books/authors you should have read but havent got round to?

[babypinkcandygirl]

david copperfield-charles dickens
anything by norman mailer
hamlet-william shakespeare
to the lighthouse-virginia woolf
the illiad/the odyssey-homer

oh and i really need to start reading more russian lit!

[Dori]

oh and i really need to start reading more russian lit!

Yes, you should! You would do yourself a major disservice to skip over Russian lit. There are too many great writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, and several others. I recommend you start out with some shorter books and then move on to the long ones. The following would be good for starters:

Fyodor Dostoevsky ~ White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Notes from Underground, Poor Folk, The Double
Leo Tolstoy ~ The Death of Ivan Ilych
Anton Chekhov ~ Selected Stories (any of his short stories)
Ivan Turgenev ~ Fathers and Sons

Then you could move onto the longer works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and expand your reading to encompass Gogol, Pushkin, Pasternak, and M. Gorky. You'd pretty much be good with that, but there are many other authors which you could try. A good place to start would be with the BOTM (Book-of-the-Month), The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Forgive me if I've gone too far off topic.

A few of the authors I haven't yet read include Homer, Hemingway, and Charles Dickens. There are many more, though.

[babypinkcandygirl]

thats really great, thank you so much i kinda have to read fathers and sons for uni but ive been wanting to read around the book too as my knowledge of russian lit is sorely lacking! but youve given me lots of ideas to start with

[Scott]

I have been very eager to get anything by Voltairine de Cleyre. I'm not recommending her to you though, because she is a non-fiction anarchist writer--which probably won't interest most of you.

[awelker]

Umm i really haven't read a lot of classics. I have tried but there is just something about them that i can't get into. Do any of you have any recomendations where to start?

[babypinkcandygirl]

id probably use what you are already into as a starting off point (lol which probably rules out sci fi etc) then it would be easier to recommend something

[Dori]

Umm i really haven't read a lot of classics. I have tried but there is just something about them that i can't get into. Do any of you have any recomendations where to start?

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev would be a great place to start. It's about 200 pages long and is very easy to get into. Also, you could try Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck. This is only 107 pages long. Or you can start with some short stories. There are several great American short stories to choose from. There's a book from B&N called Great American Short Stories: from Hawthorne to Hemingway. Read that and you'll be well on your way (as far as American literature goes).

[Sine_Ni_Ceallach]

Dang, I have a list of books a mile long that I've purchased and been meaning to get to. Here's a sampling:

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Latin for Dummies by Clifford A. Hull, Steven R. Perkins, and Tracy Barr
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
etc., etc.

[Linkhorn]

Most of the books on my reading list that I keep putting off are the bestsellers, or books of popular films, that I keep bumping down the read list in favour of something that sounds more interesting.

At present I have 4 Harry Potters to go, Life of Pi, The Road, most of Philip Pullman's work, Game of Thrones, Hunger Games, stuff like that.

Most of these kinds of books are on my "should" list simply so I can join conversations about books other people are talking about, which probably means they shouldn't be.

[Dream Catcher]

S.J.Bolton, John. Green, Stephan King

[SheldrakeWriter]

Oh heavens the list is endless. I have two degrees in English Literature and I haven't read more than one or two novels by Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Henry James, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. You name the greats of Western literature and I can probably barely cobble together a few remarks. Ask me about Shakespeare though, and you'll have me chatting for days...

-- January 25th, 2014, 9:57 pm --

Oh heavens the list is endless. I have two degrees in English Literature and I haven't read more than one or two novels by Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Henry James, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. You name the greats of Western literature and I can probably barely cobble together a few remarks. Ask me about Shakespeare though, and you'll have me chatting for days...

[SidnayC]

I really need to read the Hunger Games series like yesterday. And I also want to read the fault in our stars. But both books just seem so sad and depressing, so I'm nervous.

[WinterCandyMints]

Anything popular. I always seem to put those off until a lot later. I just now read The Hunger Games series this year.

[Chrystal]

I have a number of books on my to-read list that I have yet to read, because something or some other read got in the way of doing so. Here's just 3: The Woman He Loved Before - by Dorothy Koomson, Gathering of Waters - by Bernice McFadden, and You Should Have Known - by Jean Hanff Korelitz

[Kmikel0509]

Libba Bray and Kendare Blake