CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

OK, with all the classics and bestsellers bashing on this site, I want to offer the other side of the opinion. What classics and bestsellers did you like?
I for example, love anything by Mark Twain and Charles DIckens.

I agree with Twain and Dickens.My favorite Twain books are:
*A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
*The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
*The Innocents Abroad

Favorite Dickens' books:
*A Tale Of Two Cities
*The Mystery Of Edwin Drood
*Our Mutual Friend
*Hard Times

I also love the short stories of O.Henry because they always end in some sort of irony.
Favorites:
*The Ransom Of Red Chief
*The Gifts Of The Magi

I ADORE Hamlet with every literary fiber of my being. It's easily my favorite Shakespeare play. I really enjoyed Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth as well. Generally, I tend to like a lot of Shakespeare.

Other classics that I've enjoyed:
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- 1984
- The Great Gatsby
- The Stranger
- The Picture of Dorian Grey

:3 I can't think of any best sellers that I've read lately. My literary tastes are well rooted in the past, it would seem.

Here's a few:
'The Jungle' by Upton Sinclair.
'Contact' by Carl Sagan (the movie is a gross corruption of the book, do not see it).
'The Songs of the Kings' by Barry Unsworth
'Reading Lolita in Tehran' by A. Nafisi.

Hiawath by Longfellow

Beowulf

La Morte D'Arthur by Malory

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

The Scarlet Pimpernil - Baroness Orkzsy (sp?)

1001 Arabian Nights
Frankenstein
War of the Worlds
The Time Machine
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Robinson Crusoe

The Iliad
The Odyssey(both by Homer)
The Frogs by Aristophanes
The Apology by Plato

Farenhight 451 - It was pretty good.
The Complete Works Of Josephus - This one is a very difficult read.
Swiss Family Robinson - Inspires imagination.

1984 - Honestly, I'd like to read more classic literature because my experience is very small.... but this is one of the scariest books I've read. Just because it seems like such a powerful system.

The Count of Monte Cristo (sp?)- I watched and loved the movie adaption of the book when it came out, and decided to read the book. It took me quite a while to get into the book, but after about the first hundred pages I was absolutely hooked. The story went so much further than the book.

Let's see, where to begin...

The Enchiridion - Saint Augustine
Beowulf
The Inferno - Dante
The Bondage of the Will (and other works) - Martin Luther
Institutes of the Christian Religion - John Calvin
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Or at least all of them I have read, seen, or heard)
Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
The Works of Jane Austen (Or at least what I have read)
The Works of Charles Dickens (ibid)
The Works of Jules Verne (ibid)
The Works of Mark Twain (ibid)
The War of the World and The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
The Cost of Discipleship - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer
Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury
The Once and Future King - T. H. White
1984 and Animal Farm - George Orwell
A Canticle for Liebowitz - Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov (Alright, not read in school usually, but certainly a best seller and won the Hugo Award for best Sci-Fi series of all time)
Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein (The first is on the Army and Marine Corps reading lists and required reading at some military academies, and the second helped popularize the phrase TANSTAAFL, has won a number of awards, and is quite well regarded)

I'm just going to stop there...I plead insanity and a huge desire to read.

Frankenstein is probably my favorite classic novel of all time.

Other favorite classics:
-The Picture of Dorian Gray
-Jane Eyre
-Dracula
-Aesop's Fables
-The Three Musketeers
-The Count of Monte Cristo
-Les Miserables

Favorite bestsellers:
-Shogun
-the Dragonlance Chronicles, Legends trilogies
-The Dresden Files
-Thieves of Heaven
-The Historian
-Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel
-The Redwall series

In no particular order:

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Promethus (Mary Shelly)

The Odyssey (Homer; funny, because I hated the Iliad)

The Orestia (Aeschylus)

Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus)

Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus)

Inferno (Dante Aligheri; reading through Purgatorio right now)

Vita Nouva (Dante Aligheri)

Phaedo (Plato)

Symposium (Plato; well,... maybe "enjoy" isn't the right word)

Dracula (Bram Stoker)

The Interesting Account of Oladah Equiano, as Told by Himself

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)

The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis)

The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis)

Beowulf

Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)

Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)

Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan)

The Celestial Railroad (Nathaniel Hawthorne; not sure if it counts but it needed to come after Bunyan)

Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Fear and Trembling (Soren Kierkegaard)

Kierkegaard? He's pretty deep, isn't he? (I've never actually read him)

It should be noted that I didn't finish Fear and Trembling. What I read, no, I did not understand in the least. It was still awe-inspiringly beautiful.

And Homer, Plato, Dante, Lewis, and the epistles of St. Paul are all pretty deep, too.

I don't know what is or isn't a best seller, but I have read quite a few classics.

The Hobbit is my favorite book ever, I love it so much.

The Count of Monte Cristo is my second favorite book ever. I love it a lot.

The Clockwork Orange is in my top five. Fantastic book.

The Lord of the Rings is a great book.

Frankestein was good, but very wordy. I do like how the monster was actually intelligent, unlike the movies. It gave a much better experience than WHOA TH3RE IS UH MUNSTER IN HERRRR OH NOES LOL.

The Oddyssey is pretty good, if not repetitive.

Beowulf, in terms of epic poetry, I liked this 10x more than the Oddyssey. Awesome.

Animal Farm was good, I always loved Soviet Russia.

1984 is a great book, one of the best dystopia novels.

The Man in the High Castle is a great book as well. I love the setting.

Catch 22 was also good, although sometimes confusing. It is a very funny book, and I found myself laughing out loud during class while reading it, which was akward.

Farenheight 451 was good.

A Clorkwork Orange I am currently reading for my senior term paper. It's really good although I will say Burgess' usage of a "new vocabulary" can get quite annoying.

More of an "invented slang". I think Nadsat is derived from Russian.

I actually enjoyed it. You start to know exactly what everything means after a short while.

Mr. SmartyPants wrote:A Clorkwork Orange I am currently reading for my senior term paper. It's really good although I will say Burgess' usage of a "new vocabulary" can get quite annoying.

Try to get a version with a Helpful Glossary of Terms (TM), or you can use the Internet.

I had a fun time with it myself. It gets pretty horrorshow, my droogs.

I would love to read the book, but I will never ever watch the movie again.

Animal Farm, 1984, Paradise Lost, Trouble with Lichen, Day of the Triffids,

The Count of Monte Christo - Alexander Dumas
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The Chosen - Chiam Potok
The Scarlett Letter -
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Giver - Lois Lowry (I'm not sure if this is a "classic" but it's a great book)

The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Mansfield Park
Persuasion
Alice in Wonderland
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Much Ado About Nothing
The Hunchback of Notredame
Pilgrims Progress
Lorna Doone (not sure if its a classic)
The Tale of Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde.
Frankenstein
I forget the rest...

M'lords!!!! I love you all!!!

Many legendary books have been mentioned. I give you all a bow in respect...*bows, then sinks to a grovel*

Kierkegaard is one of my favorite philosophers ever. Awe-inspiring beauty really is the only way to describe it, and I have to concede, like earlier mentioned, I didn't understand a lot of it. Sickness unto Death took my breath away.

Dostoevsky is one of my favorites also. (You'll notice a christian existentialist pattern here...heh). The Brothers Karamazov is a highly recommended read for everyone. One of my favorite classics.

I'm also a big fan of James Joyce. Especially "A portrait of the Artist As a young Man". One of my favorite books. (Though you won't see me going anywhere near contemporaries of Joyce like Faulkner after 'As I lay Dying'...blech)

And finally, I fell in love with Pearl S. Buck and her "The Good Earth".

I am finding that the older I get the more I perfer short stories and comic books to full length novels.

I read too much. stop encouraging me by reccomending good books. *bans self from book corner*

I enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Apparently few people else did.

Sherlock Holmes series - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Ben Hur - Lew Wallace
Joan of Arc: Personal Recollections - Mark Twain
Tarzan series - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
Pilgrim's Regress - CS Lewis
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
'Farmer Giles of Ham' and 'the Smith of Wootton Manor' short stories - JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Black Stallion series - Walter Farley
Lad: a Dog - Albert Payson Terhune
Lassie Come Home - Eric Knight
Little House on the Prairie series - Laura Ingles Wilder

I can't think of any real recent best sellers that I've read, off the top of my head, let alone liked, so I'll leave it there for now.

My fourth grade teacher used to read a chapter of the Little House on the Prarie series to us everyday. We made it through the whole series!

I finished the Divina Commedia... thrice, now.

I must say, it is a sin to only read the Inferno.

Further readings:

Aeneid; Virgil

Laelius: On Friendship; Cicero

The First and Second Apologies; St. Justin Martyr

Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching; St. Irenaeus*

*Irenaeus is like gold right now. It's required reading in my Church Fathers class, but has been out of print for several years. I'm one of the few who has a copy. XD