Just watched E3 Saxo.

so did I High Guise - really hope it's not another season of MVDP thrashing WvA but looks ominous

VF for the win! AK … bleak

I've been meaning to read VF for a long time. But it's more likely that I'll reread AK first. (I think I read the Garnett or Maude translation decades ago, but am thinking of the recent Rosamund Bartlett translation for the reread.)

Minkie - Vanity Fair it is, then.

Another vote for VF.

TCoMC is fantastically readable so anything next will be a comedown.

This is why a certain sort of person would not consider TCoMC to be a classic

Bleak or not there is something about the cumulative effect of descriptive prose that is unmatchable in modern experience. Immersive, I’m very anti identity politics but you can’t beat Hardy for his descriptions of the landscape he walked as a child. Tolstoy. Dickens. George Eliot. Go for it. 

Wang - I take your point.  I have heard before that TCofMC will never be described as a classic.  I am now moving on to Vanity Fair.  Long reading hours ahead.

you can’t beat Hardy for his descriptions of the landscape he walked as a child

I have decided I am anti-Hardy after having reread Jude the Obscure a few years ago. (First read it in high school and don't remember much.) I found it absolutely abominable on my reread.

You don't like Jude because you see yourself. 

Is there a list of the "Classics" that is considered definitive? If not, what list are you going off?

With Dickens and Hardy there's sentimental slush fawning over young girls and this dark abusive side fawning over young girls. Passionate Victorian men. Controlling women. Corrupted. You get to read their minds. 

You don't like Jude because you see yourself. 

They did turn me down for a Rhodes scholarship and I'm still a bit bitter about it, so you may have a point.
 

Oooh love the classics, enjoy VF x

I'm waiting for Clubbers to opine on the lack of Thucydides on the list...

Oxford Brookes wasn't interested. I ended up at College of Law.

assumed this was about cycling 

There’s a lotion for that Cam

Those aren't the classics.

Where did you go to university? 

Ah. The canon. Marvelous isn’t it? Black spines. Cartharsis. Timeless stuff.

Wood Becky Sharp too, obvs. The little minx. 

Orange spines for the English fiction,  black for the Russians mostly, green for the others,. Increasingly collectible too. 

Alex Kingston gets them out iirc 

That’s Defoe. A much lesser work.

But in stereo 

I am also a fan of Jean-Paul  Sartres and the fabulous Simone de Beauvoir.  But, that's just me.

Ffs, Laz, this is not about cycling. It is clearly a horse racing thread…..

Buckaroo - Edinburgh.

Hun bun - I can't wait to start VF.  I really think I am going to love it x

I loved TCoMC (my first RoF name was inspired by it!). Also a big fan of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, To Kill A Mockingbird, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are just too bleak and slow for me.

Gorlami - I think I have read To Kill A Mocking Bird about 3 times.  I adore it.

Bertha - I read Tess and loved it.  I know some people describe Hardy's work as depressing and grim.  I don't agree.  I liked it.

Vanity Fair is a great read. Anna Karenina is bleak but sweeps you in. If you're going in for the Russians I prefer W&P, Dr Zhivago, and Quiet Flows the Don. Honestly it's getting too warm for them though, they are winter books imo. 

Can't be bothered with Hardy, don't find it enjoyable. 

Snowfoxberry - thank you.  War & Peace is on my list.  I know it will be hard-going but, I will do it lying on my chair in the back garden.

I may not say the same thing in October.  But, I do love the Russian writers.

Anyone who disses Hardy is a wrong’un.

On the Ruskis - Crime and Punishment is the correct answer, but Anna Karenina and the Bros K run it close. W&P needs the sort of discretionary time most of us don’t have. 

Crime and Punishment is a different type of book, it's good but it's less of a novel. It feels like hard work that is rewarding, rather than a story you can get lost in. Ditto the Brothers K. 

Tess is by any rating a great novel. I left 2 copies of VF in the charity shop today.

If you've finished War and Peace and are at a loose end try Hardy's The Dynasts. An Epic drama of the war with Napoleon In Three Parts, Nineteen Acts and Thirty Scenes. It couldn't really be staged. The detailed stage directions set the scene like a novel. More of a screenplay but then you'd lose the writing. The reader is given a bird's eye view. Would need CGI. 

I’m now collecting Viragos. Fyi 

C'est quoi?

Presumably, our Pheebs has a penchant for The Catcher in the Rye.