Now taking suggestions...

On classics one really should be acquainted with. Rather, classics with which one should be acquainted.

Some background: I think a fair share of the DVC's success is the intellectual decline of our modern times. Its pseudo-history makes the uneducated think they're learning something, when it's as much like literature or history as ketchup is a vegetable.

Once upon a time, I was denied a job at my alma mater. My embittered, retiring teacher gave me her key to the supply room and said, "If you can carry it, you can have it." Wow. I thought I'd already taken carte blanche when I had to inventory the books for our Advanced Placement English class some years before; now this was the social studies and foreign language textbooks, too. So I took copies of the history books that had been retired ten years before, for being "too demanding" anymore. And the art history text made obsolete when the teacher retired. A copy of everything by Shakespeare I saw, including a hardcover Complete Works. Et cetera.

Now, with all of this furor over the DVC, and thinking about my kids' education, I'm re-evaluating what I read. All of the popular fiction in the world isn't going to help me if my kids have questions from school. Chances are, Oprah's book club suggestions aren't going to be on my kids' summer reading lists. And I don't have a water-cooler to discuss that stuff around, anyway.
It's like the line from Pink Floyd: "I've got thirteen channels of sh*t on the TV to choose from." I don't want a hundred more of the same. I'll settle for three good ones.

I know our oldest is only going to be in kindergarten, but reading great books isn't like knocking off a romance novel. I figure I'd better get on my horse.

So, suggestions of favorite classic novels are politely requested from my dozen regular readers (and those who happen by occasionally). Those mocked in high school and reconsidered in adulthood will be given preference, as I've finally actually read Tess of the d'Urbervilles last year. I'm told in that class we also read Madame Bovary, but I don't remember any of that one.

I'll tell you this, too, sort of as a point of pride: I've read all of Les Misérables in both French and English. Don't worry that your favorite 1500-page tome will overwhelm me. Thanks in advance.