Writers’ Club Homework Assignment List
Relax – I didn’t mean to give you a flashback to college days (well, maybe just a little…)
I was compiling the most popular classic fiction from Goodreads, Feedbooks, and Gutenberg.org – and came up with this list. The tie-breaker was Goodreads in all cases, since they have people wanting to read a title in both paperback and hardcover versions – so this gave an extra oomph to certain books.
Otherwise, it was your usual popularity contest.
Why only public domain works? Because this gives us a better view without current fads incorporated, or certain fan clubs which can skew results. (Dead authors don’t usually have active fan clubs populating the social media.)
When you see this list, you’ll also be able to tell a great deal about what really great fiction is.
Without further adieu:
- A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie
- The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy
All of these have the same overall value, so I’ve listed them alphabetically. You’ll note a non-fiction work crept in – but this is again because it was a stand-out work – and with the other styles you are studying, I thought to give you a break and an additional comparative.
I’ll have more on these as I complete my own overview editorial work on them. Many are over 1300 pages, yet “The Call of the Wild” is just a couple hundred. And these will be made available in several formats for your use. I still consider that curling up with a proper book and bookmark is the easiest way to lose yourself into these worlds. However, epubs allow you to study while commuting on your laptop, computer, or tablet.
My job will be editing these into a standard quality for you. While they are available on many platforms, they don’t align to any particular standard, so you can wind up with some free, but very error-ridden texts. Another note is that these are basically illustration-free (too sad for Alice above) in order to get you right into the text and make these simply downloads for your tablet/smartphone.
Thought you’d want to know what’s ahead.
Sorry, I don’t have the email opt-in available yet – this is coming.
Back to my grinding wheel…