The Best (classic) books I read in 2013

Continuing my list of the 10 Best Books I Read in 2013 - yesterday's post was the 5 best books I read this year by living authors and today, the 5 best classic books I read in 2013. A note, first, on "classics": I read somewhere that a well-known thinker was asked how many novels he'd read and he replied something like: All 20. That struck me as true - I am sure I could spend the rest of my lifetime reading and re-reading the 20 or so acknowledged great works and would continue to learn and appreciate with every re-reading - and I wouldn't miss all that much, either. Few contemporary works stand up to those that have withstood the "test of time," and that's as it should be - there are only a few great novels published every century, certainly not 10 or so a year. We are much more tolerant about re-seeing movies, re-watching plays and operas we have seen before, and re-reading poems (for those who read poems) than we are about re-reading novels. Something about the heft of them may inhibit re-reading - and readers often say, yes, read that one, and check it off some imaginary list. I am amazed, however, how fresh the classics seem when I come back to them - I've changed, I've forgotten, or perhaps the world in which we re-read them has changed. Here are 5 great ones that I read or re-read in 2013, alphabetical by author:

Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe. This is one classic or near-classic that I read for the first time this year; Achebe is mostly known for Things Fall Apart, but Anthills is perhaps a better novel - a terrific account of an African political coup - feels frighteningly contemporary.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Friend WS has strongly encouraged me to come back to this one, and I was totally engrossed by the intelligent story and by Eliot's increbible insights and asides.

Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert. Have read this novel four or five times, this time in the Lydia Davis translation, which seemed to me excellent. Probably the greatest complete portrayal of a character in world literature, and the work that completely established the tone of naturalism in fiction that is still our guidepost. 

Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo. Came back to this one that I hadn't read in 40 years of so, spurred by curiosity about novels about psychoanalysis. I found it every bit as funny as I remembered, and I'd forgotten how troubling a portrait this novel is of a family web breaking apart at the seams - very dark, very sad.

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. I came on this one pretty late in my life, and have read it now two or three times (our list of great works, when I was in college and in grad school, included very few women writers, very few American writers, and, for that matter, very few 20th-century novels). AofI is a great story and perfectly captures its time and place - nearby, but so long ago.