Top 10 Animals in Classics
May is a month of growth, breeding and whatnot - so in the midst of all this animalistic behaviour, we celebrate the ten best animals in classics.
1. The Odyssey - Proof that even Ancient Greece had dog lovers: a tear-jerking reunion between Odysseus and his faithful hound Argos moves even the stoniest of hearts.
2. The Master and Margarita - the party really gets started with Behemoth, a vodka-chugging, chess-playing, pistol-shooting giant cat. Oh, and he's also actually a demon.
3. Treasure Island - chilling villain Long John Silver cares only for gold, his wife, and Captain Flint, his shoulder-perching parrot. Pieces of eight!
4. Moby-Dick - a giant albino whale, fond of eating legs. Symbol of existence itself, or just a massive sea-dwelling mammal?
5. Metamorphosis - on the mother of all bad mornings, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find he has somehow become a giant insect. Hard to believe, but things go downhill from there.
6. The Iliad - Achilleus' horses are not only immortal - they also talk. How's that for a War Horse?
7. Barnaby Rudge - another bird: the eponymous hero's chatty pet raven, Grip, who apparently inspired Poe's 'The Raven' and was based on Dickens's own talking ravens.
8.The Pursuit of Love - the bloodhounds are loosed for the Child Hunt, which only increases Uncle Matthew's local reputation as 'a wicked lord of fiction ... with an aura of madness, badness and dangerousness'. Wonderful.
9. Anthony and Cleopatra - thinking outside the box, Cleopatra invites an asp in to 'untie' her life. No ophidiophobic she. Or at least, she never had time to show it.
10. 'The Hunting of the Snark' - Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem features a creature varied, indescribable and unimaginable. Hunt one down for further details, but be careful it isn't a Boojum.
Top 10 Journeys
As Winter crawls to an end and Spring bursts into new life, set off on your own grand journey and disappear to new climes. Here's our Top Ten journeys, from science-fiction to moving drama.
1. Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Kingsley Amis described Verne's work as 'poor quality. full of comically bad writing'. I don't know about you, but that makes me desperate to read this tale of volcanos and prehistoric animals.
2. A Sentimental Journey
Parson Yorick travels through France and Italy, delighted to meet 'pretty ladies' on his way. Typical Sterne.
3. Journey into Fear
Istanbul, and a secret passenger steamer - need you know more? Another brilliant espionage thriller from Eric Ambler. Istanbul, and a secret passenger steamer - need you know more? Another brilliant espionage thriller from Eric Ambler.
4. Journey's End
A searing anti-war piece, this examines the journey from boyhood to desolation in the trenches of France in WWI.
5. Gulliver's Travels
Genuinely laugh-out-loud, filthy and sharp in its satire even today, this is a book that you really ought to read.
6. The Enchanted April
Four women travel from England to a medieval castle in Italy and find their lives transformed, in this beautiful and charming 1922 book.
7. Journey Through a Small Planet
A working-class Jewish childhood recalled, with Litvinoff's daily travels through a London East End full of the smell of pickled herring and onion bread. Yum.
8. Don Quixote
Windmills, insanity, and the faithful Sancho Panza feature in the first great modern novel. Nothing to do with donkeys. Yum.
9.
Humphry Clinker
Described as an 'Oops-there-go-my-bloomers bawdy picaresque' across Britain; if that doesn't make you want to read one of the earliest English novels, nothing will.
10. The Odyssey
The journey of all journeys, Odysseus faces witches, monsters and nymphs before returning home, unrecognised, ten years after the end of the Trojan War. Epic, in the correct and wonderful sense.
Top 10 Spring Classics
As winter turns to spring (sort of) we're beginning to think about the coming warmth: lambs, daffodils, turning seasons, stone eggs, all that jazz. So here are our Top Ten Classics featuring birth and rebirth:
1. Tristram Shandy
In the birth scene to end all birth scenes, the infant Tristram Shandy (among other disasters) gets his nose crushed by the doctor's forceps.
2. Dombey and Son
Tiny Paul Dombey, raised by a wet nurse after his mother dies after childbirth, doesn't get much of a start in life (or indeed much of a life at all).
3. Resurrection
Tolstoy's final novel features a man in search of redemption for his earlier sins, looking for rebirth through his moral struggle.
4. The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby is the new incarnation of a different man – but who was he? And how was Gatsby conceived?
5. Monkey
This classic Chinese tale features the irrepressible trickster Monkey - hatched from a stone egg, no less - who can ride on the clouds and transform into different shapes.
6. Frankenstein
Poor old monster. He is born one stormy night, leading not only to some bad luck on the part of the doctor, but also countless knock-off films of the shambling creature for centuries to come.
7. Wuthering Height
Giving birth doesn't bode well for most of the characters here. It mostly means they're going to die.
8. The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynn scandalizes her community when she produces Pearl, an illegitimate baby, and is forced to wear a scarlet letter 'A' for adulteress..
9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
After faking his own death, Huck is reborn as a river wanderer, travelling with Jim to various adventures. Some kids have all the luck.
10. Jane Eyre
'Reader, I married him.' But not before Rochester had gone through something of a rebirth himself - from wife-hiding dark horse to kindly blind man.
Top 10 Beautiful Classics
The month of love, and a time to celebrate the beautiful things in life. Here are our Top 10 Beautiful Classics:
1. The Major Works of Charles Dickens, in the Clothbound Classics range Beautiful and popular as ever, here the Clothbounds (designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith) come together in one box set, to show off Dickens's major novels.
2. A Taste of the Sun, in the Great Food collection A sunny, bright cover in zingy colours to capture the spirit Elizabeth David's sunshine recipes.
3. Speak, Memory in the Vladimir Nabokov collection Butterflies and childhood portraits are rendered in gorgeous pencil sketches on the cover of this magical autobiography.
4. The Great Gatsby, in the Threads collection Jillian Tamaki stitched this stunning botanical jacket for this children's classic - and inside the cover, you can see the knots on the back of the tapestry too.
5. The Great Gatsby, in the Fitzgerald collection This Great American Novel gets a stunning gold foil jacket for this hardback edition, with a lovely hidden bookmark tucked on the back flap.
6. Mrs Dalloway, in the Virginia Woolf collection Delicious swooping colours and bright endpages make this as easy to pick up as it will be tricky to put down (once you start reading).
7. Scoop, in the Evelyn Waugh collection In perfect white and soft blue, these Evelyn Waughs are a marvel of clean lines and modernity.
8. Candide, in the Penguin Deluxe range A beautiful soft-backed large version of this classic novel, with jacket designed by the award-winning illustrator and cartoonish Chris Ware.
9. The Magician of Lublinin the Isaac Bashevis Singer collection Publishing in May this year, The Magician of Lublin features Marc Chagall artwork in beautiful, gem-like colours.
10. The Drowning Pool, in the Ross Macdonald collection Finally, another one for later in the year - this Modern Classic paperback in July is a gorgeous design of David Hockney swimming-pool blues and pulp fiction lettering by Edward Bettison; an essential for any summer reading list.
Top 10 Christmas reads
Christmas time! What better way to escape the hustle and bustle of Christmas stress than with a good book? So here are our Top Ten Christmas reads:
1. Emma - Austen's heroine ruins her own Christmas day by being a meddlesome nose-poker. No Father Christmas for you, you match-making fool.
2. Le Grand Meaulnes - Meaulnes crashes an engagement party at Christmas, and changes his life forever.
3. The Pickwick Papers - Christmas at the hand of the master, as Mr Pickwick and pals enjoy the hospitality of Dingly Dell Farm. AND there's ice skating!
4. Bracebridge Hall - Washington Irving's marvellous essay on English Christmas traditions was actually Dickens's inspiration for the Pickwick festivities.
5. The Snow Queen - Hans Christian Andersen's magical tale of snow, ice and love. Haunting.
6. Little Women - home-made gifts. Singing. Plays. Flowers. Doing something nice for your neighbours. ICE CREAM! A blissful Christmas with the March family.
7. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories - Christmas isn't Christmas without some M. R. James, read aloud to a wide-eyed, terrified audience in front of the fire.
8. A Christmas Memory - a heartbreaking, heart-warming account of love and loss at Christmas from Truman Capote.
9. Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee's memories of the children carol singing around the village will warm even the coldest of Christmas hearts. Leading neatly to...
10. A Christmas Carol - the classic of Christmas classics, it's given us almost everything we recognise as Christmas today. Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim!
Top 10 Disasters in Classics
The turning of the seasons spells disaster for our shoes, our moods and our outdoor plans. Here are our Top Ten disasters in the Classics.
1. A slight surfeit of water on George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss - a sad, soggy fate for Maggie Tulliver.
2. The WORST headgear ever: Winston Smith's love life results in rats a-plenty in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
3. Who's going to catch the bouquet! No-one. It'll stay on the banqueting table and rot, after Miss Havisham's disastrous wedding in Great Expectations.
4. Postal service simply TOO SLOW in Romeo and Juliet. That is definitely worth looking into compensation.
5. Another epistolary failure - Angel misses Tess of the D'Urbervilles's letter.
6. Wuthering Heights offers many, many disastrous marriages.
7. Not for the claustrophobic - the mine collapse in Zola's Germinal.
8. Social disaster, as Emma makes cruel fun of Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic. Silly, silly Emma.
9. A little bit Indiana Jones, with The Bridge of San Luis Rey - a rope bridge in Peru - collapsing and killing five.
10. Catering disaster, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I'll pass on the sugar, thanks.
Top 10 parties in Classics
We've picked the ten parties in Classics that we would most like to have been at:
1. The amazing party in The Odyssey when Helen puts a magical libation in the wine bowl - a classic case of 'antics ensue...'
2. They knew how to have a knees-up in medieval times - see Canterbury Tales and Beowulf for some good hall-joy parties - but for the ultimate in post-bloodshed feasting we're going for Death of King Arthur
3. There are so many parties in Austen to choose from. We couldn't decide between untoward Mr Elton in Emma or the catty Bingley sisters in Pride and Prejudice, so we went for unexpected appearance of Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility.
4. The nouveau riche showing off their wealth, secret love triangles and the dashingly handsome Bel-Ami at large.
5. Robert Coover's Gerald's Party sounds like a rocking party: 'At Gerald's, the party continues around her murdered corpse (it is, after all, just the first of the night) ... a mock murder mystery as rousing and disorienting as the best drunken party'.
6. Gatsby, the king of the awkward 'I've been pining for you for years and threw this party on the off-chance you'd turn up' party. The Great Gatsby indeed.
7. Animal Farm: the poker party in the last scene where the faces of the men and the pigs become the same. You can't have a list of good parties without an allegorical metamorphosis thrown in there.
8. The un-birthday party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - now that's a tea party.
9. Story of the Eye, which opens with a week of teenage excess that then spirals into even more madness and defilement throughout.
10. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: the whole damn thing is just Big Daddy's birthday party.
