top ten tuesday: classic novels.

Originally this post was going to be a top ten books list but anyone who's spent four to five minutes with me knows narrowing down said list proved difficult once I started creating it and had to glean it three or four times before snapping my pencil in half and throwing it across the room in frustration. No anger issues here. So I'm going to break any book lists down into categories, as much as I dislike putting labels on things. First, some rules: No poems, plays, memoirs, travel writing, nonfiction--basically the list is limited to fiction classics. What constitutes a classic? Well that's an undergraduate seminar in itself...

From Wikipedia: The word classic means something that is a perfect example of a particular style, something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality. The word can be an adjective (a classic car) or a noun (a classic of English literature). It denotes a particular quality in art, architecture, literature and other cultural artifacts. For my purposes, I add my own bias to this definition in that these are also some of my favorite novels. Mine!

Top Ten Classic Novels

1. North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
2. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
3. Dracula, Bram Stoker
4. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
5. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
6. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
7. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
8. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
9. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby