Please recommend a "classic" that would be good for a book club. (discussions, great)

[Jehoiada]

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Little Women and Little Men both by Louisa May Alcott
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Winds of War by Herman Wouk
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

[StilltheSame]

Justine - Lawrence Durrell - its an amazing book with a strong heroine.

[Giesela]

When someone asks for a classics recommendation I usually recommend this because its the one book I remember from my lit class in 1980.

I would also second as good for discussion The Poisonwood Bible

Germinal (1885) is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel - an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s - has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film adaptations and two TV productions.

The title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring month. Germen is a Latin word which means "seed"; the novel describes the hope for a better future that seeds amongst the miners.

Germinal was written between April 1884 and January 1885. It was first serialized between November 1884 and February 1885 in the periodical Gil Blas, then in March 1885 published as a book.

[BlueWillowPlate]

I remember reading Germinal in high school. I still have the book, I'll have to look for it.

So many women seem to prefer Poisonwood Bible.

My favorite Kingsolver is Prodigal Summer. I've read it over and over again.
Still like The Bean Trees, too, the first Kingsolver I ever read.

[CA4Now]

East of Eden (I cannot get enough of that book and it lends itself to great discussion). Moby Dick.

[Incognito56]

Most accounts of people in the mountaineering world have focused on men. Howeve, there is a great body of little known work on some very accomplished female mountaineers. These could be future classics:
Regions of the Heart; the Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves (by David Rose & Ed Douglas)
***Hargreaves was first woman to summit Everest w/o supplemental oxygen in 1995***
Annapurna: A Woman's Place (by Arlene Blum)
***Blum was on the first all female expedition to the sumit of Annapurna in 1978***
Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy (by Lene Gammelgaard)
Betsy Cowles Partridge: Mountainieer (by janet Robinson)

[Giesela]

Oh I loved Prodigal Summer as well. But no one had mentioned it yet and I do forget the name.

[El Dakar]

[quote]

Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham

Anything by Maugham is classic. But for a group of women I would go with Maugham's "The Painted Veil" first.

[ZombieGrrl]

A list of classics and not quite classic classics:
Night-Elie Wiesel
All Quiet on the Western Front-Erich Maria Remarque
Grendel-John Grander
Brave New World-Aldous Huxley
Hamlet-Shakespeare
Catcher in the Rye-J. D. Salinger
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-James Agee/ Walker Evans
Howl-Allen Ginsburg
What is Communist Anarchism?-Alexander Berkman (I'm not trying to be political here, it's a book my mom gave me when I was a kid to read)
My Life and Hard Times-James Thurber
The Feminist Papers-edited by Alice S. Rossi
A Clockwork Orange-Anthony Burgess
Jitterbug Perfume-Tom Robbins (well just about anything by Tom Robbins is worth a read)
The Elegant Universe-Brain Greene
Lost Girls-Alan Moore (this is a graphic novel, both in that it has pictures and words, and it is sexually explicit)

[Mooseketeer]

Some of my favourite :
Too mnay to mention but some favourite of mine :

Vanity Fair
The Grapes of Wrath
The Count of Monte Cristo ( though it will take a while to read...)
Short stories by Maupassant
Nana by Emile Zola ( anything by Emile Zola)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Warton
Ana Karenina by Tolstoy
Boule de Suif -Maupassant
Far from the Madding Crowd -Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray -Oscar Wilde
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Trial -Franz Kafka
To Kill a Mocking-Bird - Harper Lee




Not classics but darn good reads :

Shantaram ( an astonishing book on so many levels) - Gregory David Roberts
The Tenderness of Wolves -Stef Penney
Cold Mountain -Charles Frazier
Whistling for the Elephants - Sandi Toksvig