the end. I downloaded several classics that were freebies onto my electronic reader that were on Susan Hill's list of favorites at the back of Howard's End Is on the Landing, and that was one of them.

I omitted to list having read The Great Gatsby, high on the reading list here because it is set locally and Gatsby stayed at the old and renowned Seelbach Hotel. I have seen several of the list either at the movies or on TV.

Frieda - I'm certain I must have read Metamorphosis for a college class, because I can't imagine selecting it for my recreational reading (although I did go through a "classics" period in my early 20's because it seemed important to me). I do not remember any class discussion about it, but I do remember my amazement at reading it - that such a book even existed; that a writer could even have such thoughts. That's one of the things I miss now that I'm older. It's been a long time since a novel felt surprising and innovative to me.

Kathy,

You were not alone in your amazement. In an interview, Gabriel García Márquez said this about reading Metamorphosis:

"I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories."

More about it here:

http://www.signature-reads.com/2013/07/the-legacy-of-franz-kafka-as-seen-through-his-impact-on-gabriel-garcia-marquez/

Carolyn, I see that you read Moby-Dick. If I remember correctly, you also read Ahab's Wife: or, The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund. I looked up SJN and see that she's the "Writer in Residence at University of Louisville" and she was named poet laureate of Kentucky in 2005 -- which I'm sure you already know, but I didn't. Although I have read large chunks of Moby-Dick, I never read it completely; but I was still drawn to SJN's book because of it. Of course the first line hooked me: —"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." That rivals "Call me Ishmael" in my opinion. Do you think so?

I wound up liking Ahab's Wife so much that I've since reread it. I have also intended to read Moby-Dick all the way through, because it really is -- or should be -- my kind of book. Did you read Moby first or go back to read it after reading Ahab's Wife? Were you aware of the Kentucky connection when you decided to read AW?

If I am mixed up and you have not read AW . . . well, pay me no mind. ;-)

I have read:

Pride and Prejudice

Anna Karenina

1984

The Great Gatsby

Jane Eyre

Both The Old Man and the Sea and Catch 22 were school texts. The former bored me to tears and I skimmed the latter without really reading it. I suspect I was too young for both of them (14 and 16 respectively).

I think I have started Metamorphosis and only skimmed to the end.

As you all know my opinion of Mr T Hardy, I can only say that as well as Tess of the d'Urbervilles I was forced to read another of his and can never recall if it was Jude the Obscure or another.

Reader-in-Transit - Thank you for Kafka/Márquez link. It's interesting that Gabriel García Márquez and I had similar reactions to reading Metamorphosis. I'm surprised that he and I might have any thoughts in common. After my two sincere attempts to get through One Hundred Years of Solitude, all I can say is that Márquez's writing grates on my nerves!

Thanks to Márquez, I learned that I seriously dislike magical realism. Of course, back when I read Metamorphosis, I had never heard of magical realism and thus did not consider it so.

Kathy, I've been thinking about your comment of it being a long time since a novel has surprised and seemed innovative to you. I suppose I must be an old stick-in-the-mud type reader, so that's why the classics appeal to me more than modern novels. I've read several of the Booker and other prize winners and those on the short lists that, in my opinion, are so innovative that I could barely comprehend them; for instance, How to Be Both, recently. I sometimes feel that the prize givers pay special attention to novels that try-oh-so-hard to scuttle traditional narratives. Most of them I find too pretentious to enjoy.

Which of Garcia Marquez's books has people walking through walls as everyday occurrences? In one of the books -- One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are the two I tried -- the granny of the family was hanging out the wash when she suddenly levitated(?) and ascended to heaven, I think. That blew my mind and I decided that GGM was not to be trusted. Magical realism and I don't get on. Later my friend from Buenos Aires told me that most South American novels have magical realism and even some of the South American nonfiction (biographies, particularly) incorporate it. Come to think of it, Isabel Allende's Paula, about her dying daughter has it, but somehow the way she wrote, it actually seems appropriate.

I've read 11 of them, half as school assignments: Pride & Prejudice, Tale of Two Cities, 1984, Huck Finn, Catcher in the Rye (blech!), Moby-Dick (it just went on and on and on.....), Peter Pan, Jane Eyre (oh those Nell Booker illustrations!), The Stranger (preferred The Plague by the same author), Old Man & the Sea, Slaughterhouse Five.

I gave up on the Garcia Marquez book, not because of the magical realism, but because after a half dozen chapters, I discovered I didn't care about any of the characters. Back to the library it went..... I've read other George Eliot novels, and have enjoyed them, but haven't tried Middlemarch yet, and I've always planned to read the Tolstoy and the Crane books 'someday,' but I'm still working on the 50 Best Science-fiction/Fantasy list from a couple years ago!

I read 1984 in high school....and I rather wish I had not. It still gives me the creeps. And I still turn off my computer every night...and don't have the screen facing out into the room. And the rats. Yuck!

Animal Farm is sad, but not as creepy. It talks about what was (Soviet Russia) rather than the fear of what may be. But I always tear up when they take the horse to the "farm". The ending is an interesting observation, though.

Kafka- I seriously wondered if he was doing drugs, when I read this in school.

Oh, I don't know, Kathy. Tell us more (joking).

Frieda, I may have said before that I finished college 25 years after I began, attending night school, courtesy of my lovely company's tuition refund plan. I took all the English and American literature and Humanity courses that I could, and one of the American Lit courses was a summer course of some of the "greats," i.e., Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Because of time constraints, the reading was short stories or excerpts. The Melville was Billy Budd, but the professor, who was a great reader as well as teacher, talked so much about Moby Dick that I read it, as well. It was my mother's hate book because one of her college profs said he re-read it every year and she didn't care for it at all.

Sena Jeter Naslund is a big deal here. I haven't read many of her books but do really like Ahab's Wife. That opening line is one of my very favorites. She is a winner of the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction award and recently retired from her position as Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville among other things. She is from Birmingham but has lived here in "old Louisville" for a long time.

Thanks, Kathy, for clarifying.

• It's rare to re-experience the awe and wonderment of your early experiences. Know what I mean?

Yes, I do know what you mean. You expressed it very eloquently. I didn't consider it from that angle above however, although I should have because it's what I was driving at in the Creatures of Habit thread I started, but I was unable to home in on what I was trying to articulate.

At various times I have tried to list my all-time favorite books, only to realize that nearly every one of them I read before I was forty years old, many of them before I was thirty, and a large portion I first read when I was in my teens or childhood. I haven't found but a half dozen or so novels written in the past three decades that I've thought were half as good as the books I read when I was young. It's not the fault of most present-day writers (well, it is the fault of some of them, I think). It is I who has become hard to impress.

We think alike, Frieda. I haven't considered my mental list of favorite books lately, but I'm sure mine would follow a similar pattern to yours.

Now, having said all this ... we still love reading!

Frida,

It is Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude that ascends to heaven while hanging bed linens. Years ago I watched an interview with Garcia Marquez explaining how he wrote that scene: He had been writing for hours and was blocked. He took a break and stood at the kitchen door, looking to the backyard. The help was hanging sheets, but she was having a hard time because it was very windy. She said something like "This wind is going to blow me away to the sky". And he wrote the scene right away.

The one with people walking through walls is also One Hundred Years of Solitude. There is none or hardly any magical realism in Love in the Time of Cholera.

A friend gave me an annotated edition of One Hundred Years, which made all the difference. It explained symbolisms and references that would have gone over my head otherwise. It also had comments from the author or biographical details he had incorporated into the narrative. Still I liked more Love in the Time of Cholera.

Magical realism is not as surreal an experience in Latin America as it is for readers from cultures that are more scientifically oriented.

Reader-In-Transit - That was a very helpful post. I might have been able to tolerate One Hundred Years of Solitude if I'd had the edition you read. I've always been sort of interested in Love in the Time of Cholera because many years ago, a good friend declared it her favorite book. But after trying One Hundred Years, I was never willing to give Cholera a go. Perhaps I'll rethink that now that you've enlightened me.

Interesting list of first lines, but one in which I have quite a few gaps (esp. in the more modern years of the 20th century). Here is what I've read (a total of 15):

Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Charles Dickens -- A Tale Of Two Cities (1859)
George Orwell -- Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Sylvia Plath -- The Bell Jar (1963)
Mark Twain -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
J. D. Salinger -- The Catcher In The Rye (1951)
Jean Rhys -- Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby (1925)
L. P. Hartley -- The Go-Between (1953)
J. M. Barrie -- Peter Pan (1911)
Vladimir Nabokov -- Lolita (1955)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
Ken Kesey -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
Stephen Crane -- The Red Badge Of Courage (1895)
Charlotte Brontë -- Jane Eyre (1847)

Back to the original list: only five women? And even fewer POC authors (Garcia Marquez)? ...

Of the remaining authors, there are a few I will probably read in the future (Tolstoy, Beckett, James) but quite a number that I don't plan to read for any number of reasons: Kafka, Melville, Heller, Hemingway and Vonnegut). Actually, my not reading them is mostly due to one reason and one reason only: I don't like them or their writing (or at least the times I've tried them). :-)

ETA: I've never heard of Goodbye to Berlin (Isherwood) or The Crow Road (Banks), so they can remain on the list of "Possible Reads in the Future."

liz, Goodbye to Berlin became I am a Camera then the musical Cabaret with Liza Minnelli playing Sally Bowles. And I haven't read the book or even seen the movie!

That's impressive, Vee! By the way, I can't help mentioning that Cabaret is my all-time favorite movie.

Bringing up this old thread for comments.

I had read about 3/4 of the books on the primary list. I would add Wharton's "Ethan Frome" as a true classic. I would also include Alcott's "Little Women". And also Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky", as well as Alan Paton's "Too Late the Phalarope."

I have an old college friend who is slowly reading "Middlemarch." She claims it is the greatest classic in the English language, and an early feminist work. I was forced to read "Silas Marner" by the same author in high school and disliked it. I barely tolerated Hardy's "Tess of the D'urbervilles" or "Jane Eyre."

Do you agree with my friend about "Middlemarch"?

By now the original list is no longer at the top of the Telegraph page, but further down is a list of the latest books for 'holiday reading'. I don't know how many will last the test of time and I have read none of them but maybe a few will be worth picking up from the library.

Should I blow the dust off my paperback copy of Middlemarch? An excellent TV series was made of it several years ago.

Holiday Reading

I have just seen the weather reports for the UK and the Continent and would recommend books I read in Summer here that have Ice or Snow in the titles!

I couldn't access the list, it appears to be Subscription Only?

Annpan, I just downloaded the link from the top of the page and it came up; can't help you any further unless I paste the whole thing here. Perhaps someone else will have better luck and can advise.

And yes, we are having Summer 2019 today with temps in the mid '80's. Up until this week June has been cold, wet, damp, grey and most of DH's veggie seedlings/plants etc have gone blue then yellow, turned their roots up and succumbed.

Woodnymph, re Middlemarch:

She [your friend] claims it is the greatest classic in the English language, and an early feminist work.

Do you agree with my friend about "Middlemarch"?

Your friend agrees with Virginia Woolf who famously said of George Eliot's magnum opus that it is "one of the few English books written for grown-up people." AS Byatt, another writer who admires Eliot, says "it's one of the greatest novels of all."

It has undoubtedly been interpreted as an early feminist work -- at least it was later adopted by feminists who have chosen to see the feminist angle as Eliot's main intent.

I don't necessarily agree with your friend or Woolf or Byatt or the legions of readers who subscribe to the feminist interpretation. While it seems to be true that Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) chafed under the strictures on women during the Victorian era, there is also good evidence that her political and religious stances were just as important to her in her writing.

Mary, I've had problems with everything I've tried to read by Eliot. Her style is didactic. She also tended to get preachy, although she eventually disavowed formal religion.

Many readers during the nineteenth century had a higher tolerance for slow development of story/plot, minutiae, and flowery phrasing than many readers have today -- I'm one of them. To me Middlemarch is a slow soap opera. Another problem I have with Eliot's style is it ignores the writing dictum of "show, don't tell." For instance, Eliot tells her readers (in third person) that her character Dorothea Brooke is a paragon -- over and over she reminds us readers, lest we forget -- but I don't think she shows us very often how or why Dorothea is an exemplar. Eliot makes similar pronouncements about many of her other characters.

Middlemarch is long and it has so many characters that I have a hard time remembering most of them. I suppose it might be a worthy book to study -- taking notes, drawing up lineage charts, putting certain aspects of the development of 19th century British politics, cultural mores, and the Industrial Revolution in rough chronology. I didn't find, however, that Eliot's style (by itself) made these things clear enough. It didn't entertain me enough to help me find those subjects memorable, either.

Of course, it's a matter of an individual reader's taste and mood. I don't particularly want to be told that a work is classic, when I want to make up my own mind about it.

Frieda, thanks so much for your in-depth commentary re "Middlemarch." It was most helpful. I tend to avoid anything didactic like the plague. Also, I am (as a writer myself) someone who believe in "show; don't tell." Having read a plot summary of this work, I doubt I'd read it unless it were the last book on planet earth. It was surprising to me to discover the taste in reading of my old college friend because we are so alike in all our other tastes. As the French say, "A chac'qu'un son gout..."