2.6 From Dickens to Woolf: What is a Classic?
Happy December! Welcome back to The Community Library, and to a whole new theme for this month! December’s theme is Classics, and we’re kicking it off with an episode that asks: what is a classic? I talk about Homer, Austen, Shelley, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Lee, and many, many more. I hope you enjoy this quick discussion episode!
Listen to the episode here
Download a full transcription of the episode here
Currently reading
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan
Emma by Jane Austen
Lists of must-read classics
Penguin UK: 100 must-read classic books, as chosen by our readers
BookBub: The best classic novels of all time, according to BookBub readers
The Guardian: The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list
Goodreads: Popular classic novels bookshelf
Lists of future classics
Barnes and Noble: Future classics: 50 literary greats
Bustle: 12 modern books that will become classics, according to people on Reddit
Why To Read: 10 modern books which will become the classics of the future
BookRiot: 100 must-read modern classics
Future classics I mentioned
The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Atonement Ian McEwan
Haruki Murakami
Zadie Smith
My "flexible list" of classics
The Greco-Roman era
The Iliad by Homer, 1260 – 1180 BCE
The Odyssey by Homer, 1260 – 1180 BCE
19th Century
1810s, 1820s
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1823
1840s, 1850s
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, 1847
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1851
1860s, 1870s
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 1861
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, 1862
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, 1865
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, 1868
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1869
Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1872
1890s
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, 1890
Dracula by Bram Stoker, 1897
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 1899
20th Century
1900s
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, 1904
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, 1908
1920s
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927
1930s, 1940s
The Grapes of Wrath by George Steinbeck, 1939
Animal Farm by George Orwell, 1945
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943
1950s
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, 1951
Lord of the Flies by William Golding, 1954
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, 1950
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White, 1952
1960s
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1960
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, 1962
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1961
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, 1967
When I say "classic novel", what's the first one that comes to mind? – Your votes
To keep the list short, I've excluded all titles that only received one or two votes.