Because the past is a foreign country, the classics are an excellent guide to that country, and foreign time travel broadens your perspective, making you a cultural and chronological cosmopolitan instead of a hick with the stifling horizons of your own local spacetime. They embiggen us.
Plus a lot of them are fun as heck to read, page turners, not at all difficult, e.g. Pride and Prejudice or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo and so many others.
A broader perspective can never hurt. And you can't get more different than by going back.
I'm currently reading Sei Shounagon's The Pillow Book. The author was a woman in the Heian court in Kyoto about 1000 AD, attendant to the Empress. By tradition it is a collection of her dairy entries, letters, poetry drafts and other personal papers, not intended for distribution, at least in the form we received them. It's unclear if the whole work is even a single author's.
I went in expecting not to understand parts of it. And that has been true. But I also didn't expect to laugh quite so much! At one point, she has a list of grievances over the aggravations of daily living and bad etiquette. The more irrelevant and trifling, the more hyperbolic she is. At one point I fell right right into it and I was in the scene. I have lived those very moments. And I feel her same bizarre gulf between the urge to be polite outside, and the frustration with the people being impolite on the inside. I am pretty sure I have felt some shadow of what she felt in Kyoto some thousand years ago. It is both jarring and pleasing to have that momentary connection to someone who is about as alien to me, as anyone who has left a written work could possibly be.
Hearing of that book, I'm tempted of recommending another book of almost the same time, about another empire half the world away: Anna Komenena's Alexiad.
I agree on all of that, but advancing age has forced me to qualify it. I now own more books that I want to read than my expected life span and average reading speed can support. I don’t regret a single moment spent reading crap genre mind-candy. I regret every single moment spent forcing myself through a book that I wasn’t enjoying, because it was something I ‘should read’. I don’t regret starting any of them, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of some Dickens and Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Tennyson. I studied Latin and Hebrew at school. I’ve read half of what Kipling wrote and everything Keri Hulme did. Hell, I used to teach the publication history of the Bible.
But I’ve read four Jane Austen novels (three for credit, one for a failed shot at a Women’s Studies major) and not enjoyed a moment of the experience. Intellectually, I get the quality of the work, but it wasn’t entertaining. It wasn’t pleasant, and life is just way too short for that. Books, even technical ones, get about three chapters to make their case now, if I’m not voluntarily choosing to read it after that, I’m moving on.
Funny aside: for my sins, I own a complete more-than-a-ventury old set of leather-bound Jane Austen works, because I was the family member who was ‘into books’. I’ve promised myself to make sure they go to someone who will enjoy them when they pass from my custody.
I like reading „classical literature“, and I find I enjoy a lot of it more than I expected to. Often I do have to push myself, because it can take a fair bit of concentration/perseverance, but it‘s usually worth it.
However, I do know the feeling you describe: sometimes, it just doesn‘t „click“. And in that case, I will eventually move on to the next book, and try not to feel guilty about it ;-) (I started „Paradise Lost“ twice. I love the absolutely epic poetry and vivid imagination, but I still ended up getting stuck both times...)
I'm a believer in audiobooks as a great way to experience the classics, you don't get derailed when there's a lengthy genealogy or dedication to a long dead patron. It's true to the original experience of the works too since there was much more recitation and reading aloud when copies were scarce.
PS no audiobook version could redeen Paradise Lost for me either, it was my peast favorite reading in high school. To paraphrase, better to be ignorant in hell than well read in heaven if you have to trudge through Milton to get there.
Dickens and Jane Austen seem to be mutually exclusive. I adore Jane Austen's work, but have only made it through Dickens with struggle. I have heard similar things to your position and mine from many people, but rarely heard someone say, "Oh, yeah, I love Jane Austen and Charles Dickens!"
Have you probed a bit further to ask them why they like Austen and not Dickens, and vice versa. I for one like reading works of both Austen, and Dickens.
Your point is much closer to the articles main question, which I understand to be "should you force yourself to read the classics" as opposed to "sould you consider reading classic literature".
The past is a foreign country, and yet people are basically the same, and subject to the same conceits, failings and heroism too, whether from thousands of years ago or across the street, competitors or customers. I frequently thank Thucydides for that lesson.
It feels like going back one or two hundred years is, in some ways, even more of a cultural shift than going to another country is today. I come across gems all the time that are products of the times and deeply insightful. Which happens with interacting with other countries today too. Both are profound and in similar, but different ways.
I agree. The single most important thing about any of us is that we are members of a civillisation that has run for thousands of years. Yet we constantly forget this, and the classics are a rich and vivid reminder.
Another reason is that lately, reality is both more fantastical and absurd than fiction. Contemporary books come off a bit pedestrian.
Because book quality has nothing to do with release date.
Books aren't fruit.
And because "classics" means a huge, multi-century or millenia long filtering process, where it has been found good, useful, and insightful for generations upon generations of people.
Also, because all the best of your modern books will soon enough be "classics" too, and you'll be as dead as the people who wrote the older classics. So what makes you think you or your compotemporary authors have some unique insight just because you happen to be living at the moment?
Only a belief in an arrow of progress where non-technical things (morals, books, ideas) get monotonically better (or at least, where the dominant vector over time points to better) would justify not reading the classics. But then again only someone ignorant enough to not have read the classics would believe such an idea. So reading the classics will cure you of that too.
(Even for technical things it's not always the case - there were civilizations more advanced than those that followed them, or periods where we went backwards in quality of life, knowledge of science, etc., for centuries - but at least with technical knowledge it's possible to amass and improve. You don't amass morals however, and even the higher moral ideas and ideals can be used for the worst attrocities).
...Also, because the "classics" are so readily available online, free of copyright and in easy-to-use, open formats. You can't really say that about much modern literature; of course there's plenty of good content on the web, but if you're actually looking for actual 'literature' meaning stuff that's been commercially published, that can be quite hard to access in anything other than dead-tree format.
I read a lot of Graham Greene and Isaac Asimov for free in high school. Loads of other books too. There are big buildings in my community full of books and they let me pick them off the shelves and take them home and read them as long as I promised to bring them back in a few weeks. They even had a big room with the same policies at my high school and even my elementary school.
The fact that classics are in the public domain provides other benefits besides simply being able to download them. They can also be freely redistributed without bringing The Man down on one’s own head. A large chunk of my reading these days comes from Standard Ebooks, and I regularly fix typos and make other formatting or markup improvements, since all the books are published on GitHub and the maintainers are very responsive.
There's something to be said about fiction tapping into a zeitgeist, and how fleeting that is. Even if the fiction remains relevant and interesting, it can still lose the emotional resonance it had when it was first released.
I share your skepticism about the "arrow of progress" however, so don't interpret this as an argument against what you're saying, just offering a counterpoint. Many classics have left me cold on reading them, even ones that I recognize are structurally excellent.
>Because book quality has nothing to do with release date.
Quality has a lot to do with release date, although in the opposite direction you seem to imply here. Books that have been part of the discourse for hundreds or thousands of years are likely of significant value because they have been hammered at, turned upside-down and kept people engaged for a very long time. That's a pretty good indicator for their value, and it also increases the chance that the books are still going to be relevant in another 50 years.
So cultural artifacts are actually like reverse-fruit. The older they are, the likely they have struck a nerve and found something that's meaningful regardless of what age we happen to find ourselves in. If you have to choose between a classic and a random politician's campaign memoir published half a year ago, picking the former based on age is actually a really good idea.
You're just repeating his point, but introduced unnecessary confusion.
The book quality has nothing to do with the release date itself. There's probably plenty of bad old books. The value is in the filtering that occurred and made those books disappear.
This is captured in the concept of the “Lindy Effect”, which says the future life expectancy of something like a book is proportional to its current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.
In other words NYT’s 2021 best seller list is less likely to be read in 2030 than a classic.
Is there anyone alive and writing today that anyone, seriously, ranks among the pan-century greats?
I think it takes time to realise anyway, they're old or dead by the time it's clear how great they are (or were).
There's no point naming them, but of the three ~contemporary authors I thought of, two are dead and one I came to realise only really had the one hit I was aware of.
It takes a while for people to be canonized, but hell yes. I'm 40 and by no means a championship reader, but here's a small set of folks alive or recently departed that will be part of the canon:
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Margaret Atwood
- J. D. Salinger
- Salmon Rushdie
- Neal Stephenson
- Colson Whitehead
But unless you think there's something special about today's literature, you have to wittle that down further, or over time there's just too many even for a 'championship reader'!
For sake of argument say that's an ordered list of your favourites. Why would you read Whitehead when you could instead read Vonnegut of yesteryear, last century, before that, etc.?
How do you pick something recent to read? A bestsellers 2021 list? Why cast aside something that eas an even better seller, just because it wasn't released this year?
There's just too much available, I don't think I could ever read something new, because I'll never (especially not at my rate, but nobody could) catch up with everything before it, about which more is known and had more time to digest and review etc.
Not really. That list spans 75-ish years of English literature. There are only about 400 years of (modern-enough-to-be-read-by-non-specialist) English literature. If your statement were true, we'd have to assume that there's only space for about 40 authors in the English canon. Even at my non-championship status, I'd guess I've read fiction by 150-ish authors. I'd expect people whose lives are focused on literature are an order of magnitude beyond that.
For me personally, it's usually random chance or personal recommendations that get me to read something from a new author. (I also mostly read things at least a couple decades old.) But a lot of authors basically reach the "canon" in their own lifetimes, at which point it's not a giant roll of the dice to read their recent books. Even when it is though, I mostly read for my own amusement. I'm not expecting any reward other than additional rolled eyes from friends at the bar. ;-)
- "These authors are already dead/or will be, and their books are already decades old, but they are very good according to me, even classic status worthy".
In that sense, it's an answer to TFA's question: "why read classic books" if we consider it as not just asking "why read classic==canonized books?" but "why read class==old books?"
And the answer is "because old books can be great, and contemporary books that are great will at some point be 'classics' themselves".
There can be no honest absolute ranking of subjective artistic works. It's NY Review of Each Other's Books to lull oneself into ranking apples with oranges.
This is all well and good, really -- I love 'the classics' to whatever extent that's an agreed upon list (Harold Bloom's the Western Canon (1994), probably its most explicit recent defense, had a list of essential books that was highly controversial and admittedly personal). But I'm concerned that not enough people here have heard the counter-arguments.
The problem is that time is not an unbiased filter, and all the processes of history that anoint and preserve Great Books are not purely a result of their innate or universal value. It's the same argument that's been made for the last 30-40 years about historical archives: what gets saved and how inherently excludes other stories, perspectives, and lives that we're now trying to recover. Often those exclusions are made along lines of power--race, class, gender, etc.
"The Classics" is an idea with its own history that scholars can trace, where the key players are rarely literary critics or sales numbers but institutions (churches, schools, etc.) aligned with powerful interests. Of course it's more complicated, and you'd ideally want to trace each work or groups of texts individually to see how they were 'canonized' and what that meant--but what's important to question is why many of us take this notion of 'the classics' for granted, and whether we might just be stooges of old historical prejudices (that are not, of course, gone). Understandably any effort at 'canonization' makes people nervous, because we'd immediately want to know who's making the decisions.
None of which is reason not to read things considered classic--Tolstoy and Thucydides and Shakespeare are some of my favorite shit-- but to treat the concept with skepticism, appreciate new work that challenges it, and consider each work on its own, rather than as part of some grand corpus handed down from above. It's an attitude that arouses a lot of contempt (Bloom called critics the 'School of Resentment' intent on subjugating all aesthetics to Marxist politcs), but it's really I think just a standard liberal challenge to established authority. In some sense it's a broader playing out of the Reformation rejection of Catholicism's stranglehold on biblical reading and interpretation, except what we're dealing with is the secular equivalent (Great Books). Inevitably there's a radical segment which will call for abandoning these books altogether as vehicles for oppression and nothing more. And every time there's a threat to established church order, including the Reformation, authorities have cried 'antinomianism' (no laws, faith justifies all)--true in a few cases, but misrepresenting the movement as a whole and disqualifying its legitimate criticisms.
Anyway, contemporary writers and publishers are becoming aware of these issues and some have tried to resurrect the lost narratives excluded or unrecognized by 'the Classics,' documenting facets of the human experience that rarely earned entry. Since more people can read and think freely now than ever could during the formation of the Canon, and a lot of these people would not have had a seat at the table if they were alive then, the skepticism of 'Classics' and embrace of modern writers speaking directly to them, makes total sense. The "rich white men" point is a bit overplayed, and often misapplied, but in general it pretty succinctly nails the problem.
tl;dr: there are absolutely great books considered classics but 'the classics' itself is a historical construct that's often been wielded by the powerful for their own ends; lots of folks feel no obligation to it and prefer instead to find modern writers creating new ways forward.
Valid points, but lest one thinks the canon is just some sort of unanimous, homogeneous cohort of writers, one shouldn't forget that this particular western canon is built itself as a conversation between authors, often contradicting each other, over the span of centuries.
Its value is in the breadth of that conversation and the fact that new authors, whether trying to inscribe their works inside the canon, or trying to break away from it, can hardly escape being positioned relative to it (partly the point of Bloom's "anxiety of influence").
There can however certainly be competing canons, and canons that are more single-minded, and should be recognized as such.
One good thing about the age we live in is that it is easier than ever for readers to discover those “lost narratives” that didn’t find their way into the Canon. The Internet Archive, for example, hosts scans of millions of older books that can be read online and downloaded for free. Among the genres I’ve explored to my own benefit and enjoyment over the past decade have been travel narratives [1], the humor and sports writing of Pierce Egan (1772–1849) [2], and 19th-century novels [3].
The novels, I thought, have been a particularly unfortunate victim of the filter of the “classics.” In the 19th century, they played a role similar to that of television dramas in the streaming era: immersive, commercial, produced in large numbers, intended primarily as entertainment, and ranging in quality from junk to great art. Most have been completely forgotten, but many are still worth reading.
Posts that whiff of “sjw” tend to get downvoted or at least end up controversial, regardless of the quality of the post. The canon is continuously reevaluated and that is a good thing. But it fits the narrative of “woke academics ruining stuff I like.”
> It's an attitude that arouses a lot of contempt (Bloom called critics the 'School of Resentment' intent on subjugating all aesthetics to Marxist politcs), but it's really I think just a standard liberal challenge to established authority.
This might well be a distinction without a difference. Even liberal challenge to established authority can be outwardly indistinguishable from mere ressentiment, at least if one does not take care to look into the specifics - and in interesting cases, these specifics will obviously involve facets other than "Is X challenging some established authority?"
I'll give a caveat - many of the classics suffered by being translated. They're translated in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian style that takes all the pizzazz out of them.
For instance, the Odyssey never gripped me until Emily Wilson's translation. Beautifully lucid, so clear my eight-year-old niece easily followed it, the story pops again.
By this measure, book quality and release date may have a lot to do with each other.
I’ve been trying to translate some of Caesar’s works into readable English, and to this day I can’t find one reason why all of these translations read like a textbook. The Latin for most of these writers was really direct and to the point, so translations specifically made it harder to read.
Perhaps because the Venn diagram of expert-level Latinists and great writers doesn't overlap much. It also depends on their goal; literal translations for an academic audience don't prioritize readability.
Agreed. I found Paul Roche's 2005 translation of Aristophanes' plays marvellously fun to read. Anne Carson's translations are excellent too. Some that come to mind are "Bakkhai" (2015), "Electra" (2001), "Grief Lessons" (Euripides, 2006).
Totally agree with it. It is not only the ancient classics, there are quite awful translations of greats like Dostovesky, Tolstoy etc. After reading Dostovesy in some bad translations, before venturing on reading any of his works I spend some time checking who are the transaltors.
> Also, because all the best of your modern books will soon enough be "classics" too, and you'll be as dead as the people who wrote the older classics.
> So what makes you think you or your compotemporary authors have some unique insight just because you happen to be living at the moment?
Because you just stated in the previous sentence that they are soon to be considered classic?
> So reading the classics will cure you of that too.
Absolutely right. There are many attitudes in modern life that apply the new=better consumerism fallacy where it doesn't belong: code, people, experience, restaurants, ideas, values, music, art, film, food, literature, and durable goods. Throwing away ideas, objects, and preferences of the past wholesale loses the lessons of history, reinvents the wheel, and repeats said history.
The filter, exactly. You will probably only read ~5000 books in your lifetime so targeting the best of the best will maximise your enjoyment. Of course you should pursue an author/series/subject that you particularly enjoy. It's also nice to read books that friends recommend so that you can share the experience with them.
I tried to read as many books as possible for a period of time between getting an ereader and huge book dumps. I found I could read a book every 3 days on average. Keeping that pace you could read 100 books a year. People can't keep up that pace. Of the people who read if they finish more than 5 books it would be amazing.
You have periods where you read more like in school. Most people will not have read 50 books by the time they have finished school. Books on tape could increase the numbers.
Most people will have read 5 or less books. Those who do read will probably average 54. To get to 500 would be amazing.
To get to 5,000 would take you 50 years of reading every second you could outside of work.
The correct number is somewhere between yours. I remember encountering the number 3,000 for serious readers at some point when I was in my twenties and being rather depressed at how low it is. Goodreads is my sole social network these days and it's interesting to see the range of numbers that my friends pick for their challenge goal each year from as low as single digits to one friend who routinely reads 200+ books a year. Since I've started tracking my reading about 26 years ago (probably around the time that I encountered that 3,000 books number), I've read 1,840 books (with my annual totals varying from a low of 27 to a high of 129). Probably the most important thing towards this was something my Latin professor told us, saying that if you read just ten pages just for yourself each night before you go to bed, that becomes 3,650 pages over the course of the year which is nearly the entirety of À la recherche du temps perdu. It also helps that I've done things like commute by public transportation (extra reading time) and I value reading as a means of entertainment.
I would also add that understanding the stylistic history of writing in terms of language, technique, structure, etc., improves your own writing, if you have an interest in learning to write well.
For a while I tried to do the opposite and only read very contemporary books (harder than you'd think). I had three reasons:
-I felt (still feel) a lot of pity towards new authors. It's hard enough to break through in any field, imagine having to compete with millennia worth of people. Man that has to suck and the easiest way I had to give them a leg up is to give them priority.
-I'm lazy and hope contemporary authors will digest all of those classics for me, even if only through the culture, and give me an easier to assimilate message. There's an ease to reading someone from your generation that really helps with comprehension.
-This sentiment is as old as the hills and I'm a contrarian. Can't deny that particular emotion rules over my decisions now and again.
I think the classic styles handle contemporary subjects well and there are many good authors today that write better than the classics, it is worth it being able to recongize a 3000 year old way of story telling. Contemporary styles is a different subject, seeing styles change through the decades is more interesting than how TV-shows have developed. For me that means reading a lot and knowing that even if a style hasn't been my cup of tea, that might easily change.
I have for the last decade nurtured a love for shorter novels because you can read so many of them and get such a large span of styles, through time as well. For reference a classic Kallocain at is a bit too long, but managable at 200 pages.
For the last couple of years, I've been increasingly doing that for Science Fiction and Fantasy: Reading primarily recently published books, often Hugo nominees published the year before.
This is another genre where lots of connaisseurs insist on a canon that one absolutely has to have read, but (a) the field has considerably expanded its range of perspectives in recent years and (b) many of the "canon" writers just cannot measure up to the literary quality of contemporary authors (doubtlessly in part due to the audience to which they catered, and the industrial writing process many of them were forced into).
When you read about the Classics (stories that have stood the test of time because of how well they convey human truths), it's as if you are living a thousand different lives instead of living just one. As a humanities major working in tech, I observe daily how the miopia of living with the experience of the present only can have negative effects on the products it produces. For a distillation of this thought I recommend reading this short story (15min) by Anton Chekhov: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Bet.shtml
>As a humanities major working in tech, I observe daily how the miopia of living with the experience of the present only can have negative effects on the products it produces.
Interesting. Is it possible to elaborate on this? I enjoyed the short story you linked (thank you) but still would like to understand your unique perspective.
It takes longer to sift through the dreck of reddit curated by popular vote of random people on the internet (who might be expert in a sub's subject or might just like funny pictures) to get to stuff worth reading than it does browsing through a list curated into a canon by civilisation over millenia.
And that's before you consider that much of what appears on reddit isn't "real experiences of real people" anyway, it's self-indulgent, exaggerated or downright made-up rubbish posted for meaningless "karma".
That is a very good point I didnt even mention, but you are totally correct. That demographic must have actual interesting stories and POV , but they will not appear on reddit without being grossly transformed.
"Real lived experience" is heavily overrated nowadays, in all sorts of domains. A bunch of individual anecdotes is not data - at least not before people have taken the time to tally them up properly, which usually happens on generation-level timescales.
I don't subscribe to the idea that all classics are mandatory. However, there is a certain amount of homework you would have to do if you want to understand the culture you live in. The Bible and Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Goethe, etc. Stories that other stories build on and extend, down through history. Scratch any contemporary book, movie, video game, whatever, and those sources are right under the surface. They're in the language you speak, the music you listen to. You are well served by having certain classics as part of your education, but if you are not curious about that stuff I am sure you can live your life without knowing.
I would say that reading the whole bible to "understand the culture you live in" is a massive over-investment of time, even if you're in a country where the culture is Christian or Jewish.
I used to read the whole Bible, annually, with a group of friends in college. It took about 60-70 hours, reading out loud in shifts. Less of a time investment than many TV series.
As for understanding the culture you live in, the historical cultures documented certainly differ from modern ones. It still provides a basis for some interesting comparisons between the Biblical books and groups that claim heritage from them.
I took a course in college called "European Political Thought" and one of the texts we had to read was the bible. Reading it cover to cover revealed a number of surprises to me. I had to go to church as a kid so I knew the basics but I was never very religious. The best moments in class were the uncomfortable reactions of a few of the students who were clearly quite religious.
A "massive over-investment of time", indeed, unless you are doing it for college credit ;)
OK, I'll bite: what did Goethe write that you consider indispensable to someone's education? I can just about stand one of his plays and a few of his poems, though I think the world would be perfectly fine without them.
His prose, though, I hate with the force of a thousand suns. I've never read a book so infused with insufferable wankery as "Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre".
Not to forget that Goethe himself considered his most important work his contributions to Physics, where he tried to argue that Isaac Newton was all wrong about Optics. Needless to say that Physics esteemed him less highly than Literature did.
To be honest, reading that essay reminded me why I (personally) don’t enjoy classics more than modern work: the language of modern works is already familiar, making for a far more enjoyable experience.
I do enjoy some classics (love Dostoyevsky), but in general if I open a book and find the prose to be more of a hike than a stream, I don’t open it again.
It doesn't take inordinately much practice/exposure to get into the flow of (good) past writing in a language you are fluent in, and if you keep at it, it gets easier with practice.
You do have to pay a bit of attention to words whose meanings have drifted over time; comparable to false cognates in a foreign language.
Keep in mind many classics are translated and retranslated in a contemporary tongue. I was reading some Plutarch and found it incredibly accessible and easy to read - most Latin texts that I have read are quiet easy.
Until I started reading them I was expecting something more like the Bible - so terse it is exhausting.
> [...] he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years.
> "That's the only kind of book I can trust", he said.
> "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
The Lindy Effect[1] is a good answer to this question. In a sort of pseudo-evolutionary way, timeless ideas have a way of persisting because they are well-adapted for consumption no matter what the cultural milieu. There is, of course, survivorship bias to take into consideration, but I think this is a useful heuristic.
Not that I believe you shouldn’t read new books (because you should sometimes) but that would be a more interesting question: “Why should you read new books?” Because given the half-life of information/facts/data, it’s a risky proposition from a opportunity cost standpoint. You’re basically hoping the book becomes a classic — and therefore it has staying usefulness and that answers the original question on why you should read classics — or you simply what to be plugged into the zeitgeist for networking or other reasons.
Unrelated, I am always fascinated by classics, especially ones from antiquity, because they really demonstrate how very little we’ve changed as a species. The problems facing Seneca or Cicero and the questions they asked themselves aren’t all that different from the ones we have today.
The same logic is applicable to news headlines. I purposely avoid consuming major news outlets because their job is to sell my eyeballs to the highest bidder. If I instead focus on learning about the most significant events starting at N years in the past and going backwards, I’m much more likely to be learning about only those events that history has judged to be historically significant.
There’s a saying that “You always read about the one plane that crashes, not the millions that land safely.” The job of news media is to shock, awe, and transfix the public for the benefit of the shareholders. My bet / hope is that authors of history books don’t operate under the same economic model.
Jeff Bezos admonishes his employees to focus on the things about society and human nature which don’t change, rather than the things which do change, if they hope to move the needle at Amazon. I feel like that advice is broadly applicable to the public and those who are generally civic-minded, not just those who want to succeed in business.
The meaning of words changes over time. The classics are like strong currents in which some words have been caught and carried for many centuries. The way we speak and write today is an echo of the words spoken and written before us.
There are some who prefer to speak and write free from the burden of what was spoken or written before. They may see themselves as radical or pragmatic, seeking to subvert the influence of the past or at least avoid its prejudices. But they are no more likely to subvert or avoid those past influences than others who have immersed themselves in them because whatever they say or write will be heard and read by audiences who have been brought up in them.
As American classic author Mark Twain observed, the past does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. We read the classics to find the rhythms and rhymes of life, to find articulated with clarity what we ourselves might otherwise only have seen in dim half-light. Once in the light, these rhythms and rhymes become a shared experience that binds us together, not only in terms of how we speak and write, but in terms of how we think and feel, yes ultimately in terms of who we are.
Art makes allusions, and is inspired by, and builds off of, other work. There's even great work that, when you boil it down, is done in homage to earlier creations or creators.
Being familiar with classic literature is one way to appreciate the rest of culture, as it gives you a reference for everything that comes after it.
Many of the classic books that are still available are those that explore profound truths about who we are or tell stories that affect us deeply. They have been examined and discussed for centuries (or even millennia) and they form the foundation that modern thought, society and storytelling is based on.
Reading the classics give you an appreciation of how little is new in the world. You'll see that most modern works are shallow reworking of the classics.
And that's OK. It's always been this way.
You'll also develop a healthy skepticism for those claiming that "nothing like this has happened before," "no one could have foreseen this" or that "we live in unprecedented times".
The classics are a distillation of the best thinking of mankind, and they are free. Why on Earth would you not want to read them?
I'd love a good literature class where we intersperse classic and contemporary writing. Often times I wonder how much of the subtext I am missing due to my ignorance of the classics. It'd be a lot of fun to read some Ralph Ellison, then a Chang Rae Lee novel.
After all in film, an area I'm a little better with the classics (although not entirely—I have massive gaps), it's really fun to point out the allusions and inspirations. The deep focus multi-narrative comedy of errors that is The Rules of the Game begets the combinatorial explosion of country music that is Nashville begets the post modern family drama of Yi Yi begets the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Or how non-linear editing in Hiroshima, Mon Amour could lead to Petulia.
I’ve been into this idea for a while and even created a side project to help read the classics instead of social media, or HN (you can check my profile if interested)
The books I absolutely hated being forced to read in school have been much more enjoyable as an adult.
Yes I've found that too, and I regret I did not read more literature when I was younger. I'm objectively highly educated (phd in electrical engineering) but at some point realized I was pretty hollow outside of some narrow specialization - like Sherlock Holmes who doesnt know the moon goes around the earth because it doesnt relate to solving crimes.
To some extent I was not mature enough in high school to take literature seriously, but even now 20+ years later, I'm pretty sure I would reject it just as forcefully if it was presented as it was in school, with all the life sucked out.
While we're on the topic, Xenophon's "Anabasis" is probably both the greatest military memoir of all-time and the greatest adventure story of all-time.
Heck, maybe also a candidate for greatest learning-on-the-job and leadership story too.
It's really an incredible work. The "Why am I lying here?" monologue still gives me chills.
Ok, I wanted to read "Anabasis" for quite some time, but never actually gotten myself to it. However, you provided the final nudge, I'm already past page 10.
The classics are a set of texts we've agreed on as being the classics. Their status is often deeply entrenched, probably rightly so. Beyond the undeniable beauty and the reflections on the human condition throughout the ages, it's a common societal anchor. Think of how many people know what 'My white whale means' but have never read Melville. Having read it, you can actually understand the reference. Though as I type this, I think I've only shot my argument in the foot and made the case for reading the cliff notes....
What are good "starter" classics (and translations, where relevant) to help people get into them?
I enjoy Pride and Prejudice, Count of Monte Cristo, the Figaro trilogy, and the parts of Les Mis that I didn't skip (finding the gems in the long side notes is tough).
Translator is important because I've tried to push through some other works with whatever was free online and it was rough.
I think it depends on where you're coming from—like, what do you already read? Romance? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Contemporary adventure fiction? Young adult (Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, et c.)?
There are a couple kinds of classics: there are adventure stories that have endured, and there are books that are considered outstanding literature. There's some overlap in these categories, but there are plenty which are definitely in one category but not the other.
There are some difficulties that accompany classics: 1) quality of translation, if not in a language you can read; 2) "old" language, if in one you can (also a problem in translations, actually, especially public-domain ones), 3) they take place in times that are alien enough that they're harder to understand now than they were originally, and 4) in the case of "literary" works, what one may be expected to appreciate about them is... not always the same sort of thing one may expect to appreciate about, say, a Tom Clancy novel. For most people it takes time to really get that, and begin to enjoy it.
Research and advice can help with #1, and one must get used to the idea that one may read a book once and hate it, but read it again in another translation and love it, and anyway, it's not a problem for everything, just works in translation. Exposure and practice are what get you through #2 and #4, precisely like getting into a new genre of music (especially one that's considered hard to appreciate, like, say, jazz or classical music, but hell, hip-hop's dense AF and takes time to really get, too). #3, exposure helps (as you pick up more about various cultures and time periods) but you've really gotta get comfortable with annotated editions and seeking extra material outside the book you're trying to read.
So, I'd say entry-level depends on the kind of classic, and where you're coming from.
Adventure-classic? For a native English speaker? Easy recommendation for King Solomon's Mines. It's great, it's pulpy, it's not terribly long, it's... weirdly modern in some ways? The language isn't old enough to be hard to read. Delightful, even in 2021.
Adventure-classic + literature? The Odyssey. Easy. If you find verse hard to read, just get a prose translation. Bonus: try to appreciate the so-called "Telemachy" (a few "books" [chapters] about Telemachus looking for his father, but mostly just drinking with his dad's old acquaintances). You'll be on your way to appreciating the more literary-side of classics if you can find enjoyment in that part.
You a sci-fi reader and want to learn to appreciate more literary things? Bradbury. Lots. Of. Bradbury. When you're loving his "boring" stories, you've made it.
Everyone who likes romance seems to get into Austen just fine, so that's easy. If you bounce off the more popular ones, try Persuasion. It's very short and, I gather, didn't get a "polishing" edit/rewrite pass from Austen so it reads differently from the others. Maybe stretch into Isak Dinesen's short stories? Not romance, exactly, but I think it'd do the job.
I'm garbage at fantasy, so I'll leave that rec. to someone else. Tolkien seems obvious, but IDK, and I'm not sure he's really a great gateway to broader "literature", and anyway I'm not that well read in him (I've read Fellowship and The Hobbit—I enjoyed The Hobbit). Ditto young-adult. The usual path there is just to move into friendly, short, easy-to-read semi-literary authors like Vonnegut, I think.
Would you have any recommendations for short classics? I like sci-fi and fantasy, but I am very open to any good literature as long as it isn't depressing or disturbing.
King Solomon's Mines would count as fantasy-adventure, for its time period. It gets listed among influences on or precursors to 20th-century fantasy literature pretty often. I think it's 200ish pages, maybe 250. It's closer to Indiana Jones than to modern fantasy, though. You're not going to find a ton of "high fantasy" before Tolkien, if that's your thing. Mostly fantasy-adventure (as King Solomon's) or "low fantasy" (think: Conan the Barbarian) and a few works playing with folk-tale and fairy tale motifs.
Sci-fi is easy because it's a genre full of great short stories and novellas. Arguably, it's better suited to those than to novels. The New Hugo Winners collections showcase a lot of shorter works that tend to be a bit more "literary" (in an early Asimov-penned forward to one of these, he claims to have passed off editing duties on the "New Hugo" series because he doesn't quite understand the appeal of these newer stories). The chief difference is that older, less-literary sci-fi tends to focus on ideas, while in more recent material characters, theme, mood, and quality of prose take greater prominence. However there were authors working in that more literary space in the more classic-era of sci-fi like, as I mentioned before, Bradbury.
I'd hit up broad collections of classic sci-fi stories, which will mostly be good stuff and will give you an idea of the intentions and capabilities of a ton of authors, most of whom have large bodies of work to explore, and the New Hugo Winners series. Both kinds of book are readily found for very little money at thrift shops and used book stores. I'd avoid other annual collections (Year's Best, The Hugo Winners) until you've got a better idea of what you're looking for—get wide-ranging best-of collections and the New Hugos until then.
Regarding 1, use availability bias. Whatever is in front of you. Classics vs. Cannon is a nuance there. Fredrick Douglas, not classic, but certainly cannon. Toni Morrison, again, certainly not classic, bu absolutely literary cannon.
If we can separate cannon from Classics, then the question of which classics becomes easy, because any single one will do because they express something that is independent and consistent in spite of the attitudes of the time. There is the small matter of when they were translated, by whom and under what conditions, but you're into the realm of scholarship at that point instead of engaging with the expression of an experience that has managed to persist in the face of change.
The underlying premise of rhetorical questions that destabiliize an idea is that conflict itself is valuable and facilitates progress. While it is useful to have a critical or contra reference point as a control for deeper analysis of an idea, the challenge of the current era is we have a set of critical frameworks that exist to manufacture conflict without adding additional co-ordinates, or as a means to neutralize an opposing view.
So yes, if we set the Classics against a backdrop of meaninglessness, as a kind of scientistic randomized control, the two questions of which ones to read, and the legitimacy of the culture that produced them appears to be a tantalizing and sensational conflict. But viewed through the lens of inconceivable longevity over millennia, they're a pretty good reference for the condition of our species.
I'm trying to get into the habit of upvoting things I don't agree with, and I hope your comment survives so that its controversy isn't washed away.
Why not. Read whatever you like. Stop trying to be superhuman and enjoy whatever you feel like reading and don’t judge others for what they enjoy reading.
Plus a lot of them are fun as heck to read, page turners, not at all difficult, e.g. Pride and Prejudice or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo and so many others.