What literature classics are a must read before you die?

This is an unanswerable question.

Read until you die.
 
Crime and Punishment by Dosteyevsky
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
 
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

Not a great book per se, but a read to expand thinking a bit (and it's short too)
 
Ren the devils trailboss said:
Johnny got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo
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I re-read that a few weeks ago. It's an amazingly powerful, depressing as all holy hell book. I'd like to see the movie, but none of the rental places around here have even heard of it.
 
Good stuff all

I can't believe nobodies mentioned it yet, kind of a pereneniel favorite for this kind of list.

Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence
Great book, with some good stuff to say about thought and other great books and schools of thought.
Used as a text for some lower level philosophy classes, as fodder for tearing apart in the same level for profs with different veiws of the author. I like the heck out of it, good introduction to indepth philosophical reading and analysys of thought. Does it in a friendly way, understandably to someone who isn't used to it.

Jon
 
Franz Kafka "Das Proces"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Die Leiden des jungen Werther"
Christiane F "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo "
 
Try Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. One of my all time favorites, and no I'm not a chick-lit reader. It does focus on a young woman, but the main characters are well fleshed out and the story has some interesting twists.
Oh and Ren..., I think we may be located in the exact same place!:p
 
The Vedas
Genji monogatari
The Wei chronicles and ancient Chinese histories from the Han on back.
Feymnan's lectures on physics
Gravitation by Wheeler, Misner & Thorne et. al.
(started most but get blown out of the water at some point by the poetic allusions and references of the former or the math of the latter)
 
Sally, Dick, and Jane with Spot the dog from 1st grade literature teachings. Meant alot then and could quite possibly be a very good read right now. "See Spot run." author unknown.
 
While not a "classic", Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is one that everybody should read, real thought provoker and powerful concepts.
 
The Holy Bible.


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Keep your nose in the wind,your eyes on the skyline.
 
I started reading James Joyce's Ulysses while in college in the mid '70's. I finished it last year. if you want to spend 30 years trying to wade through a ponderous unreadable tome, I recommend it highly.
 
(Edited to add) FYI, most of the books listed can be bought second hand at Goodwill for next to nothing. I have bought a small mountain of paperbacks of 'the classics' for 4 for $1 that all the high school/college kids give away after reading them.

All the conventional stuff has been covered pretty well, but I didn't see these:

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
Walden - Henry David Thoreau



Here are a couple that aren't literaturary classics but are very good reads:

Ender's Game- Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (not a serious book, but one of my favorites)
Essays - Michel de Montaigne
The Universe in a Nustshell - Stephen Hawking
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes - Stephen Hawking
 
yuzuha said:
Feymnan's lectures on physics
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I STRONGLY recommend these also. I have a bunch of his lectures in audiobooks and although they can be though to follow at times they are great.
 
Wow, some great choices by everyone. A lot of books that I love. Here are 10 of my favorites (not my 10 favorites):

Somerset Maugham- Of Human Bondage
Ernest Hemmingway- The Sun Also Rises
Ernesto Sabato-The Tunnel
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- The First Circle
Jack Kerouc- On the Road
Ken Kesey- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
Jerzy Kosinski- The Devil Tree
John Dos Passos- USA
Haruki Murakami- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
 
Poe
Ayn Rand
Tao te ching
Robert Frost
John Stuat Mill - Utilitarianism
locke - Second tretise of government
Odessey
 
Shelby Foote's US Civil War trilogy:

The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. I Fort Sumpter to Perryville
The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. II Fredericksburg to Meridian
The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. III Red River to Appomattox

A long read, best savored at one's leisure without regard to time limit.
 
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