I need recommendations....HELP!

I'm a 14 year old girl and my mom wants me to read a classic this summer. i can give her a list of 5 books, and she will pick one. I like most books, but classics have never really appealled to me. Here's one I did like: Pride and Prejudice. Can you give me some suggestions? We are about to leave for the library! Thanks!
Oh, in case they are helpful, my fave authors
Nicholas Sparks
Meg Cabot
Carl Hiaasen
Ally Carter
E. Lockhart

This isn't the best place to come for this kind of question if you're in a hurry, but I hope these suggestions won't be too late.

If you liked P&P you might try another Austen book like Sense and Sensibility or Emma.

Jane Eyre is good.

The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas?

I am fond of some of the works of Charles Dickens, but they can be tough going. Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities might be easier places to start. My personal fav is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, but it's pretty fat.

It looks like you enjoy romance/mystery/adventure kinds of books. Here are a few suggestions along those lines. Pride & Predjudice is my favourite, but I also liked:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Little Women & Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott.
Mansfield Park, Emma or Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

You're too immature in age to appreciate the Russians, and I don't know if you'd be willing to read any classic longer than 300-pages, so I suggest you remain with Austen; although you may find you like the Brontë sisters.

Picking out what is likely to be in the canon when you get to read "the classics" as required reading is a little risky, but now the classics on my reading list for The Nineteenth Century Novel (Open University) are;

Heart of Darkness
Dracula
Northanger Abbey
Germinal
Dombey and Son
Far From The Madding Crowd
Jane Eyre
Middlemarch
Portait of a Lady
Madame Bovary
The Woman in White
The Awakening

The obvious match is Northanger Abbey though it's far from a push over.

I highly recommend all of these:

Rebecca
Mansfield Park
The Outsiders
Little Women Good Wives
Anne of Green Gables series. In the first book she is a little girl of 9 or 11 but in the rest of the series she is growing up into an older teen, going to university, teaching, and then marriage.
I Capture the Castle

Emma or Mansfield Park or Sense and Sensibility
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Great Expectations
Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre

I'd also suggest staying clear of the Russians and, Middlemarch is a tad long.

To Kill a Mockingbird. Classics I liked in high school when I was a bit older than you are now include Jane Austen, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Tale of Two Cities, Cry the Beloved Country, and Huckleberry Finn.

And Cry the beloved Country, besides for being an amazing book, is great for essays.

You might like to read some of Oscar Wilde's plays: The Importance of Being Earnest, etc.

We've had quite a few threads like this lately - I thought it might be a good idea to start a wiki page where we can gather together a list of starting points for the classics. The page is here: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Classic_novels - please all leap in and add to it.

To get this thread a tad longer I guess we could consider "which classic, if you had read at 14, would've impressed your mom?"

Aurora Leigh is my guess.

Ovid. In Latin.

Beowulf in Ye Olde English.

What would have impressed my mom? War and Peace or Moby Dick. But "classic" is such a fuzzy word. Do we get to count The Scarlet Pimpernel? Kim? Drums along the Mohawk? Two Years Before the Mast?

Unfortunately, I doubt if any of this is relevant to Bookworm Student, who asked the question just before heading out to the library with her mom.

Just popping in and out of edit made my touchstones work? Interesting.

Fuzzy or not I agree classic seems a contentious word for some. I've just picked up Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie mostly because being a Norwich lad I have a link, although I read in the blurb that she is, according to Gary Kelly English Fiction of the Romantic Period;

" equal at times to Austen and very similar in character." .

So I think she probably deserves a read, 14 years old or not.

>12 armandine2:
>13 Sandydog1:
>14 Phocion:

they must be tough mothers to impress!

>17 armandine2:
That's mothers for you: stony-faced when swotty teenager flaunts his Hegel at the breakfast table; boasting like anything to the other mums when the kids aren't around...

The trick is to find a "classic" that you actually WANT to read.
I remember being forced to read the classics at a young age and really falling in love with the books and the stories, but resenting being forced into reading them. So find the happy medium! Whatever you're interested in now, chances are the is some classic literature that will complement those interests.
If you're into the whole Harry Potter or Twilight series, try The Once and Future King by T.H. White or Bram Stoker's Dracula. Did you watch the finale of Lost? Then try Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island. Like horror movies? Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and some of Poe's short stories misgt be worth a read, too. Emma by Jane Austin is my favorite classic romantic comedy, and for adventure on a rainy day, Moby Dick, and ALWAYS The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
I know that this advice is probably too late for your library trip, but keep it in mind. Its important to like, if not love, what you read, or else, what's the point? This is one of the best lessons my parents taught me at an early age, and its stayed with me.
Have fun with the classics!! Let us know what you've chosen and how you like it so far, OK?

These are on the reading list at our school and should be appropriate for you:
Of Mice and Men and The Pearl by Steinbeck
The Crucible a play be Arthur Miller
Epic of Gilgamesh an ancient tale
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

If you have not read Little Women by Alcott, you should! Someone suggested The Awakening by Chopin, but I think you'd be better off with Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre or Madame Bovary

Happy reading!

My favourite novel of all time is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. If you liked Austen, then you may also like Wharton who writes a distinctively American version of the novel of manners (money, rather than class/birth, plays the deciding role). In my former life as a Lit Prof, I had good luck teaching this novel.... Students seemed to really like it. I write about it in my blog at www.the-reading-list.com

I would also recommend Portrait of a Lady, Sula, and Invisible Man.

If you like Pride and Prejudice, then I would suggest that you try 'Northanger Abbey' also by Jane Austen. It is about a young girl who is obsessed with gothic romances that were a form of popular fiction of the day and is sometimes carried away by her imagination. I would also recommend one of my favorite recent books 'Lady Vernon and Her Daughter' that is based on a short work Jane Austen wrote when she was very young - it is about a widowed mother and her teenage daughter who have to deal with the relative who cheats them out of their inheritance and with the gossip that affects their reputations.
If you like Carl Hiassen, here are some other authors you may like
Jane Rubino (she actually co wrote Lady Vernon but also has a series of mystery books that have some LOL moments - Death of a DJ was the first
Sarah Strohmeyer - the Bubbles books
Katy Munger - the Casey Jones books
Sparkle Hayter - she wrote a series but 'Naked Brunch' is a comic-mystery-fantasy with a werewolf theme - may like it if you liked Twilight
Elmore Leonard - he has some violence and hard language but his dialogue is as funny as Hiassens.