Atria35 (post: 1403120) wrote:Lolz! I have never made bookmarks out of toilet paper, but I'm very guilty of dog-earing every book that comes my way.
*twitch* I could never do that to a book
From before I can remember, it's been ingrained in the very fiber of my being to treat books with utmost respect - so now even if it's load of trash masquerading as a published work, I treat it with reverence!
Anyway, I
looooooooove classics, and have done so ever since I started reading them for school and realized, "Hey, I can actually
understand them!" I always figured classics were something that only old
grown-ups could fathom. There are so many good classics out there, and there's so much you can learn from them! And I must confess that I have a soft spot for the 1800s-style writing, with their copious amounts of semicolons and huge long sentences that last more than a page. I don't know why, I just think that's awesome.
But anyway, here are some of my favorites:
Crime and Punishment and
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - This guy just cuts right down to the
core of human nature, including all of its ugly depravity, and he forces you to face the darkness in your soul. Plus, I love psychological stuff, so he's right up my alley. Books that are almost entirely devoted to introspection make me go
, though most people find them boring.
Pride and Prejudice and
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen - I don't know what you guys are talking about, Austen being dry and boring. She has one of
the best opening lines I've ever read: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
She does a really good job with relationships and how they morph and shift over time, how someone can go from loathing someone's guts to loving them with all their heart, and it's
so much more realistic than the stuff people come up with nowadays. Or how someone can end up holding respect and affection for someone who seemed to have nothing in common before. I suppose I might have a soft spot for Austen because I'm a
lot like Marianne (minus Willoughby, thankfully) from
Sense and Sensibility, but I still think Austen was an excellent writer.
Oliver Twist and
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - I haven't read a whole lot of Dickens, mainly because some of his tomes are a little daunting in terms of length, to say the least >_> But I
really liked these two. He does satire masterfully when you understand the context, and really brings out the feel of the locations in which his stories are set. I am
never going to see a movie of
A Tale of Two Cities, because his writing was so vivid that I could see it perfectly as I was reading, and the brutality of the Reign of Terror was almost too much for me just as words on the page. (Similar to
Lord of the Flies, which is too recent to be called a classic, really, but had a similar effect on me.)
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Everyone loves Sherlock Holmes, but I certainly think this novel stands out among all the rest. I've read it twice now, and seen two of the movie adaptations (Basil Rathbone is
the best Sherlock Holmes I've ever seen!), and I just love this thing to death. So ingenious! So gripping!
Dracula by Bram Stoker - This is the only book I've ever read that has horrified me so much that I couldn't even look at the
cover while I was reading it. It also gave me the worst nightmare I've ever had in my life. Yet even with all that, I couldn't stop reading for the life of me! Obviously, I knew from the get-go what was going on, what with the way Dracula has pervaded Western culture, but it was still a thriller all the way through. I came to fear Dracula as though he actually existed. It's very rare that such an old story will pop out at me, coming to life like that. I love it.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - How could anyone
not like this awesome book?! What a titillating story of revenge and intrigue. It was a little hard to grasp at first when they were throwing a bunch of French names every which-way, but soon you get completely caught up in the machinations, simultaneously hoping the Count will succeed and fail - at least, that was the way it was for me. I also found myself riveted by the descriptions of that old guy, forgot his name, who's paralyzed and the only motions he can make are opening and closing his eyelids, yet he uses this to talk to his...granddaughter? -_- It's been too long since I read this....
...um, I feel like there should be more, but those are the biggest ones, at any rate.
