Quote:
Originally Posted by Neverwhere
Should I begin with Don Quixote? War And Peace? Les Misérables? Ulysses? The Divine Comedy? Bleak House? Frankenstein? Middlemarch? It's such a vast field to choose from - I feel, frankly, lost.
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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.