Carl Honore: In Praise of slowness

Great Classic Literature that everyone should read

Today is my favorite kind of day... pouring rain and howling wind and a Sunday! Perfect for reading a good book under the covers! And on days like this I always find the classic novels to be the best, something about the time periods and the  formality of them just transports me far away and the dustier the book, the better. So for those of you who have never tried an old book and for those who have tried them all and are running out of ideas, I've put together a list of my favorite classic novels in no particular order for you to enjoy:

Emily Gaskell - Mary Barton, North and South, Cranford, Wives and Daughters
Jane Austen - Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey
Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend
Miguel De Cervantes - Don Quixote
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels

Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
Laurence Sterne - Tristam Shandy

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Anne Bronte - Agnes Grey
William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
Gustave Flaubert - Madam Bovary
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karinina, War and Peace
Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn
Lewis Caroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time

James Joyce - Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask
Oscar Wilde - The Portrait of Dorian Grey, The Importance of Being Earnest (a play but still a good read)
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea
Virginia Wolfe - Mrs. Dalloway
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit
Kenneth Graham - The Wind In The Willows
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
George Orwell - 1984
E.B White - Charlotte's Web
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda
Salman Rushdie - Haroun and the Sea of Stories (modern but it's wonderful!)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
William Golding - Lord of the Flies