Books

Isaac Asimov is decent, and I enjoyed his "robot" stories, which if anything seem like the opposite of defeatism. He even wrote an article shitting on Orwell. By the way, if you find sci-fi to be your liking, do check out Dune by Frank Herbert. I think it's an excellent series, as you may be able to tell.

I think with such a broad brush the only viable answer is "it depends".

Some of them I actually quite enjoy. While I haven't read him again since my politics radicalized, I always really enjoyed Asimov. Herbert and Philip K. Dick have always been two huge favourites of mine. I have always been a sucker for dystopian novels, so I quite liked Huxley as well (though I suppose he would be English). On the other hand, I never particularly cared for Faulkner and his writing style. I think King is garbage, both as an author and a person, and I am not sure his work really deserves to be considered with some of the other classics.

Others can be still worth reading even if you don't necessarily agree with the politics, both just for the pure enjoyment of it and also as an exercise in reading things critically that you may not entirely agree with.

I'm quite a fan of Isaac Asimov.

I loved Heller's Catch 22. If you enjoy it, also try Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. Now, I read these before Marx. I'd likely have a different opinion of then if I read them again today. But I still recommend them to people who ask.

I've got a copy of Maus. Have to say that I enjoyed the beginning then never finished it. My copy is the Spanish translation. When I read it, I had to translate almost every word, so it was quite difficult to get into the flow. I put it aside because I wanted to enjoy it rather than reading it as a chore. If it wasn't very good, I'd have powered through as a grammar and vocab exercise. So while I can't say it's great all the way through, I can say that I thought it was good enough to treat it as a worthwhile read.

Can't say I got on with Faulkner or Hemingway. With Hemingway, I think I read him too young. I'd appreciate him more now. Stephen King is utter shite. The problem is that he's too American. I can't describe it in any other way. He writes as if the spirit of the American Dream is trapped in his keyboard. I quite enjoyed F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Quintessentially American novelists, still, but these two have a kind of balance that King doesn't seem to understand.

Hands down most underrated classic is John Williams, Stoner. I heard about this book long before I read it and thought it would be about a stoner, which didn't appeal to me at all. Then a trusted friend was talking about how good it was and I was a little confused with their spoiler-free description and title of their favourite book. It's up there in my top 5. Maybe it's #1.

The problem is I can't confirm it's my favourite book because it was so … [I can't actually describe how it made me feel] … that I don't want to reread it in case my impression changes. I'm simply content that it was the most … story that I'm just happy to have experienced it and am now able, occasionally, to relive whatever emotion this is. Maybe you have to read it at the right time in life.

Charles Bukowski's Post Office and Factotum were similarly awesome—in the sense that I was awed that someone could write like that.

My advice: don't read classics because they're classics; read for pleasure and read widely. You don't have to finish a book just because you started it. Give each book 50 pages or so before you decide that you dislike it.

The classics are classics for a reason - that might be the writing or the cultural effect they had at the time.

I doubt Amerikkkan classics deserve the position of preeminence they hold over other languages. I guess that's just cultural hegemony.

You will find plenty of reactionary or offensive language and themes, even in "well meaning" works (slurs in "Tom Sawyer" for example). It's up to you what boundaries you'd like to set for your own reading. I chose not to finish a Hemingway recently due to themes glorifying sex buying. I don't think any classic is worth pushing through if you hate it.

I liked Catcher in the Rye and reread The Great Gatsby every couple years. I found Asimov kind of boring, but his ideas are cool. It's not Amerikkkan, but I'm rereading Heart of Darkness right now, and I think it mostly holds up.

Edit: I also re-read Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy pretty often

Vonnegut is great, especially for early HS, good anti-war themes and kafka-esque post-modernist elements that really add to the odd scenes of his books, especially Slaughter house 5. Stephen King famously wrote A LOT(he did more than his fair share of blow) so some is pretty good like The Shining(tho I will say some of the book is just disgusting sexually) or others that became decent horror movies, others are just absolutely awful shitstains of movies like Lawnmower Man. Speigelman’s Maus was a story I loved reading in Elementary school and it was depressing but I needed to read it, I highly suggest it. My grandma (a Catholic) was not exposed to the full horrors of the Nazi occupation as she fled to the USSR, but reading about the struggles of the characters and seeing the artwork they use in the comic made me cry at times. Some of Steinbeck’s works were heavily influenced by the struggles of ordinary working Americans during the Great Depression. I actually didn’t know Asimov lived in the US, but his sci-fi was EXTREMELY influential to most modern media that includes robots, space travel or high-tech shit beyond the comprehension of humans. Hemingway is interesting, he does have quite a few thoughts on what makes a man a man and how to pull yourself up by your bootstraps but his books are decent. Mark Twain is one I’d like to check again because I don’t know how to feel about him, I read his works when I was a 2nd grader so I only remember plots not writing style and even then idk how the plots are portrayed. I’d suggest reading some of these classics when you have enough time.

Steinbeck is awesome, Vonnegut is great as well, Asimov is good, but the misogyny and bigotry of the times tend to shine through. So that's worth taking into account.

Art Spiegelman's Maus series is a fun read but it does have its 'moments'