Favorite Books Written Before I Was Born

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is about our favorite books written before we were born.  I haven’t written about my favorite classics for a while, so this was a nice opportunity to span a couple centuries of great literature and pick out my favorites. 

In making this list, I thought about the books that have had the greatest impact on me, as opposed to maybe being the best books ever written.  Most of these are books I read years ago, some of them in high school and college. But they’ve stuck with me.

1. Emma by Jane Austen (1815).  Emma isn’t everyone’s favorite Austen, but I’ve loved her as a character since I first read this in college.  I love how independent she is, and how she can be really self-centered but grows over the course of the novel.
2. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850): This is my favorite of Dicken’s books.  Copperfield feels like a more fully formed character than many of Dickens other characters, probably because he’s writing about himself.
3. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871): I love the breadth and complexity of this novel and its characters. This is a huge novel, but nothing about it felt like it had been done before. 
4. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878): I have a soft spot for this book, which I discovered in a high school literature class where I hated nearly every other book I was assigned.  Eustacia Vye isn’t nice or good, but she’s my favorite literary character and I never read this book without liking her more. 
5. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905): There are plenty of classic novels written about “the fallen woman” but I found this one the most nuanced and Lily Bart more sympathetic (and maybe that’s because most of the others are written by men).  
6. Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945): I read this book as a teenager and I’ve never forgotten it, especially the image at the end. Like 1984, I feel like you see shades of it everywhere you look. This “simple” book about a revolution by animals on a farm feels very, very real.  
7. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953): I read this book later in life but it was no less impactful.  Bradbury does a masterful job writing about the importance of reading and thinking – and the harm that censorship and media can do. 
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960): I expected this novel to be amazing, but was surprised at how beautifully written it was. Enough said.
9. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963): This book really made an impact when I read it in college, and I’ve read it a few times since. Now that I’m older it feels different but still meaningful.
10. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965): There are quite a few things that got me interested in law when I was young, and this was one of them. It’s still one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read. It’s a compelling look at murder in a small town and capital punishment, and a reminder that even murderers are human beings.

I would have liked this list to be more diverse but I haven’t read that many classics by authors of color written before I was born (I stopped at 1970, in case you were wondering). Other books that almost made this list include The Count of Monte Cristo, East of Eden, A Raisin in the Sun, The Good Earth, and Testament of Youth. I also didn’t include children’s literature, but if I had I would have certainly included The Secret Garden, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Oz series.

Thanks to Top Ten Tuesday for a good topic this week! What are some of your favorite classics?