Classics for Pleasure

[paranoid marvin]

Despite the fact that I have written a number of poetical entries to the Challenges, I am not a wide reader of poetry. That which most speaks to me is of the war poets of WW1, in particular Siegfried Sassoon. I even for one challenge wrote an entry to a Challenge as a sort of companion piece to his 'The General'. Other than that, the nonsense poetry in Alice in Wonderland is about my level of sophistication!

Dracula is a marvellous book, and whilst I appreciate Frankenstein, having (appropriately enough) dissected it in English Lit, I would be reluctant to return to it. It's been some time, but Treasure Island and Kidnapped are just as readable today as they were more than a century ago.

For Shakespeare, Richard III was centuries ahead of its time in the creation of the villainous king and Henry IV is a fascinating story into how a disreputable young prince turned into the monarch who would be Henry V.

 

[BAYLOR]

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
On Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I read and enjoyed these novels .

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

"The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins - the primordial detective novel, written by Charles Dickens' best mate. Collins is massively underrated if you ask me.

"The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne - a rambling avant-garde comic novel from the mid 18th century. I was fascinated by it in my teens and 20s.

A second vote for "Dracula". I particularly love the sections from Jonathon Harker's diary.

"Vanity Fair" by William M. Thackeray. For an 800-page Victorian novel, it's a surprisingly pacy read. Follows the fortunes of two childhood friends, the mild-mannered Amelia Sedley and the accurately-named Becky Sharp.

"War and Peace" by Tolstoy - I remember seeing 3 different translations of it side-by side in the library. The first two used such dreary and convoluted language they were pretty much unreadable. The third, by Lousie and Aylmer Maude, is just brilliant. Not heavy-going at all, so you can actually enjoy the story. Ended up reading it in 3 weeks and getting my own copy for re-reading. Translation matters!

(I've read and enjoyed a fair number of other "classic" novels, but most of them I've never re-read.)

 

[BAYLOR]

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Dracula by Bram Stoker I think lots of us can agree on this
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenmore Cooper
Johnny Got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

 

[Orcadian]

Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers.

And this was intended to be played on a humongous Pipe Organ. Orchestras and piano players need not apply.

That really is a great recording; thanks for posting. This is Liene Kalnciema playing the Walcker organ (1883) at Riga Cathedral in Latvia.

As it happens I'm going to an organ recital tomorrow, where Toccata & Fugue in D minor will be the centrepiece.

 

[dask]

Poe: The Man Of The Crowd. Maybe not his best story but one I seem to enjoy more than the others. Read it a couple of times and still retains its magic allure.

 

[Montero]

Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers.

And this was intended to be played on a humongous Pipe Organ. Orchestras and piano players need not apply.

Great recording. I've heard it live twice. Once was the music master at my comprehensive playing it in a school choir concert that we gave in a local church - sitting in the choir stalls about ten feet from the pipes which was pretty all enveloping but not overwhelming
The second time was in the Royal Albert Hall, up in the gallery, and watching the safety rail vibrate in response to the really low notes. That was "just" the waiting music for a Tchaikovsky evening which finished with the 1812 Overture complete with stage cannon, full orchestra, organ going full pelt and the band of the Coldstream Guards. I'd gladly go and listen to that again.

My main classics are music
Vivaldi - I call it sunshine music a lot of it, makes me think of the vaulting in a great English cathedral with sun streaming in the windows
Monteverdi
Handel's Messiah
Gilbert and Sullivan
Some Mozart and some Beethoven
Strauss Waltzes and Polkas

I haven't re-read classic books in a fair while, but another fan of Pride and Prejudice here - but also Persuasion. I think in some ways I like Persuasion better.
John Donne - especially Busy old fool, Unruly Sun
Edward Lear - nonsense rhymes cheer me up most days.

And here is one of my favourite performances of the Hallelujah Chorus. Having been in a choir and sung it, I know how hard it is to do what they were doing.

 

[Extollager]

Just in case anyone needs a reminder -- please keep nominations to work published in 1922 or earlier. (Johnny Got HIs Gun is too recent.)

Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Conrad's The Secret Agent are two more classics I can always read with pleasure.

 

[AE35Unit]

I must be the only one that didn't enjoy Dracula. Found it boring with the occasional good scene

 

[BAYLOR]

Vathek by William Beckford
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Mallory
The Last Day of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer Lytton
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
The Sea Wolf by jack London

 

[dask]

How could I forget: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles and The Lost World.

 

[Extollager]

Sibelius's Lemminkäinen Suite and a lot of other compositions. Dvořák's New World Symphony and lots more. Boccherini's Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid (one of the delights of a certain enjoyable movie).

 

[BAYLOR]

Twilight of the Gods by Richard Wagner

 

[Bick]

I find this hard to answer with just one or two things because I get genuine pleasure from a huge number of classic books that I’ll happily re-read: Dickens, Doyle, Balzac, Hardy (I recently re-read three Hardy novels and absolutely loved them again), Twain, Stevenson, and Jerome come to mind. Musically, I would say the list is shorter, but I love the less well known Vivaldi concertos, such as La Stravanganza and L’Estro Armonico. Quite a bit of Bach too (I prefer baroque to classical period).

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I'm like Bick, my list would be too long when it comes to books. When I was a child, my parents bought my brother and sisters and I a collection of books called Classics for Children. I grew up reading and rereading those books, and discovering others by some of the same authors when I was a teenager and adult.

These were the kind of books that a bookish child, back in the 1950s and early 60s, received from parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, for Christmas and for birthdays: fairy tales initially, and then, a little later, books written in the 19th century, by authors like Stevenson, Dumas, and Dickens. Also American authors like Twain, Alcott, and Baum (Baum's Oz books of course were well short of a hundred years old when I first read them—or in the case of The Wizard when I had it read to me.) In my teens I discovered books by Austen and the Brontë sisters, Thackeray, etc.

I know a lot of people who struggle with the language in Dickens and other writers of his era. But for those of us old enough to grow up reading 19th century English as a sort of second language, it was just the way that stories were usually written.

 

[Orcadian]

I too once sang in a choir. This is my favourite flashmob.

 

[Randy M.]

Over the last few years I've been less inclined to read pre-20th century fiction than I used to be. The writers I suspect I'll eventually return to include Arthur Conan Doyle (have actually done this in the recent past), Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Kipling, Stevenson, Wharton and even Henry James (short stories more likely than novels), also the Brontes and Stephen Crane -- The Red Badge of Courage was a great read in college and I should reread it. Writers I'm likely to explore further than I have would include E. T. A. Hoffman, Joseph Fielding, Dickens and, maybe, George Eliot -- Adam Bede was very good and I should tackle one of her heftier volumes.

Still, I think I'm more likely to dive into short stories than novels, so take all that with a grain of salt. My interest has always been piqued more by the writers between the World Wars.

 

[Orcadian]

...
As far as poetry goes, favorite short poem of the time period is "Ozymandias" (1818) by Percy Bysshe Shelley; favorite long poem is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) by T. S. Eliot; and favorite really long poem is "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Given all that, it may seem odd that my favorite poet of the time is Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886.)

I too would put Prufrock close to the top of my poetry list! Also there are Little Gidding (Eliot again) and Fern Hill (Thomas; read rather beautifully by [then] Prince Charles here). I also love Yeats' He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven, which seems to me to embody the absolute love that gives everything and asks nothing; and the vulnerability that goes with being able to do that.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

[hitmouse]

I too would put Prufrock close to the top of my poetry list! Also there are Little Gidding (Eliot again) and Fern Hill (Thomas; read rather beautifully by [then] Prince Charles here). I also love Yeats' He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven, which seems to me to embody the absolute love that gives everything and asks nothing; and the vulnerability that goes with being able to do that.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Fern Hill was published in 1946 so it does not qualify, sadly. It does deserve a shout however as one of the most beautiful and moving poems ever (IMHO).
This famous stanza is painted on the foyer wall in my place of work:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

And it is also engraved on a rock in my local park, Cwmdonkin, in Swansea, where Thomas played as a child.

 

[Astro Pen]

Carol does Widor

Debussy ff to 2:00 for countdown and take off

But nothing can tear your heart apart like The Lark Ascending

With a local bias for me:
George Borrow Wild Wales
Thomas Love Peacock The Misfortunes of Elphin