Have you read a classic lately? What have you read if you have? Here are six I've picked off the shelf (and a couple I have read in the last six months - as well as a long time ago). This means they are in stock and at these prices - between $9.95 and $16.95 - a great way to remind yourself of just how far literature has come (or perhaps not).

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was conceived when she was just eighteen years old - or was it? Could Percy Shelley really have written it? Pick up a ocpy of the book and have a read of the transcript of Ramona Koval's interview with John Lauritsen on Radio National's The Book Show and see what you think about Shelley's 'immature prose'. Our Germaine comes down in support of Mary.

Madame Bovary by Flaubert has a completely modern heroine - Emma - married, bored and passionately in love with being in love. It caused a moral outcry in 1857 and if re-written now it still might. The classic line of Emma's must be: 'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?'

I have to include Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, if for no other reason than 'Pip' is the main character. But there are many reasons to re-visit this epic. The journey that orphan Pip goes on is still as moving and relevant as it was when I first read it back in high school. It is a wonderfully full story told by a master writer at the height of his powers.

Dostoyevsky has to be included but which one? How about a lesser known work (and shorter) Notes from the Underground? "I am a sick man...I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver." Who could not read and love this book. The Underground man has retreated from the world because he doesn't want to be like other people. Sound familiar?

The Europeans, one of Henry James' early books is often disregarded in his long list of literary achievements but it is well worth the read as James' prose still reveals much about manners and the effect worldy experience has on us all.

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is, if you haven't read it, full of wit, irony and creates a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending civilisation. The New York Times said "It is one of the best novels of the twentieth century..."