What are five of your favorite classic books?

Here are mine:

1.  Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

2.  Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

3.  Vanity Fair by Thackeray

4.  The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

5.  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Tess/D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Howard's End by EM Forster

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Pride & Prejudice --Jane Austen

Emma -- Jane Austen

Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte

The House of Mirth -- Edith Wharton

The Awakening -- Kate Chopin

(If we could pick 6 something by Hardy would come next, or Flaubert's Madame Bovary)

Melody -- I just finished teaching Vanity Fair for the first time!  It's such a great, complex, funny book!

Susan, Vanity Fair was wonderful.  In some ways, Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton was very similar.

Only 5?  It's so hard to narrow it down!  My favorites change pretty often, but right now they'd have to be

Pride & Prejudice --Jane Austen

Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte

The House of Mirth -- Edith Wharton

The Three Musketeers--Alexandre Dumas

Ethan Frome--Edith Wharton

BTW, if anyone is looking to get rid of old "unswappable" classics, please let me know.  I have a preference for old books with yellowed pages, brown spots, bad binding, etc.  Just yesterday I ransacked Half-Price books for a nice stack of pre-1900 hardbacks that have seen better days---but I think they are lovely!

5 is hard! I just realized I've left off one of my favorites: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.  I think I've read it 3 times and I usually don't reread books.

A Connecticut  Yankee in King Arthurs Court by Mark Twain

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (I read three more Hesse books after this one but none so meaningful)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (I like Spanish Civil War books)  and/or Old Man and the Sea (I like Cuba stories) by Ernest Hemingway

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Les Miserable by Victor Hugo

I had the Count of Monte Cristo for ages my ex read it, couldn't put it down, and kept it.  I still need to read it.

My current reading:  Moby Dick (1/2 way) and Frankenstein (just started).

Picking five is WAY hard.  I like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Age of Innocence, and many more!  =) 

My absolute favorite is The Golden Ass by Apuleius- Translated by Robert Graves! You guys have to check this one out if you have never read it!

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Waverley by Sir Walter Scott

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

And MANY MANY more!

Hmmmm...top five.

1. The Jungle

2. 1984

3. The Old Man And The Sea

4. Traveles With Charley In Search Of America 

5. Catcher In The Rye

David Copperfield,  Jane Eyre,  The Scarlet Pimpernel,  Remembrance Of Things Past, and  A Tale Of Two Cities

That's pretty funny! After 5 days of no posts, montereyjosh and I posted at the exact same minute!

As an elementary  school librarian, I noticed how infrequently the children's classics were checked out, and so we developed a reading contest that we call "The Classics Bowl." We picked 5 children's classics (5 different ones each year), and 4th and 5th graders are challenged to read these. We let the kids get in teams of 4 and rev up the excitement with great prizes and after-school discussion groups (snacks and door prizes included, of course!)

On our game day, the teams tried to answer questions in game-show style (think Family Feud style), until we had one winning team. The kids loved it, the parents think it's great that the kids are reading such wonderful books, and the teachers appreciate the challenge that these kids are accepting (the contest is optional, but about 1/2 of the kids participate.

Here are the books we chose:

Year 1: Little Women; Prince and the Pauper; Call of the Wild; Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates; Prince Caspian.

Year 2: Kidnapped; Black Beauty; Pilgrim's Progress; Pollyanna; Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Year 3: Secret Garden; A Christmas Carol; The Bronze Bow; A Horse and His Boy; Where the red fern grows.

What would your favorite children's classics include, other than these above?

Liz

1. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
2. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
3. The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
4. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglass Wiggin
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Liz, what a wonderful way to get kids to read classics and to engage their minds.  I think alot of times people hear "classic" and think stodgy and hard to read.  But, it's so not true!

For children's classics I think I would add:

Island of the Blue Dolphins

Anne of Green Gables

Little House on the Prairie

Treasure Island

The Borrowers (would they be considered classics?  I just loved those books as a kid)

Tie for #1. I can't decide. Forever 19 in me says Jones, The Sober Adult says Kesey

From Here to Eternity - James Jones / Somtimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

What a great question.  Pride and Prejudice (I hate to say the same things as others but this is my absolute favorite), Prisoner Of Zenda by Sir Anthony Hope, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Kim by Rudyard Kipling (as well as Stalky and Company), Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein.  It's more than 5--probably I could add 20 more.  I love classics.

ANYTHING by Jane Austen (is that fair?)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Awakening

Vanity Fair

My five favorite classics include:

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

One of my favorite car games is to play "If you were stranded on a deserted island and could take only 10 of your favorite __________s, what would they be?"  So, I'm ready for you:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Lost Horizon by James Hilton

Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

This list will change by this afternoon but the essence remains the same.  Thanx for asking!

I agree, narrowing it down to 5 is difficult.

1. Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
2. Ethan Frome- Edith Wharton
3. The Yellow Wallpaper- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
4. The Handmaids Tale- Margaret Atwood
5. The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

I can't rank them in any order within the top 5, it was hard enough to limit myself only to 5, so here in no particular order are mine:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

gah, there are so many missing!

Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

An Invisible Man - Richard Wright

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald        (and another great book to read in conjunction with this is When Washington Was in Vogue by Edward Christopher Williams, a Harlem Rennaissance writer which is contemporaneous to Gatsby but deals with the African-American upper class, an epistolary novel).

I, Claudius - Robert Graves

- Tracy