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Old 08-18-2013, 03:32 AM   #7
Neverwhere
Nameless Being
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Istvan diVega View Post
All of those are excellent starting points, except perhaps Ulysses (which I, at least, found to be hard work. Your experience may of course differ). My own favourites and recommendations would be:

Don Quixote
Les Miserables
The Three Musketeers and most other books by Alexandre Dumas père
Most anything by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamasov, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pretty much everything by Jules Verne
Pretty much everything by H. P. Lovecraft (since you express a liking for haunting gothic themes)
Pretty much everything by Edgar Allen Poe (ditto)

Wherever you start you have innumerable hours of great enjoyment ahead. There is, after all, a reason they're called the classics.... It's very nice, by the way, to see someone who's actually eager to tackle them, something which isn't exactly common fare these days.
Hi Istan diVega - I'm a little embarrassed that it isn't common for people to want to dive into the classics. It makes me feel a little bit on the spot! I'm sure they're all great, though, if the two that I've read are any measure of what makes a classic.

At your comment regarding Ulysses, I've decided to push it somewhere towards the back of my more immediate list (which is by no means fully formed, obviously). As you've given another suggestion to read Don Quixote, I am again resolved to pick it up earlier than intended! There are numerous copies of the book on the library here, which it seems I can access regardless of the geographic restrictions imposed when I looked at the book on Kobo. Would you recommend any particular upload of the book?

I have, of course, added every else that you mentioned to my notepad - and I've underlined Lovecraft and Poe. I'd love to finally discover where the beloved horror genre originated! Will I notice any particular themes or linguistic quirks reading translated French or Russian literature, as opposed to English literature?

EDIT:

Alright, I've downloaded a few things based on your replies so far - sitting in my library are Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk, Edgar Allen Poe's complete works, H.P. Lovecraft's complete works, Jules Verne's complete works, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace and Anna Karenina, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Jane Austen's complete works (which I purchased a while ago from Amazon, but only read Sense and Sensibility, as mentioned earlier). My Kobo itself is perched atop my paperback copy of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. By no means am I satisfied, though, so keep those suggestions coming, please!


Last edited by Neverwhere; 08-18-2013 at 04:55 AM.
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