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.
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).