I knew you would have a rather length list. I was worried until the edit came through. 
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- Edit 1Before modification by StormCrow at 01/10/2010 02:54:58 AM
What are your favorite classic works?
I love Aristophanes and Herodotos. And I really like Hamlet and Macbeth. And I'll read Austen any chance I get. Same with Woolf, really. Or Dumas. Or Wodehouse. I am writing my PhD on Dickens, so I suppose I'll have to mention him. And Thackeray and Stevenson. I quite like some of Zola. There is too much to mention. I real a lot of "canon" literature.
I do enjoy Dumas and Stevenson. Count of Monte Cristo is great, and Treasure Island was one of my favorite stories in younger years. I've never read Woolf or Zola, so no commentary there. I mentioned Macbeth as well, which, I think, is my favorite play. What is your premise for your work on Dickens?
Edit: the more I think about this, the more books I feel that I should enter. There are so many good ones. Starting with Homer (Gilgamesh was alright, but not something I feel an immediate urge to re-read), on to Sapho, Aeschylos, Sohpocles, Plato, Xenophon, then Catullus, Vergil, Ovid. The mystery plays of the medieval period are worth your time. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakespeare, and Aphra Behn, Michel de Montaigne, Moliére, Racine, Fielding, Swift, Laurence Sterne, Goethe's Elective Affinities (not the tragic romantic stuff), Pope, Blake, Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne, Nietzche (oh, my god, Nietzsche... or are we only talking about fiction here?), Ibsen and Strindberg, Henry James, Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Gaston Leroux, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky (within reason), Gogol, Bulgakov, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Walter Benjamin, Huxley, Orwell, Beckett, ... and with that I think we have reached the end of what I am comfortable calling a "classic". Although I will emphasise that I am associating wildly, and it is quite possible that I have forgotten someone I really like.
This is one heck of a list, with a lot of good authors in there. Lewis Carroll is on my list to read, as are Don Quixote and Dorian Gray. Will have to look up some of the others.
I wasn't aiming for something like Nietzsche when I started talking about classics. I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil for a philosophy class. He was the most interesting to read by a mile.
If you had to suggest just one, which would it be and why? (please not, "because it's good" )
Hmm. If you are not used to reading non-contemporary books, I think Dumas or Wodehouse, possibly Austen (but I think possibly that works better if you are a girl) is a good place to start, mainly because the difference will not be so great. Stevenson is always great. Or, you know, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Poe. Those are a good place to start because they are not terribly challenging.
I will check out the Holmes books at some point too. Everything doesn't have to be a challenge for me. At this point I'm removed enough from academia that I can just take it easy.
The same goes for Tolstoy. I am always amused by how War and Peace is touted like this difficult, intellectual novel when it is really a soap opera. It is interesting, and it is fun to read (if you get through the periods of thoughts on history, but those are short).
I never found it exceedingly difficult, it just seemed long and kind of slow. I need to reread this at some point. I'm having a hard time remembering what actually happened.