The 10 Essential Penguin Classics, According to Penguin

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/fe...sics/index.html

In a new promotional ploy, Penguin has created their list of the "Top 10 Essential Penguin Classics." Most of it's pretty much what you would expect, and of course there are some glarring omissions here. I've read a measley 6 out of the ten, although I've been meaning to read those Austen and Steinbeck books.

10. Dante's Inferno
09. Thoreau's Walden
08. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
07. Kafka's Metamorphosis
06. Melville's Moby Dick
05. Shakespeare's Hamlet
04. Homer's The Odyssey
03. Austen's Pride and Prejudice
02. Bronte's Jane Eyre
01. Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

Penguin and other big publishers are obviously in the business of constantly re-packaging classics in the public domain, and this isn't a bad marketing idea, by any means.

Heck, I've only read 4-5 of them, myself.

i've not read Thoreau and my inability to get along with Austen is my own fault. There's also the Penguin "big ideas" series. And whatever you do, don't forget these


http://www.faber.co.uk/faberfinds/

wonderful!

I've read 7.

I've read them all, but with the possible exception of Oedipus Rex, not in Penguin editions (tho I do have the Fagles I/O on the shelf of good intentions ...

) but the Penguins that I've read not on the list but should be, certainly above Bronte & Steinbeck, include:
Rabelais, Gargantua & Pantagruel
Dickens, Bleak House
Eliot, Middlemarch
Gaddis, The Recognitions

the whole comedy is somewhere in my house, unread. the rest of it i've read (Mice and Men?)

most of those read were not in Penguin eds, and where was Chaucer, and better still where was Boccaccio. I did love (when shopping around for Chaucer in the best most affrdable edition i could find since school) reading an amazon reviewer declare with absolute confidence, such being the privileged majesty - though not sole preserve - of youth, i suppose, that unless you intend to specialize there was no need to read him in the original, as i was blessed to for o level. I bought norton, and the same editions for his dream visions

Steinbeck is thin reportage, for me. And Midddlemarch certainly over Bronte and Steinbeck, but it's one of those how long is a piece of string things again

Let me pull out my dick: I've read them all.

If the editions are nice, I might buy them again. I'm a book-whore.

i thought they meant the whole thing, but the Inferno alone? pah! Purgatorio is magnificent, i love it dearly and most of all of the three

i thought they meant the whole thing, but the Inferno alone? pah! Purgatorio is magnificent, i love it dearly and most of all of the three

The Inferno is just pushed more than the rest of work, which is quite a shame (not that The Inferno isn't fantastic, but the thing as a whole is just jaw-dropping). In my experience, it's actually difficult to find the whole Comedy at bookstores.

Read them all. Bronte, Thoreau, and especially Steinbeck do not belong on such a list.

i thought they meant the whole thing, but the Inferno alone? pah! Purgatorio is magnificent, i love it dearly and most of all of the three

The Inferno is just pushed more than the rest of work, which is quite a shame (not that The Inferno isn't fantastic, but the thing as a whole is just jaw-dropping). In my experience, it's actually difficult to find the whole Comedy at bookstores.

it's cheating, to choose from amongst on such a list of "essentials" I think i have at least three translations and i've been looking again at more secondary literature, for later on. The Hollander remains my favourite, but johhny - in particular and since you havent, you should read Dante xxxxx

i thought they meant the whole thing, but the Inferno alone? pah! Purgatorio is magnificent, i love it dearly and most of all of the three

The Inferno is just pushed more than the rest of work, which is quite a shame (not that The Inferno isn't fantastic, but the thing as a whole is just jaw-dropping). In my experience, it's actually difficult to find the whole Comedy at bookstores.

Penguin publishes the entire comedy in The Portable Dante, an edition that I've seen many times at book stores.

Another glaring omissions... Joyce! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man should make this list for how it radically changed prose fiction in the 20th century (Ulysses is his best book but it's curiously absent from Penguin).

Also, Don Quixote for sure.

haha, my unread ass has read 9/10.

but then, they were required reading for high school, so it's probably less of an accomplishment.
i can certainly say that some of them, had they NOT been required, never would have been read.

hhahahahaha

QUOTE (Cave Hinds @ Nov 2 2009, 11:03 PM)
Let me pull out my dick: I've read them all.

me too

ahem
well of course
I mean I've read them all
not that I am pulling out my dick
now let me see
what is the female equivalent of
pulling out my dick . . .

i thought we did that every day anyway *wink/grin* xxxxx

perhaps the only place where adiscussion of some of the most important pieces of western civilizaation literature (midatlantic) turns into dicks and clits as long as dick perhaps with balls attached...I don't know if this is a how dare you or a ringing endorsement...i do know I'm loving the breeze on my cock right about now

Sharon (& all) which translation of Dante's Divine Comedy is the best, your favortie, etc.? I mean I was just going to read it in Italian, but, you know, I wouldn't understand a word so that might hinder my enjoyment.

i love the Robert and Jean Hollander best, granted Jean is a poet, but if anything that was likely to make me the more wary and critical. I shall go back to Musa, Mandelbaum, Durling?and i've never read Pinsky, but i love the Hollanders' rendering of Dante's visual, psychological structures.theyre staggering in their generosities and distilled in such a music and it made me weep, but to be clear this is my favourite, i'm not arguing the merits of a versus b, nor will i xxxxx