Finally picked up Grapes of Wrath, and damn is it good. Steinbeck has such beautiful prose when he’s not writing southern dialect.
What other classics are still compelling today? If it’s any help, I don’t really dig Vonnegut, Asimov, and Huxley.
War and Peace is supposedly really good, but don’t you almost need to have a notebook nearby just to keep track of all the characters and their relationships to each other? I definitely needed that when I began reading Brothers Karamazov, and I barely made it past the first couple of chapters.
I don’t think it’s any worse than some modern epics. I will say: Tolstoy is really into realism, and one very “realistic” thing he does is have tons of characters with very similar names to confuse the hell out of you
