Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is Top Ten Favorite Classic Books (or) Top Ten Classics I Want to Read. I went with the latter. Here goes (and no fair berating me for not reading them yet!) As usual, they’re in no particular order.
- Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
- David Copperfield and/or The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens)
- North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)
- Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) (I know, I know…)
- The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
- The Idylls of the King (Tennyson)
- The Faerie Queene (Edmund Spenser)
- Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Le Morte d’Arthur (Sir Thomas Malory) (this one’s actually a re-read, but I don’t think I finished it the last time)
abibliophilesstyle
No berating here, as I’ve only read 3 of them – S&S, David Copperfield, and To Kill a Mockingbird. David Copperfield is my favorite Dickens! I hope you enjoy it. 🙂
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
I thought it would be a good one to cut my Dickensian teeth on. Of course, I’ve read A Christmas Carol (several times), but it hardly counts as it is so short in relation to his other works.
abibliophilesstyle
I’d also highly recommend the BBC version of David Copperfield from 1999 – stellar cast!
Katherine P
Great list! I’m not sure I’ve ever read Kidnapped or Kim and I definitely should! I’ve read some of Tennyson’s poetry but not The Idylls of the King. I don’t care for London. I like his writing but all the stuff about the dogs gets me. People can have a rough time of it and I’m good with that but when dogs get thrown in I get squeamish!
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
I’ll bear that in mind about the dogs. And Idylls can be florid and overly sentimental (I’ve read excerpts), but I’ve always wanted to see what Tennyson did with the Arthurian myths, of which I’m a big fan.
Lianne @ caffeinatedlife.net
I hope you enjoy S&S and North & South (the latter is one of my favourite books ever <3) Great list, there are a few on it that I need to read myself–the two Dickens titles you mentioned, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.
My TTT
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
Oh, I’m so glad I’m not the only one who never read TKAM! It was never assigned, and I just never got around to it.
curiouslybookish
Great list! There are some on there I’ve been meaning to read, too, like The Faerie Queen and Le Morte d’Arthur.
And no shame from me! I’m “bad” about reading classics, too!
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
There are so many good books, both classics and not, that I despair of reading even half the ones I want to read.
Angela's Anxious Life
I did read To Kill a Mockingbird. I was good but I didn’t think it was as good as some people say. I don’t really care to read it again. I love classics!
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
I love some classics. Some are… well, let’s just say that I’ve read a few that have not appealed to me at all. I’m not a fan of depressing, and some classics are all about depressing. 🙂
Finley Jayne
The Call of the Wild is a good one! I read it back in HS and have fond memories of it 🙂
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
Good to know. I don’t know why I’ve not read it before, but it wasn’t required in my HS.
Stephanie Shepherd
There are SO many books and just not enough time for them all so you won’t hear any berating from me! Just listing my favorites really made me realize how many classics I haven’t read – I think I will start keeping a list of those I haven’t read that I especially want to get to. Your list looks pretty excellent – the first two are two of my all time favorites so I hope you enjoy. I am also unsure whether I’ve read all of Le Morte d’Arthur….
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
I went to a private high school with a highly original/alternative approach to education. We did study several Shakespeare plays intensively (including producing and acting in them), but I wasn’t required to read a lot of the standard HS literature fare. Most of the classics I’ve read, I’ve read by choice – which means I’ve probably avoided some I might have enjoyed, just because they sound dry or not my cup of tea. So like you, my list of classics I haven’t read is pretty long! I have a spreadsheet of classics I think I’d like to read, and those I’ve read; for this post, I picked the ones that appealed to me most. 🙂
Hadas
The Faerie Queene sounds intense! Is there a dumbed down version out now? I had to skim a bit for my thesis and it was hard haha. Can’t wait for your review when you get to it.
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
I don’t know if there’s a dumbed-down version. A friend of mine who homeschools is reading an annotated, multi-volume version to her children (ages 11 and up.)