The Great Unread

bjd, enjoyed Durrel's the Alexandra Quartet series as well and also Gavin Maxwell's books especially "Ring of Bright Water" about otters.
TH White's book "The Goshawk" was also interesting.

This is becoming a Culture Vultures thread!

Yea,the Culture Vultures thread is deader than a Dodo for quite sometime:))

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Thoreau's Walden

In Canada:

Ondaatje's The English Patient,
Margaret McMillan: Paris 1919: Six months that changed the world

I have studied English Literature at university (not in Britain) and among the required reading there were many works quoted above, such as

Ulysses (yes, all, in English, plus most of Joyce's works excluding Finnegans Wake)
To the Lighthouse (hated Virginia Woolf ever since)
Heart of Darkness
A lot by Dickens, I remember fondly A Tale of Two Cities and even Dombey and Son
Some by very obscure authors, such as the appalling Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin - I was in Edinburgh recently and discovered a theatrical version of the same - avoided it, of course
Many parts of Paradise Lost
Most of Shakespeare was taken for granted, there are some plays I have forgotten and some I remember in detail.

And this isn't an exhaustive list
I can still quote by heart lines from Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd, for example.

Proust I can't stand, I even tried with the comic version.

The Divine Comedy I know well, it is still widely read in Italy and taught in every high school

The Russians I know little, but my sixteen years old daughter spent most of our holiday reading Anna Karenina, and liked it very much. I read and loved Doktor Zhivago and Cechov and Pushkin.

As for German authors, I read all of Thomas Mann in the summer after my school leaving exams, and liked it a lot.

Edited by: chiaram

To the Lighthouse (hated Virginia Woolf ever since)

I never read any of her writing, but I read Leonard Woolf's multi-volume memoirs, and by the time I got to the end I thought "She was married to him? Poor woman! No wonder she walked into the sea and drowned herself." No, I didn't like him at all.

No wonder she walked into the sea and drowned herself.

Not quite. She actually drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home.

To the Lighthouse+ is one of my all-time favorites. I've actually read most of the genuinely well-known and well-regarded works mentioned in this thread cover to cover, but +To the Lighthouse is one of the few that I've read multiple times.

I have also read most of Virginia Woolf's books and enjoyed them.

I do tend to avoid biographies though, especially of writers. The subjects always disappoint me, the way their writing didn't.

I really liked the first volume of Leonard Woolf's diaries. (In Sri Lanka.) I liked the other five volumes enough to finish them. My reaction was a bit different from NA's: I felt sory for Leonard having been married to Virginia. Maybe, as Samuel Butler said of the Carlyles, it was merciful of God to have them marry each other, so that only two people were miserable instead of four.