Writer Italo Calvino had fourteen answers to what makes a book a classic. These are my favourites:
- The classics are books that exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual's ... unconscious.
- A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
- Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
- A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe...
- 'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
What are some of your classics? (Regular readers will already know many of mine!]
[Hat tip Alberto Mingardi writing about one of his (and my) classics, Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress]
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13 comments:
The Lagoon Joseph Conrad
The Forgotten Soldier - Guy Sager.
3:16
Robinson Crusoe-Daniel Defoe.
So not Barry Crump, A good keen man, then
Darkness At Noon - Koestler
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemmingway
Huckleberry Finn - Twain
Only read three of his so far, and enjoyed them all. I might try this one next.
Didn't know this one. I'll take a look.
A great list! They're all on mine, too.
Once read, always remembered.
More talked about than read, I fear.
Lolita - Nabokov
Light Years - Salter
Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
The Remains of the Day - Ishiguro
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
The Magic Mountain - Mann
Brideshead and Gatsby are good reading. Just trying Salter's 'All That Is,' which seems promising. But I never got the appeal of Nabokov, particularly that one. Can you explain it?
"Sailing Alone Around The World" Joshua Slocum
"Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman? " Richard Feynman
"The Fountainhead" Ayn Rand
"Islands In The Stream" Ernest Hemingway.
"The Short Stories Of Saki" HH Munro
"On The Road" Jack Keroauc
The majority of Christopher Hitchens' later works
...and there's more.
Chris Robertson.
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