Some of My Favorite Classic Novels
I love reading novels. Well-written novels take hold of my imagination and immerse me in the characters and the world that the novelist creates. Sometimes I’m so involved with those people—fully developed characters have all the reality of people—and that particular world that I don’t want to put the novel down; I want to keep reading until I get to the end, and when I reach the end, often I wish that the novel were longer so that I wouldn’t have to leave the fictional reality that I’ve found so compelling.
Although I read some contemporary fiction in college, most of the novels I loved while I was in school were classics, written long before I was born. My enjoyment of classic novels has continued, and today I alternate between reading contemporary novels and reading classics.
Some of my favorite classic novels are Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding; Emma by Jane Austen; Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens; Barchester Towers, Can You Forgive Her?, and The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope; New Grub Street by George Gissing; L’Assommoir by Emile Zola; Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Washington Square by Henry James; The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford; The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and Light in August and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
After seeing Baz Luhrmann’s film The Great Gatsby, I read the novel for the third time and found its style as sharp and clear as a diamond, its character depiction and storytelling brilliant, and its themes even more profound and moving than I’d found them the first two times I read it. Even if you’ve read The Great Gatsby before, I highly recommend it as a wonderful book to start you on a classic novel-reading binge!
What are your favorite classic novels?
