Novels with a definite beginning, middle, end? (Classics basically..)
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1sirjazzhands
I just realized that I have read very few books that I can think of that are focused more on storytelling and plot instead of ideas.. and I'd like to get into the classics, like Dickens or Hardy or whatever, I just don't know which is the best of the best or where to begin.
What is your favorite "highly structured" novel?
What is your favorite "highly structured" novel?
2Mr.Durick
Somebody who has a favorite novel cannot be taken entirely seriously. My favorite novel is Independent People by Halldor Laxness. It has a chronological story line and ideas too.
Robert
Robert
3Fogies
Fogies are 100% with rdurick; favorites distort your vision. Focused on storytelling--which as you point out narrows things down a lot with modern fiction--we'd say our favorite novel might be something like The Sand Pebbles. But still stories are deep in the human psyche and most of the absolutely best books--the great classics--have a story to tell. Pick at random one of those with a classic reputation and read it and read ten more of the same type. Stick with 20th century authors at first so you don't have the added hassle of footnotes and culture shock. Suggestions: Fitzgerald: Gatsby, Mailer: Naked and Dead, Jones: Here to Eternity, Mitchell: Gone with the Wind. Avoid 19th century academic specialties like Tobias Smollett and the like, or obsoletissimos like Scott and Thackeray. They can wait for later, if at all. You can work into them through 20th C types like Ivy Compton-Burnett (advanced readers only) or Anthony Powell (much more readable). Dickens is immediately accessible: start with Pickwick and you'll get hooked. But to call Dickens "highly structured" -- well, Ken Kesey's novels are much more highly structured than Dickens's.
Go for it, guy! There's decades of nifty reading there.
Go for it, guy! There's decades of nifty reading there.
4sirjazzhands
Hmm Fogies thank you for the detailed reply.. I may actually read Gone With the Wind then, especially since I love souther literature already but haven't gotten around to it yet.
20th century lit is what I've been reading most of my life, so that's why I've been trying to explore new options by looking to the 19th century. The Naked and the Dead though.. I read it just recently, did not like it, it seemed a bit too "Here is everything you need to know" as if I were stupid or something. Gatsby though, loved it, that's a good example of storytelling.
You say avoid Scott and Thackeray.. are there any "classic" authors you can think of that high school students would normally say aren't enjoyable, and that evaluation may be unfair? For example, it's usually said The Scarlet Letter is boring. What are some of those "boring" ones that really aren't?
20th century lit is what I've been reading most of my life, so that's why I've been trying to explore new options by looking to the 19th century. The Naked and the Dead though.. I read it just recently, did not like it, it seemed a bit too "Here is everything you need to know" as if I were stupid or something. Gatsby though, loved it, that's a good example of storytelling.
You say avoid Scott and Thackeray.. are there any "classic" authors you can think of that high school students would normally say aren't enjoyable, and that evaluation may be unfair? For example, it's usually said The Scarlet Letter is boring. What are some of those "boring" ones that really aren't?
5Fogies
>4 sirjazzhands:
First and foremost you don’t want to get into books that take a problem-focus on aspects of life that are just gone and forgotten, like Scarlet Letter or Uncle Tom or Les Miserables. A few of them are good reads (none of those just mentioned) but they are hard work to get through. (As academics in the humanities, the Fogies flatly reject difficulty as a reason not to read a book, but for recommendations to non-academics who want to read for pleasure, we have to downplay works whose pleasure/work ratio is low.)
Then there’s the language problem. We love Chaucer and Dunbar and Skelton and Burns. They’re among best English poets of all time. But we’d never recommend them to a beginner who wanted to find out why some people claim to enjoy reading English poetry. An important point to consider when making such recommendations is how much experience you have in reading foreign languages. If you consider two of the earliest books with a claim to the label “novel” in English, Gulliver’s Travels is readily readable to modern readers with no special training, while Robinson Crusoe is in a clotted 18th-century prose style that takes work to get through.
Still with us? “Boring” is an even less objective criterion than “intelligent.” The Fogies can apply it with each other, having had forty-some years of living and reading together, but it misses fire even between us often enough that we just won’t make that kind of recommendation. “Telling an interesting story” is about as general a criterion as we’re willing to apply, and we’re sure to get lots of that wrong. Some of the novels of the 19th century we might call bores would be so only to those unfamiliar with the language and customs of the time, but to cognoscenti are classics. Example: Vanity Fair. There is another of Thackeray’s novels, Henry Esmond, that is not about his contemporaries, so that he had to fill in details in a way as valuable to us as to his immediate readers. Result: we say leave Thackeray in general till later, but as the 19th century novel most readable to 21st century readers, we nominate Henry Esmond. Read it, see if you agree with us, post here again if you want more.
First and foremost you don’t want to get into books that take a problem-focus on aspects of life that are just gone and forgotten, like Scarlet Letter or Uncle Tom or Les Miserables. A few of them are good reads (none of those just mentioned) but they are hard work to get through. (As academics in the humanities, the Fogies flatly reject difficulty as a reason not to read a book, but for recommendations to non-academics who want to read for pleasure, we have to downplay works whose pleasure/work ratio is low.)
Then there’s the language problem. We love Chaucer and Dunbar and Skelton and Burns. They’re among best English poets of all time. But we’d never recommend them to a beginner who wanted to find out why some people claim to enjoy reading English poetry. An important point to consider when making such recommendations is how much experience you have in reading foreign languages. If you consider two of the earliest books with a claim to the label “novel” in English, Gulliver’s Travels is readily readable to modern readers with no special training, while Robinson Crusoe is in a clotted 18th-century prose style that takes work to get through.
Still with us? “Boring” is an even less objective criterion than “intelligent.” The Fogies can apply it with each other, having had forty-some years of living and reading together, but it misses fire even between us often enough that we just won’t make that kind of recommendation. “Telling an interesting story” is about as general a criterion as we’re willing to apply, and we’re sure to get lots of that wrong. Some of the novels of the 19th century we might call bores would be so only to those unfamiliar with the language and customs of the time, but to cognoscenti are classics. Example: Vanity Fair. There is another of Thackeray’s novels, Henry Esmond, that is not about his contemporaries, so that he had to fill in details in a way as valuable to us as to his immediate readers. Result: we say leave Thackeray in general till later, but as the 19th century novel most readable to 21st century readers, we nominate Henry Esmond. Read it, see if you agree with us, post here again if you want more.
6frithuswith
sirjazzhands, I would highly recommend reading Gone with the Wind - I'm reading it at the moment and think it's brilliant. The Woman in White is another classic with a good plot at its core. Wilkie Collins was a pioneering mystery writer and it's not hard to see why the genre took off after him!
7thorold
I was going to say "What about Wilkie Collins?" -- probably the most obvious example of a 19th century novelist focussed on storytelling (although I wouldn't say anything against Henry Esmond).
sirjazzhands mentioned Thomas Hardy in the original post - his novels are certainly very highly structured. The Mayor of Casterbridge, for instance, is basically a Greek tragedy with a corn and feed merchant as protagonist. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is the same thing with a milkmaid; Far from the madding crowd the same thing with a shepherd, etc. If the language and the obsession with description don't put you off (and they shouldn't, if you read Dostoievsky and Nabokov), you might find him worth a look. Might also be worth thinking about other realists, like Arnold Bennett, or Theodore Dreiser.
Anthony Trollope has the big advantage that he's funny (and in at least some of his books short, a rare thing in the 19th century), but the disadvantage that he deals with religious and political issues that are largely obsolete.
It's not 19th century and not formally structured, and it's driven by rambling and inconsequential links rather than plot, but have you considered Tristram Shandy? That's very much the 18th century novel for people who don't like 19th century novels. (Henry Esmond being the 19th century novel for people who like 18th century novels, or possibly vice-versa...).
sirjazzhands mentioned Thomas Hardy in the original post - his novels are certainly very highly structured. The Mayor of Casterbridge, for instance, is basically a Greek tragedy with a corn and feed merchant as protagonist. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is the same thing with a milkmaid; Far from the madding crowd the same thing with a shepherd, etc. If the language and the obsession with description don't put you off (and they shouldn't, if you read Dostoievsky and Nabokov), you might find him worth a look. Might also be worth thinking about other realists, like Arnold Bennett, or Theodore Dreiser.
Anthony Trollope has the big advantage that he's funny (and in at least some of his books short, a rare thing in the 19th century), but the disadvantage that he deals with religious and political issues that are largely obsolete.
It's not 19th century and not formally structured, and it's driven by rambling and inconsequential links rather than plot, but have you considered Tristram Shandy? That's very much the 18th century novel for people who don't like 19th century novels. (Henry Esmond being the 19th century novel for people who like 18th century novels, or possibly vice-versa...).
8sirjazzhands
Oh wow, Tristram Shandy.. that book scares me to be honest. I've heard it may be as incomprehensible as Finnegans Wake and I'm not sure if I am entirely willing to read something like that haha. Is it that bad?
9thorold
No, nowhere near as scary as Finnegan's wake :-)
It is long, and it jumps around infuriatingly from one idea to another, and does silly tricks like confronting you with a totally black page, but it's written in clear, lucid, 18th century prose.
It is long, and it jumps around infuriatingly from one idea to another, and does silly tricks like confronting you with a totally black page, but it's written in clear, lucid, 18th century prose.
10Fogies
>9 thorold: Not on the same planet with Ulysses, and not even in the same solar system as Finnegans Wake. And "clear, lucid, 18th-century prose" is entirely accurate provided you don't leave out the qualifier "18th-century". If, for example, you don't know what "bubble" meant to an upper-class Englishman in the 1730's, you'd best get an edition with a plethora of footnotes. (And if your recognition vocabulary is light on words like "plethora" you'll find most 18th-century writers send you to a dictionary too often to be fun reading.)
11sirjazzhands
I am not entirely stupid, I know what the word plethora means :P Though yes, an annotated edition sounds helpful hah
12Fogies
Really good reads from before the XXth century:
A. Those that meet the criterion of having a beginning, middle and end:
Candide, ou L'optimisme
Jonathan Wild
Typee
Omoo
The master of Ballantrae
Lord Jim
David Copperfield
B. Those that don't, but also happen to be great, great classics that you can't put down until you've finished and then you wish there had been more:
Genji (Waley translation)
Red Chamber
Monkey
War and Peace (This has acquired the status of an icon as a long boring book. Hoo-ha! Mr. Fogy got it from a library about 9 AM and closed the book around midnight. Mrs. Fogy took three evenings (in the first of them the silence was split by the cry, "Tell me! Does Natasha marry Prince Andrei?!")
More later. Ignore the school curriculum. Go by word of mouth from insatiable readers.
Edited to correct touchstones.
A. Those that meet the criterion of having a beginning, middle and end:
Candide, ou L'optimisme
Jonathan Wild
Typee
Omoo
The master of Ballantrae
Lord Jim
David Copperfield
B. Those that don't, but also happen to be great, great classics that you can't put down until you've finished and then you wish there had been more:
Genji (Waley translation)
Red Chamber
Monkey
War and Peace (This has acquired the status of an icon as a long boring book. Hoo-ha! Mr. Fogy got it from a library about 9 AM and closed the book around midnight. Mrs. Fogy took three evenings (in the first of them the silence was split by the cry, "Tell me! Does Natasha marry Prince Andrei?!")
More later. Ignore the school curriculum. Go by word of mouth from insatiable readers.
Edited to correct touchstones.
13Fogies
>11 sirjazzhands: I am not entirely stupid, I know what the word plethora means :P
Why the inappropriate snark? Plenty of 4-sigma types don't know many words like that. And are you entirely sure you really know it? For example, a character in an 18th-century novel might die of a plethora. You don't need a dictionary for that?
Why the inappropriate snark? Plenty of 4-sigma types don't know many words like that. And are you entirely sure you really know it? For example, a character in an 18th-century novel might die of a plethora. You don't need a dictionary for that?
15Mr.Durick
The suggestion to read other realists brought to mind Stephen Crane, especially Maggie, a girl of the streets and Red Badge of Courage, both of which I feel are reason enough to read novels.
Robert
Robert
16sirjazzhands
Okay Fogies, ya got me, no clue what the word "plethora" means in that context haha.
Since you had mentioned something that has a need to be translated.. what about the other Greek/Roman/Japanese stuff? Like, Homer. Would you happen to have a preferred translator of his works?
Since you had mentioned something that has a need to be translated.. what about the other Greek/Roman/Japanese stuff? Like, Homer. Would you happen to have a preferred translator of his works?
