“To think I might have died without having read it”: 100 good and bad classics

a list

For whatever reason I’m seeing a lot of people in my Substack feed reading Middlemarch and War & Peace right now. This guy wrote a whole piece about the current Middlemarch wave, which includes Matt Yglasias’ piece;

Henry Oliver

is saying, of War & Peace, “to think I might have died without having read it.” Writing of the recent Odyssey discourse, Lincoln Michel, “More than just great, the classics are always far weirder, hornier, and funnier than their reputations.” I agree that classics are usually incredibly good, to a surprising degree, and that, in general, classics are, in most circles, actually underrated, because every generation thinks they’re living through a super unique time, because they don’t know the first thing about what human experience in the past was like, because they haven’t read the classics.¹

However, beware. Not all classics are good. Some are bad. For example, I just finished certified Classic The Red and the Black, for my goddamn book club where we always pick the worst books explore literature’s underappreciated gems, and I have to admit that some Classics are Bad, Actually. It would be a real shame if you got all enthusiastic about classics but then ran out and picked up, for example, Jude the Obscure, which is insanely boring, so below is my definitive list of Good and Bad Classics.

4 things:

• These are all original assessments; many if not most of these books I read between 18-23, as a cognitive science major with no interest in the kind of academic analysis

  Naomi Kanakia
  skewers here; I was looking for pleasure and good company.

• Relatedly, an asterisk (*) denotes a title that I suspect is unlikely to cause pleasure unless mixed with the levels of testosterone typically found in a male of that age.

• Sort of relatedly: the list is very male-heavy; this is partly because I’m a man, but also because, as far as I can tell, men used to write most of the good books; these days, women write most of the good books.

• I included, randomly, some ‘modern classics’, because they were in the lists of classics I was using to create my list. If this gets people to read them, I think it justifies the chaos.

So:

Good classics, i.e. classics you will actually enjoy reading (in order of best to worst, dropping off at a not-quite-exponential rate)

1. War & Peace

2. Infinite Jest

3. Anna Karenina

4. Middlemarch

5. To the Lighthouse

6. Crime and Punishment*

7. Madame Bovary

8. The Catcher in the Rye (+ all Salinger)

9. The Death of Ivan Ilych

10. The Sun Also Rises
    —
    tier above which “to think I might have died without having read it” applies
    —

11. Catch-22

12. Things Fall Apart

13. Of Human Bondage

14. The House of Mirth

15. Tropic of Cancer*

16. The Brothers Karamazov

17. Heart of Darkness

18. The Bell Jar

19. Lolita

20. Slaughterhouse 5 (+ all Vonnegut, to a considerably lesser extent)

    —
    tier above which, if you haven’t read any of these books, you probably don’t understand why fiction is the best art
    —

21. American Psycho

22. Trainspotting

23. Man’s Search for Meaning

24. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

25. On the Road*

26. Waiting for Godot

27. A Streetcar Named Desire

28. Long Day’s Journey Into Night

29. The Old Man and the Sea

30. Hunger

    —
    tier above which, if you have read these, you probably think you’re smarter than all therapists, because they’re trying to solve specific problems while you’re trying to solve “the” problem (life)
    —

31. The Metamorphosis

32. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

33. Blood and Guts in High School

34. Blood Meridian

35. The Secret History

36. Pale Fire

37. Notes from Underground

38. A Movable Feast / The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

39. Meditations

40. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

    —
    above this line are still some of the best books ever written; after this they start to get pretty optional, though they might still change your life even if you don’t enjoy reading
    —

41. The Stranger

42. The Lovely Bones

43. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*

44. Death of a Salesman

45. Walden

46. The Great Gatsby

47. Mrs Dalloway

48. Dubliners

49. Elie Wiesel’s Night

50. Fight Club*

51. The Handmaid’s Tale

52. Elementary Particles

53. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

54. Anne Frank’s Diary

55. Giovanni’s Room

56. Pride and Prejudice

57. The Sorrows of Young Werther

58. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

59. The Glass Menagerie

60. Siddhartha

    —
    below this line are still very good books, but I don’t think they will change anyone’s life and I only endorse reading if you “like to read”
    —

61. Vanity Fair

62. To Kill a Mockingbird

63. Nineteen Eighty-Four

64. Brave New World

65. Lady Chatterley's Lover

66. Steppenwolf

67. Denis Johnson’s Angels

68. A Room of One’s Own

69. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

70. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

71. Rabbit, Run

72. The Little Prince

73. Looking for Alaska

74. Tuesdays with Morrie

75. Ficciones

Bad classics (unordered)

1. The Red and the Black

2. The Master and Margarita

3. Ulysses

4. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

6. Great Expectations

7. Jude the Obscure

8. The Picture of Dorian Gray

9. Absalom, Absalom (+ all Faulkner)

10. Gulliver’s Travels

11. North and South

12. Robinson Crusoe

13. The Arabian Nights

14. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

15. Villette

16. Naked Lunch

17. A Farewell to Arms

18. Less Than Zero

19. 2001: A Space Odyssey (though the movie is an extremely Good Classic)

20. The New York Trilogy

21. The Adventures of Augie March (+ all Bellow)

22. Darkness at Noon

23. A Passage to India

24. The Corrections

25. Look Homeward, Angel

I’m leaving out some that fall in the middle, like The Idiot by Dostoevsky and A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and of course the ones I haven’t read, plus Shakespeare and Homer and Virgil, which I consider something else entirely.

How did I do? Sound off in the comments.

1. As I said elsewhere:

Imho the #1 most surprising thing about life, & it’s not close, is that when you read writers from 30, 70, 100, 200, 500, 2500 years ago, it’s exactly like talking to someone from the present. Just like every generation believes they invented blowjobs, we also think our quirked up times invented disaffection, being ironypilled, signaling, drama queens, gender fuckery, etc. Most people will go their whole lives thinking people from even 100 years ago were as 2-dimensional as a Soviet propaganda poster, or an actor playing a soldier from a war movie paid to squint at the horizon. All those people were as real as you.