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This is obviously very challenging. It’s probably impossible to chose five only. Still, if you were to do this, to pick five classics which generations after us should not be without, which five?
Mine: 1. La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri 2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 3. 100 love sonnets by Pablo Neruda 4. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 5. Mio, My Son (in Swedish) by Astrid Lindgren
Posts: 19677 | From: San Siro | Registered: Nov 2003
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1) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 2) Atonement by Ian MacEwan 3) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 4) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole 5) The Joke by Milan Kundera
Posts: 7499 | From: A Gun | Registered: Aug 2003
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Auto da Fé by Elias Canetti The Idiot by Dostoyoevsky The Outsider by Albert Camus The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer umm..tricky to choose...probably The Heart of the Matter but possibly The Comedians by Graham Greene - a book that expresses <I>guilt</I>
<<insert proviso about my answers being different tomorrow here>>
<<insert apologies to Conrad, Dickens and Raymond Chandler, to the last of whom every gin gimlet I will ever drink is dedicated, here>>
<<finaly, add a respectful nod of approval for The Joke by Kundera here>>
Posts: 23 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
I'm having Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby at one and two, but from then on my list looks too much like PG's for me to escape the suspicion of being a copycat. Fucking three-novel overlap, there is.
(Though I might bounce A Confederacy of Dunces for Right Ho, Jeeves. The trouble is, I'm pretty sure that would have been bubbling under PG's list as well.)
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The Great Gatsby - Scott Fitzgerald L'Assommoir - Zola 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez What a Carve up - Jonathan Coe At Swim-two-birds - Flann O'Brien
This sort of list changes all the time, though.
Posts: 12564 | From: The bus lane | Registered: May 2002
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posted
Ehh.... GY might be right. With plays I'd really want to make room for Calderon de la Barca's Life is a dream.
Posts: 19677 | From: San Siro | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
is it just favourite fiction or does "classic" imply a narrower definition?
Posts: 7953 | From: Tank Meadow, Munich North | Registered: May 2002
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posted
Seeing as at least two people have included 100 years of Solitude I think the definition stretches to 'any load of old bollocks that takes your fancy'.
Posts: 7499 | From: A Gun | Registered: Aug 2003
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