Let the Classics Discussion Begin

With our February book scheduled to be a classic, we need to get some discussion going over which one to read. Abby has suggested using page count as a filter--which given time constraints--is a good one. So far, here are the classics on our list. I've pulled descriptions and page counts from Amazon

Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather 138 pages:

The novel is based on the lives of Bishop Jean Baptiste L'Amy and his vicar Father Joseph Machebeut and is considered emblematic of the author's moral and spiritual concerns. Death Comes for the Archbishop traces the friendship and adventures of Bishop Jean Latour and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. Latour is patrician, intellectual, introverted; Vaillant, practical, outgoing, sanguine. Friends since their childhood in France, the clerics triumph over corrupt Spanish priests, natural adversity, and the indifference of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and build a cathedral in the wilderness. The novel, essentially a study of character, explores Latour's inner conflicts and his relationship with the land, which through the author's powerful description becomes an imposing character in its own right.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, 366 pages:
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Love in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford, 249 pages:
In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, the story of coldly beautiful Polly Hampton and her aristocratic parents is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of the language.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 320 pages:
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons, 256 pages:
A hilarious parody of D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy’s earthy, melodramatic novels, the deliriously entertaining Cold Comfort Farm is "very probably the funniest book ever written" (The Sunday Times). (book was written in the 1930s)

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 272 pages:
Since its first publication in 1890, Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. After having his portrait painted, Dorian Gray is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary friend, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wished to stay young forever and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses, he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Howard to the opium dens of the East End.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 102 pages
A classic (newer than what we may be thinking, but classic nonetheless). A woman abandons her husband and children to search for love and self understanding.

A Day in the Life of Ivan D,by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Eric Bogosian, 208 pages
Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 1962.

War & Peace, 1296 pages
Anna Karanenina, 846 pages
The Brothers Karamazov, 1072 pages

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey, 736 pages
The Stamper family are loggers, rough, hard men and women who care for no ones opinion but their own. They are fighting the union, the neighbours, the town, their whole world. Their motto of "never give an inch" was the title of the film of the book. Into the strike-breaking start of the book comes the dope-smoking, college educated half brother, the prodigal son. His arrival triggers a tidal wave of events that spiral gradually out of control until everything that has been permanent before is now threatened.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, 80 pages
Although never having seen battle Stephen Crane vividly depicts the grueling intensity of the American Civil War. The story revolves around Henry Fleming, a member of the 304th regiment of the Union Army. At the start of the novel Henry is eager to show his patriotism in battle but when faced with the savagery of death he flees the frontline. Throughout the novel Henry struggles with his courage in the face of the horror of war. "The Red Badge of Courage" is a classic modern depiction of the psychological turmoil of war from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, 464 pages

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 400 pages

Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 186 pages

The Prince by Nicole Machiavelli,108 pages
About about a trestise giving the absolute ruler practical advice on ways to maintain a strong central government.