Ok, here they are:

1) What is your favorite 19th century book and favorite 19th century author?

2) What is your favorite 20th century classic book and classic author?

3) What is your favorite contemporary book and contemporary author?

Dan

Ok, here's my answers:

19th century book:
wow,there's so many to choose from. But I think I'll go with Elliot's, Silas Marner.

19th century author:
I love Jane Austin, but I think Dicken's gets the nod simply because he has so many excellent works.

20th century classic book:
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee

20th century classic author:
I've enjoyed reading works from many authors, but the only one that entices me to RE-READ anything is Steinbeck, so he gets my vote here. Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday are simply wonderful to read again and again.

20th century contemporary book:
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Wow, what a recounting of the Gettysburg battle during the Civil War.

20th century contemporary author:
I don't know about this one, so I guess I'll leave it blank. I enjoy Clancy, Cussler, Koontz, Coonts, Auel (who is finally releasing a new novel!), L'Amour, and many others but no one really stands out as a favorite, so no vote from me on this group.

Dan

As someone who studied English literature I think I should answer.

Favourite 19th century book:
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy.

Favourite 19th century author:
I too like Jane Austen a lot, so she's on top of my list. But Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy run a close second.

My favourite 20th century classic books are "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf and "Howards End" by E.M.Forster.
As favourite author for that perios I would nominate E.M.Forster.

Among the 20th century comtemporaries books and authors I like are Roddy Doyle (all his books except "A Star called Henry"), "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis" by Frank McCourt, Kazuo Ishiguru's "The Remains of the Day", Nabokov's "Lolita" and many more.

It's too difficult to answer this question! I'm going to tell you my favorites writers:
19th century: Bodelaire; Poe; Dotoievski;...
20th century: Henry Miller; Bukowsky;...
Contemporary: Sabato (from Argentina).
Now, in the last years, I'm reading philosophy (it's very interesting).
Regards.

They seem like such easy questions on the surface. I'm a voracious reader though and generally have 3 or 4 books going at once. Fiction, non-fiction, classic, fluff...it doesn't matter.

1) Yet another vote for the Bronte's here. I did enjoy the heck out of "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre". As for authors on this side of the pond, I like Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans".

2) I could read "To Kill a Mockingbird" over and over and with the exception of "The Old Man and the Sea", I generally like Hemingway. I can tell you that I never got Faulkner and spent a semester banging my head against a wall over "The Sound and The Fury".

3) My favorite author is M.M.Kaye. While her short mysteries are inferior to Agatha Christie, I adore her long historical fiction; "The Far Pavilions", "Trade Winds" and "Shadow of the Moon". Two books I've read recently that I thought were better than average were "The Painted House" by Grisham and "The Red Tent" by Anita Diamant.

Lily

19th Century: Mark Twain
20th Century: Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein
Contemporary: Phillip Gulley

19th Century - Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn " I also like Alexandre Dumas, Arthur C. Doyle, Dickens, Cooper.

20th Century - Robert Penn Warren, "All the King's Men" (a thinly veiled account of one of the most fascinating periods in American history), other authors -Robert Heinlein, L'Amour, Clarke, Tolkien, Chandler.

Current - I enjoy Grisham, Ambrose, Parker, Koontz.

19th century book:
A Sentimental Education - Flaubert

19th century author(s):
Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Twain

20th century classic book:
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner

20th century classic author:
James Joyce

20th century contemporary book:
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

20th century contemporary author:
So many good ones - I don't have a single favorite.

Some recent reads: Tom Perrotta's Bad Haircut;
David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day; John Dunning's The Bookman's Wake; Peter Kivy Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences.

[ February 27, 2002: Message edited by: netizen ]

Nici:

Too bad you're in Germany; I think we should check out each other's bookshelves! My list would probably be fairly close to yours, although it would be hard to nail down a favorite 20th C author and book.

(I was an English 'minor' in college, and focused on 20thC).

My fave 20thC authors would also include: Primo Levi, Nadine Gordimer, John Barth, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Faulkner,... it's just too hard to pick one!

Nina

Nina, all

yes, too bad that I live in Germany not only book-wise Living in Germany also means that I can't participate in all those piano get-togethers...sigh.

What I find amazing about this thread is that almost everybody seems to like Charles Dickens. Cool.
The other good thing about this thread is that it provided me with a list of books to be handed out when my birthday comes around again

If you like Charles Dickens you’ll probably like Anthony Trollope as well. His The Way We Live Now is a great novel. Trollope was as popular as Dickens in his day, but after he died his Autobiography was published. In it Trollope pretty much described his writing as a way to earn a living. Certain literary snobs castigated him as merely commercial. I thought that was one of the goals of becoming a published author; to sell as many books as possible. Certainly Dickens was of the same mind but wisely kept silent.

Favorite 19th century book:
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
(I wish I could read it in French)

19th century author(s):
Hugo, Dostoevsky (especially the one variously called The Possessed or Devils), Trollope, Thomas Hardy

20th century classic book:
Absolam Absolam or As I Lay Dying – Faulkner
I read just about everything Faulkner wrote, consider him superior to most American novelists. Light In August is also pretty good but I think the other two are genuine masterpieces.

The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway also impressed me and I’d probably read any of these again. I like Hemingway, have some sense of why he is considered a great writer, but nothing of his quite struck me as much as this one.

I read some Thomas Wolfe. Is it possible to admire someone’s passion more than their art? That’s about how I feel about him.

20th century classic author:
James Joyce. There was a time when I was a Joyce fanatic and Ulysses would have topped my lists, but time makes some tastes change. Still admire him.

E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) based on this book alone is certainly a great writer.

20th century contemporary book:
Probably Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut, another author I have read widely. He seemed to have his finger on the pulse of American society for many years, but Cat’s Cradle is his stand out masterpiece.

Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury is also pretty impressive.

20th century contemporary author:
Here are a few; Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, C. S. Lewis, Alain Robbe-Grillet (Jealousy) and Jean Paul Sartre (The Age of Reason is a masterpiece)

Once upon a time I was invited (along with my late wife) to a literary soiree in New York, a place where the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon and John Updike (oooh I loathe him!) were being lionized. They asked me who I liked and I decided to make the equivalent of a great fart by saying that I preferred Jacqueline Suzanne (Plarski) as providing far better social criticism than any of the others. Then they KNEW I was not one of them.