Classic Books: 13 Titles Worth Reading, Chosen by Reader Interest
"Classic books" covers a lot of ground, from Shakespeare's comedies to nineteenth-century Russian novels. This list gathers thirteen titles that keep their place on the standard lists: the 100 novels of all time, the Modern Library 100, the BBC Big Read, and the GCSE and A Level English syllabuses.
The order comes from our own readers. The titles people look at most sit at the top, which is why Little Women and Pride and Prejudice come before Moby-Dick and Don Quixote. Each entry explains what the book is, when it was written and what it is actually about, so you can tell whether it is one for you.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott's novel of the four March sisters appeared in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, and was a commercial and critical success straight away. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy grow up in genteel poverty in Massachusetts while their father serves as a Union Army chaplain in the Civil War. The book is loosely based on Alcott's own life with her three sisters, and its themes have been summed up as domesticity, work and true love. Alcott followed it with two sequels, Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).
Pride And Prejudice
Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice when she was 20 or 21, though it was not published until 1813. It follows Elizabeth Bennet, second of five daughters whose family estate is entailed away from the female line, as she revises her first impressions of the haughty Mr Darcy. More than 20 million copies have sold, and the novel sits near the top of most-loved book lists among both scholars and general readers.
East Of Eden
Steinbeck considered this 1952 family saga his magnum opus, saying everything else he had written had been practice for it. It traces two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, in California's Salinas Valley from around 1900 to the end of the First World War, with the Cain and Abel story running underneath. The Hamiltons are based on Steinbeck's own maternal grandfather and his family. At its centre is the Hebrew word timshel, "thou mayest", and the argument that people are neither compelled to be good nor doomed to sin.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare wrote this comedy between 1594 and 1596, and it remains one of his most performed plays. Four Athenian lovers, a company of amateur actors rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe, and a quarrelling fairy king and queen all end up in the same moonlit wood. The plots run in parallel and tangle together around the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta.
Persuasion
Persuasion was the last novel Austen completed, published in December 1817, six months after her death. Anne Elliot, aged 27, broke off her engagement to naval officer Frederick Wentworth eight years earlier on the advice of family and friends. When her spendthrift father rents out the family estate, Wentworth comes back into her circle. Scholars regard Anne as Austen's most mature heroine and the book as her most refined work.
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Dumas serialised The Count of Monte Cristo between 1844 and 1846. Edmond Dantès, a young sailor falsely denounced as a Bonapartist, is imprisoned without trial in the Château d'If, where a fellow prisoner educates him and tells him where a vast treasure lies hidden. The novel is set against real events between 1815 and 1839, and works through hope, justice, vengeance, mercy and forgiveness. It is counted a classic of both French and world literature.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee's 1960 Southern Gothic novel won the Pulitzer Prize a year after publication and is still widely taught in American schools. Scout Finch narrates three Depression-era years in Maycomb, Alabama, as her father Atticus defends Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman. The historian Joseph Crespino called it probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America. Despite its subject matter, the novel is known for its warmth and humour.
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's sixteenth and final novel was serialised between 1879 and 1880, and he died less than four months after it finished. It centres on the dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three very different sons, Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha, and turns on the question of who killed their father. Ivan's prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor" is one of the most argued-over passages in literature. The book has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
Macbeth
Shakespeare's shortest tragedy was first performed around 1606 and first printed in the Folio of 1623. A Scottish general hears from three witches that he will be king, murders Duncan at his wife's urging, and then kills again to hold on to what he has taken. It is a study of ambition, guilt and paranoia, and of the madness that follows. It contains more allusions to King James I, patron of Shakespeare's company, than any of his other plays of that reign.
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, narrated by Nick Carraway, who rents a bungalow next to the mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Gatsby throws enormous parties he does not join, all in the hope of winning back Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald drew on his own youthful romance with Ginevra King and on parties he attended on the North Shore in 1922. Francis Cugat's dust jacket art, Celestial Eyes, so impressed him that he wrote its imagery into the book.
Moby Dick
Melville's 1851 novel follows Ishmael aboard the whaler Pequod under Captain Ahab, who is hunting the white sperm whale that took his leg. It sold badly, was out of print when Melville died in 1891, and only became a Great American Novel in the twentieth century. Faulkner said he wished he had written it; D. H. Lawrence called it the greatest book of the sea ever written. Melville drew on his own years at sea from 1841 to 1844.
Don Quixote
Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is widely regarded as the first modern novel and a founding work of Western literature. Alonso Quijano reads so many chivalric romances that he sets out as a knight-errant, with the farm labourer Sancho Panza as his squire. It is one of the most translated and best-selling books in history.
Great Expectations
Dickens serialised Great Expectations in his weekly All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861. It follows the orphan Pip from a graveyard encounter with the escaped convict Magwitch through to his life as a gentleman in London, funded by an anonymous benefactor. Miss Havisham in her decayed wedding dress, the cold Estella and the blacksmith Joe Gargery have all passed into popular culture. The novel is popular with general readers and literary critics alike.
Any one of these would make a sound starting point, and several appear on more than one of the canonical lists, so you are unlikely to go far wrong. If you want something shorter, the two Shakespeare plays are the quickest way in.