What oldish fiction are you reading?

[bgmnts]

I've decided to get through the old fiction I've spent years keeping in a disorderly pile on my drawers.

I'm likely alone here, but I didnt read much fiction growing up, and so all the classic books people read passed me by. I've read a fair bit since, but of course you need a good brain for it and my attention deficit is phenomenal, so it's tough. Les Miserables only lasted half the book despite a thrilling story, but Dumas's d-Artagnan romances are some of my favourite novels ever, so it's hit and miss. The Brothers Karamazov was somewhere in the middle: it pushed me to my limit but I did just about finish it.

I recently devoured Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and whilst it had a crap epilogue, it was absolutely gripping, especially when Raskolnikov tangles with Porfiry Petrovich - essentially a 19th century Russian Columbo.

Currently reading the Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald and find it all a bit agonising for my taste, but it's only 150 pages so no bother.

What is everyone's favourite classic, or just old book or author? I'm willing to take a chance on anything recommended if I don't possess it. This is obviously a long term thing.

Is anyone currently reading anything classic or old now? Unsure what I'd even class as 'old'; perhaps pre-war?

[Magnum Valentino]

I've a copy of Frankenstein sitting unread which I've not read since school but am looking forward to getting back to. My wife landed home the other day with a collection of Poe stories too so I suppose I'll give that a go and all.

[AngryGazelle]

I've just finished reading Moby Dick and found it a bit of a mixed bag.

On the one hand it contains some absolutely fantastic prose and there is so much depth to it all that you could probably read it 100 times and find something new.

On the other, it really does drag at times and I found certain chapters, whilst strong in symbolism, were just a bit dull to read.

[bgmnts]

I've a copy of Frankenstein sitting unread which I've not read since school but am looking forward to getting back to.

Frankesntein and Dracula were two of the books I remember reading as a child, as a sort of double book (on a coach to Spain on an all-inclusive holiday, and I definitely remember Frankenstein being really good.

All I specifically remember is of it taking place on a ship in a remote sea, and finding that quite isolating and chilling.

I actually wish I could remember the edition or publisher of that paperback, but it was a strange tete beche double novel thing, with Frankenstein monster's face on the one cover and Count Dracula's face on the other cover.

On the other, it really does drag at times and I found certain chapters, whilst strong in symbolism, were just a bit dull to read.

Ah! I find this is a bit of a recurring theme with these classics.

[Mr Vegetables]

I'm listening to The Brothers Karamazov read by the guy who plays Benedict Bridgerton, and he is very good at reading it in a way that makes the rambling nature of it seem engaging and natural. I think I would struggle to actually read it myself; my attention span would be defeated. But the first 5 of its 44 hours have been grand.

I really like GK Chesterton's stuff in general, except when it is extremely racist and sexist. Which it is a lot, to the point the Catholic Church wouldn't make him a saint

[bgmnts]

Well The Great Gatsby seems a tad overrated for what it is.

[13 schoolyards]

I really like Gatsby, but it has a very strong tailwind behind it. It's short, the prose is effortlessly readable, the subject matter is still relevant, and it's exactly the kind of "literature" they assign to schoolkids as there's a better-than-average chance some of them will actually finish it (for the above reasons). It's not YA, but it's a great bridge between YA and more grown-up texts, so you get generations who're told it's a classic (and by now it kind of is).

Then again, you could always read Heart of Darkness, which shares a lot of those strong points and has a much better movie, even if it does take some liberties

[badaids]

I'm reading Frankstein.  It's like the longest shitest version of Raffles the Gentleman thug ever.  I know it's like 200 years old and like the first horror novel written and by a young girl, but still...

[Noodle Lizard]

Les Mis. No songs yet and it's all just about some priest who is great bunch of lads?

[Gladys]

I really like the short stories of Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. Lots of amazing writing to be found by checking out those two.

Moving on a bit in time and location I love the weird and eerie stories of Walter de la Mare and also people like Oliver Onions. All those werird fiction writers that Tartarus publish.

[AllisonSays]

I just finished The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. I love her, she's a wonderful writer, but this was possibly my least favourite of her novels so far. Still stylishly written, sharp, evocative, but felt a little incoherent, a lot of setpieces that didn't quite join up. For me the P-Fitz gold standard remains Offshore which is a perfect book.

Good idea for a thread btw, and your attention deficit must be manageable if you're ploughing through Russian novels!

[ASFTSN]

Middlemarch

[bgmnts]

I really like Gatsby, but it has a very strong tailwind behind it. It's short, the prose is effortlessly readable, the subject matter is still relevant, and it's exactly the kind of "literature" they assign to schoolkids as there's a better-than-average chance some of them will actually finish it (for the above reasons). It's not YA, but it's a great bridge between YA and more grown-up texts, so you get generations who're told it's a classic (and by now it kind of is).

Then again, you could always read Heart of Darkness, which shares a lot of those strong points and has a much better movie, even if it does take some liberties

These are all fair points, and obviously I don't think Gatsby was at all bad, and I think I understand what it was satirising etc, I think it just has such a legacy it didn't live up to it. Also, there was some lovely prose in there but also some weirdly bad writing. I found this sentence a bit odd:

She asked me if was going to the Red Cross and make bandages.

Heart of Darkness is better in my view.

[selectivememory]

Have you read much Modernist stuff? Can't go wrong with Joyce, Woolf and Proust. Though you might want to set some serious time aside if you want to tackle the entirety of In Search of Lost Time. It's well worth it - for me it's about as good as literature gets - but definitely a big commitment.


Also seconding the Middlemarch rec. We did that in the short-lived CaB Book Club era, and it was such a good pick for reading along with other people here.

[Average Comedy Enjoyer]

Just read The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, a Sherlock Holmes story from the more mental end of the canon.

It includes the bizarre retelling of that time

Spoiler alert

Homes and Watson broke into a man's house and watched him get murdered from behind a curtain, then destroyed the evidence and refused to talk to the police.

[close]

[bgmnts]

Have you read much Modernist stuff? Can't go wrong with Joyce, Woolf and Proust. Though you might want to set some serious time aside if you want to tackle the entirety of In Search of Lost Time. It's well worth it - for me it's about as good as literature gets - but definitely a big commitment.

These authors are definitely on the list but at the tail end, as I've read just how difficult they are. I think I'd have to build up to them.

I think for me personally what I want to read - even classical 'literature'  - should be able to stand up as interesting or entertaining stories with engaging characters that I can enjoy. It's a shallow approach, but I'm not a literary analyst, and I've found most old books I've read will have deep themes but centered around an interesting or gripping story and engaging characters.

Whereas I imagine books like Finnegans Wake or Swanns Way are more like philosophical and literary treatise, and need to be built up to. I've read everywhere that In Search of Lost Time is basically the most important and best novel ever written, but that's it's also four thousand pages of a man having a memory after eating a biscuit.

[Dayraven]

Whereas I imagine books like Finnegans Wake or Swanns Way are more like philosophical and literary treatise, and need to be built up to.

Finnegans Wake is a genuine 'very few people understand it' book, but then it's also Joyce's most difficult. Ulysses has been rewarding reading for a lot more people. (I've read Ulysses, and I've looked at all the words in Finnegans Wake.)

I wouldn't say In Search of Lost Time is an unchallenging read, but while it does meditate on memory and time, its manner of telling is a bit more conventional than you might imagine.

[selectivememory]

These authors are definitely on the list but at the tail end, as I've read just how difficult they are. I think I'd have to build up to them.

I think for me personally what I want to read - even classical 'literature'  - should be able to stand up as interesting or entertaining stories with engaging characters that I can enjoy.

I wouldn't say In Search of Lost Time is an unchallenging read, but while it does meditate on memory and time, its manner of telling is a bit more conventional than you might imagine.

Yeah, and I would say also that it does have some of the most richly drawn and memorable characters in any novel, and even if it isn't necessarily the most eventful story, it is actually pretty meticulously plotted (though with a few notable errors in the later volumes, as he was still working on those when he died). The payoff to it all in the final volume is just about the greatest denouement to any kind of narrative art I think I've ever experienced, but you really do need to read the preceding 3,000 pages or so to appreciate it.

But yeah, definitely one I had to read at the right moment in my life, and probably did have to build up to it a bit, so do I get that reasoning.

[bgmnts]

Alright well I'm sold on Proust then.

I think one of the main risks of reading these old works is just the expectation. It's hard to go in with absolutely no expectation and that can make or break any art I reckon.

[Pranet]

Just read The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, a Sherlock Holmes story from the more mental end of the canon.

It includes the bizarre retelling of that time

Spoiler alert

Homes and Watson broke into a man's house and watched him get murdered from behind a curtain, then destroyed the evidence and refused to talk to the police.

[close]

I'm slowly reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels and I wasn't prepared for now nuts some of them are. Just read Valley of Fear, in which it seems he only added a bit of Sherlock Holmes framing to the book he wanted to write, a fairly crappy one about a crime family (freemasons possibly? I wasn't clear on that) taking over an American town. Presumably because he got more money when he wrote about Sherlock Holmes.

[Famous Mortimer]

Frankesntein and Dracula were two of the books I remember reading as a child, as a sort of double book (on a coach to Spain on an all-inclusive holiday, and I definitely remember Frankenstein being really good.

All I specifically remember is of it taking place on a ship in a remote sea, and finding that quite isolating and chilling.

I actually wish I could remember the edition or publisher of that paperback, but it was a strange tete beche double novel thing, with Frankenstein monster's face on the one cover and Count Dracula's face on the other cover.

I have a ton of Ace Doubles, which are also tete beches (I just learned that phrase thanks to your post), but it doesn't look like they ever printed either book.

[Mr Vegetables]

I'm slowly reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels and I wasn't prepared for now nuts some of them are. Just read Valley of Fear, in which it seems he only added a bit of Sherlock Holmes framing to the book he wanted to write, a fairly crappy one about a crime family (freemasons possibly? I wasn't clear on that) taking over an American town. Presumably because he got more money when he wrote about Sherlock Holmes.

The bit in Study in Scarlet where all of a sudden it becomes about some guy in the American West for a while really threw me when I first read it; from what I remember it really did seem like a completely different novella soldered onto Holmes

[bgmnts]

I have a ton of Ace Doubles, which are also tete beches (I just learned that phrase thanks to your post), but it doesn't look like they ever printed either book.

I actually got it wrong but fuck me I found them. It's a Puffin Classic 'flip-over', so I don't think it's a tete beche in the strict sense of two books bound together.




Never seen anything like it since, so I'm unsure if it's a unique piece of publishing or not.

[Pranet]

The bit in Study in Scarlet where all of a sudden it becomes about some guy in the American West for a while really threw me when I first read it; from what I remember it really did seem like a completely different novella soldered onto Holmes

Thinking about it, Holmes is barely in Baskerville. It's a swizz.

[Average Comedy Enjoyer]

Valley of Fear

Yes, if I'd seen that on ITV4 I'd have thought it was a non-contemporary work, like Jeeves and Wooster in America or Young James Bond.

[Inspector Norse]

On the other, it really does drag at times and I found certain chapters, whilst strong in symbolism, were just a bit dull to read.

Ah! I find this is a bit of a recurring theme with these classics.

I have over time come to the conclusion that a lot of the CLASSICS just aren't for me because the prose is, to modern eyes and ears, just rather turgid or meandering. The odd thing yes but generally I'm happier once the modernists emerged from the wreckage of WW1.
Someone mentioned Heart of Darkness and that's fine but have you ever tried reading Nostromo or one of his other longer ones? Fuck me the bloke was verbose. Never said anything in one sentence that he couldn't say in twenty overlong, unnecessarily detailed and increasingly tedious ones.

How old do we mean by "oldish"? I'm reading Lanark right now and that's over 40 years old (over 50 really, given that Gray had it written for ages before it was finally published). Rather enjoying it although not on a lifechanging level.

[buttgammon]

My favourite Conrad is The Secret Agent, which is pacy, fun and streaked with a real dark humour - much better than those long, boring ones.

[lankyguy95]

Pretty much exclusively reading old fiction.

Mainly devouring Tolstoy though. Read War and Peace and Anna Karenina for the first time last year and I'm currently re-reading the latter, as well as making my way through the feast of short stories and novellas of his that I haven't yet read.

Other than that, I'm planning on reading The Great Gatsby soon.

[Famous Mortimer]

The bit in Study in Scarlet where all of a sudden it becomes about some guy in the American West for a while really threw me when I first read it; from what I remember it really did seem like a completely different novella soldered onto Holmes

I think the Mormons were a relatively new thing when he wrote the book, and he clearly had a bee in his bonnet about something they did. Is it the Mormons? I think I'm remembering it right.

[Pink Gregory]

Are Titus Groan and Gormenghast considered children's books?

Some precocious bloody children eh.

Foolishly I got the trilogy ages ago, with Peake's sketches inserted throughout, in this massive combined hardback edition which has stalled me at the end of Titus Groan.  Still, effortlessly witty prose.