Recommend some books to me

[womzilla]

Assume that I have read no novel published in the 19th century, in any language--I'm embarrassed by the degree this is almost completely true. (I will probably list the few I have read in a comment to this post.)

What are the first 20 or 30 novels I should read to close this chasm of ignorance? And where should I look for other recommendations? I've found a couple of "great novels of the 19th century" lists, but not many.

Oh, it probably doesn't make sense to recommend more than two novels by the same author. And for these purposes, "novel" can include "single, outstanding collection of short fiction and/or drama".

Edited to add: Lots of great stuff recommended so far, though unsurprisingly heavy on English-language works, though French and Russian have shown up. I'm haven't seen any recommendations for anything originally in Italian, German, or Spanish--is there really no one noteworthy in German literature between Goethe and Mann? Or Spanish between Cervantes and Borges?

Comments

Recommendations

[(Anonymous)]

As one who still jokes about giving gifts of the latest entry in the *Headbanging Tunes Recorded after 1974 with Lyrics by Roy Thomas Derived from Mimetic Novels* series, I find this post rather amusing, but here goes:

1) Anthony Trollope, *The Way We Live Now* -- one of his best mostly standalone books (Trollope is the British Balzac, in a lot of ways, even if his roman-fleuve is mainly confinedto the Barsetshire and Parliamentary novels), as Trollope surveys the good, the bad and the ugly;

2) Charles Dickens, *Little Dorrit* -- If only for the Circumlocution Office and "How Not to Do It," but also for Dickens's own take on the fabulous financier Merdle (more credible in *The Way We Live Now's" Melmotte, but still well-done);

3) George Eliot, *Middlemarch* -- One of those rare novels which is actually as good as people say and even a little better. I read it because of a convict's admission that she rationed herself to two chapters a day so it'd last a while (it has 86 chapters in all) in P.D. James's *Innocent Blood,* and I had to agree with her daughter who said she couldn't have done it, because it's a marvelous novel;

4) George Gissing -- My favorite first-rate second-rate Victorian author, so it's very hard to keep it down to two, but I'd suggest *The Nether World* for his look at the working-class suffering for Mad Jack's Dream and *New Grub Street* for its lower-middle class intellectual squalor (George Orwell wrote a very fine essay on Gissing in which he remarks that it was hard -- circa 1948 -- to find his books, and that he hadn't read *Born in Exile,* which he'd heard was his masterpiece. Oh, no, close parenthesis before mentioning *The Odd Women,* *The Whirlpool* and...);

5) Emile Zola, *Germinal* -- A great novel about a mining strike;

6) Ivan Turgenev, *Fathers and Sons* -- Because it gave us the first fictional nihilist;

7) Stendhal, *The Red and the Black* -- For Julien Sorel's progress in the uneasy Restoration (1814-30). Close runner-up: *The Charterhouse of Parma,* for its account of the Battle of Waterloo;

8) Gustave Flaubert, *Sentimental Education* -- Surveying the later years of the July Monarchy (1830-48) and the fall of the Second Republic (1848-51). Possibly his masterpiece, even if the first book to come to mind for him will always be *Madame Bovary* (which Flaubert tended to regard in later life as Conan Doyle viewed Sherlock Holmes);

9) Honore de Balzac, the books featuring Vautrin, *Old Goriot,* *Lost Illusions* and *A Harlot High and Low* (okay, that's three, and his major role is in the third. But Vautrin is best appreciated if you understand what he hopes to do for Eugene de Rastignac in the first book and what he does do for Lucien de Rubempre in the second and third);

10) Herman Melville, *White-Jacket* -- Hard as it is to believe, Melville was once a very popular author, in the days before *Moby-Dick* and *Pierre* relegated him to the fringes of literature. This book, subtitled *The World in a Man-of-War,* is fresh and fun and contains a brilliant set piece involving the Neversink's physician, Mr. Surgeon Cuticle; and

11) William Makepeace Thackeray, *Vanity Fair* -- For the scintillating Sharp (Becky, naturally) whose mother was a Montmorency, and also because I think its subtitle is wrong, and that William Dobbin is as heroic a character as a reader could wish (speaking tomeavesishly, of course).

Happy reading!

Re: Recommendations

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Is Germinal the novel with the horse that spent its entire life down the mine? If so, it features heavily in Tom Wolfe's essay "People Should Write More Novels Like the Ones I Enjoy" from the late 1980s (oh, wait, that wasn't the actual title).

Re: Recommendations

[(Anonymous)]

"A novel may be good, though Tom Wolfe may praise it." -- The Black Panther to Monica Lynne, *Avengers* #74.

Oh, sorry, that was "a cause may be right, though a leader or two may be wrong."

Seriously...I'm sure it is, but I don't remember the horse at all. (I read *Germinal* a long time ago.) I do remember a rabbit named Poland (John Kerry wouldn't have, right, Turdblossom? No, Mr. President), though.

My memories of *Nana* are much sharper, despite my annoyance that the titular heroine is able to cause so much damage in such a short period of time (Zola began plotting out his sequence before the Second Empire fell, and didn't realize how little time it had). If you don't want to give Tom Wolfe any satisfaction, you could read that instead. According to Gustave Flaubert, "it is a Colossus with dirty feet...but it is a Colossus."

Elsewhere, I see that times are trying for you, Nellorat and Supergee. If there's anything an Anonymous Sparrow can do, please let me know.

Carry on.