Greatest Books of the Glorious Past

[This Baron of Mora]

A simple question with thousands of answers;

What do you consider the greatest book (any genre) written before the year 1900?

To this regard I would ask that if you say the Bible to include your favorite version/book of/in it and also a book besides.

[fluke]

With Bibles, the KJV was a great translation.

George McDonald's Phantastes still burns in my mind even though I didn't finish it.

[Kessie]

Uh ... well gee, a lot of my favorites were written just this side of 1900. How about Jane Austen? Was she pre-1900? I know Henry James kind of straddled the century change ... Alas, Albert Payson Terhune (collie books!) was in the 1920s.

[metalikhan]

The Bible is the ultimate greatest book; I've always loved KJV.

But other great books of the past -- golly, that's a tough one. At best, I could limit it to a half dozen favs.
In no particular order:
Beowulf
Le Morte d'Arthur -- Sir Thomas Mallory
Odyssey & Iliad -- Alexander Pope's poetic translation (1700s)
Dracula -- Bram Stoker
Kidnapped -- Robert Louis Stevenson
The Bacchae -- Euripides

And if I think about it in a different mood on a different day, I'd likely have a different list. (Didn't even mention Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, or Sir Edmund Spencer.)

[Kessie]

Dracula's a great book! I checked H.G. Wells, and he straddled the century line, as well (1895-1941 is his publishing window).

Blah, just say "old books" and I'll be throwing out Mary Stewart, Elizabeth Enright, and Mary O'Hara. But they're from the 40s, 50s and 60s, so they're not quite old enough. I sure love their writing, though.

[This Baron of Mora]

-The 1611 King James Bible (considered the only 'classic' written by a 'committee')
-Beowulf
-Phantastes by. George MacDonald (an extremely strange but interesting fantasy, or shall I say phantasy), 1858
-The Well at the World's End by. William Morriis
-The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (known as one of the greatest autobiographies, rightfully so)
-The Count of Monte Cristo by. Alexandre Dumas
-The Man Who Would Be King by. Rudyard Kipling (if you ever wanted to head for Eldorado this book is for you, the movie was actually slightly based on this book despite it taking place in India/Kafiristan)
-My Life As An Explorer by. Sven Hedin (noting that it takes place before the turn of the century but is published after, this book is a real life adventure like Eldorado, only in Central Asia, written by the last great explorer)
-Central Asia & Tibet (same as the previous entry)
-Others that I can't recall

For those that know Tolkien/his works he advocated that most modern literature was not nearly as valuable/as good as the older stuff in his crusade to redo the English curriculum at Oxford around 1930 with C.S. Lewis's help, such is why I posed this question (not to condemn anyone this list is about all I've read in the period not counting various legends/stories but they don't really have secure names or authorship).

[metalikhan]

So many great books of the past still have recognizable titles even though fewer people read them nowadays. Often, the older styles are neither easy nor speedy to read. LOL Moby-thingy by Herman Melville might be considered cruel and unusual punishment for a lot of modern readers. I still love Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott) but no one else in my immediate circle (or even intermediate one ) has read it. Ditto the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the Poetic Edda.

[waldenwriter]

The Bible is definitely one for me; I've used several versions.

Other than that:

-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
-Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
-The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (which I really like though I have trouble following the parts with theological discourse)
-Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
-The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
-Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (read this for school and liked it a lot)

And, if plays are allowed, Shakespeare's Hamlet (or frankly anything by Shakespeare) and Molière's Tartuffe.

There are probably more I could list but I can't think of them now.

I agree with Mora regarding Ben Franklin's autobiography; sadly I've only read excerpts of it for school and never the whole thing.

[cherylr]

Hmmm, off the top of my head:

Anna Karenina
Pride and Prejudice

I'm currently reading The Brothers' Karamazov in increments. I can only take the Russian names for so long.