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Ask HN: What is your favorite book written before 1900?
- gregjor 6y agoMad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning.
- jimmyvalmer 6y agoCount of Monte Cristo has to be way up there. Compared to the plodding, sententious pace of his contemporaries, Dumas was the veritable Michael Bay of nineteenth century writers.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI much enjoyed Ben Franklin's autobiography.
- codevark 6y agoLeaves of Grass, Walt Whitman. One of THE greatest of human works. Look it up. :) Wait.. not enough? How about Emily Dickenson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, et al.? Some of the most influential writing in the last 300 years. Where have you been all your life? And, if you haven't read "The Story of the Glittering Plain", by William Morris, regarded as the first modern fantasy novel, you should. Oops! Almost forgot this gem: https://www.amazon.com/Phantastes-Lilith-novels-George-MacDonald/dp/0802860206 https://www.amazon.com/Phantastes-Lilith-novels-George-MacDo... I used to have a first edition, but I lent it to someone, and it ended up being attacked, poetically of course, by mold, and was discarded before I could reclaim it. Both of these stories are ABSOLUTELY freekin amazing !!! (written coincidentally just about the time my grandmother was born, in Nashville, TN.) I grew up hearing G.M.'s childrens' stories, The Princess and the Goblin, et al., and didn't find his more serious works until just a few years ago. Brilliant stuff.
- pinewurst 6y agoCandide by Voltaire The History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison By Henry Adams