Rethinking the Classics

[catsittingstill]

_Pride and Prejudice_ got a mention in the comments a few months ago, and it occurred to me that I could probably get it from manybooks.net for free, and sure enough, I could.  Yesterday I finished _Lord Darcy Investigates_ and started reading _Pride and Prejudice_ in the car as Kip drove us back from Knoxville. 

I ended up staying up half the night reading it.

Way back when in 8th grade I had a class where we were required to read "classics."  I don't remember who set the book list, or what rationale they used, if indeed I ever knew.  All I remember is that we had to read a certain number of books from a particular set of shelves, and I, a voracious reader unintimidated by large books, dragged "The Count of Monte Cristo" off the shelf and opened it up.

All I can say is that it was a spectacularly bad match of book to reader.  I thought it was slow, it was boring, it took forever to get to the point, and when the poor beggar dug his way out of his cell with a spoon, only to wind up in another cell--well, that was just a cheat, was what it was, and I wasn't going to read another page of this garbage. 

I passed the class by reading Shakespeare plays.  They weren't great, but they were okay and they got the job done.

Again in 11th grade or so, I had another brush with the classics.  We were supposed to read several works by one author and then do some sort of report on the author's style and themes and such; I don't remember it very well.  My teacher, for some reason, told me he thought I would like Faulkner.  And rather than do the sensible thing and say, "well I'll read a book of his and see what I think, and if I don't like it, I'll read Shakespeare, okay?"  I just agreed.  Which left me stuck reading four Faulkner books, and boy--that was another spectacular mismatch of book to reader.  I do not read for a vicarious sense of disgust, and likable characters are an important part of my enjoyment of a book, so I wound up holding my nose and choking down four books set in a decaying society with decaying psyches, not to mention the occasional decaying body, and not one character in the set with whom one could contemplate spending an afternoon without wanting to run screaming in the opposite direction. 

So I had this deep, unexamined conviction that I didn't want to read the classics.  They were terrible books, which our ancestors read because they couldn't get anything better--the same way they used to eat grubs from under logs.  But now we have clean, fresh, wholesome food and science fiction and mysteries and fantasy books, and we don't have to eat grubs or read classics anymore.  Isn't it wonderful to live in the twenty-first century?

So _Pride and Prejudice_ was a bit of a surprise.  Apparently there are some strawberries under those logs too.  I'm not going to eat (uh, read) just *any* classic.  But I might read some more of Jane Austen.  Maybe.  If they smell okay.

Comments

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

How the books are presented to you can make a difference, too.

If you're looking for recommendations, I can't strongly enough praise Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird." Had a very profound effect on me in high school.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I surprised myself in a very similar way. Turns out I like a lot of 19th century British lit. You also might want to try Russian novels, though they're more of an acquired taste. A selection of short stories from the big names would be a good introduction instead of jumping right into some of the more infamously long works.

[mdlbear]

That one wasn't a classic when I read it...

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Well, it's really not so old by the standards of classic literature, but it was assigned reading when I was in school, so I figured it fit.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

I mostly agree with you regarding the school experience. Dickens and Hardy convinced me that their intent was to go beyond the portrayal of suffering and transmit an experience of the real thing.

I was much happier when I encountered books for study that could deal with "classical" subjects using a modern tone and style. Even if one of those was by Faulkner. :-)

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

I have examined my conviction that I don't like the classics, and it still tests out fairly solid. I not only don't like-them-because-they're-the-CLASSICS-boy as seems to be expected of one when young, I don't actually enjoy reading them. Sad but true.

when the poor beggar dug his way out of his cell with a spoon, only to wind up in another cell--

The Goons did that one better and quicker.

"It's good to be out of that filthy cell 25. Now then--where are we?"

"In filthy cell 26."

[mdlbear]

Most 19th-early 20th century novels leave me cold. Drama and poetry, on the other hand... That love extends back to the Greeks, and even high school lit classes couldn't kill it. Everything from Homer and Euripides to T. S. Elliot and Yeats.

Chaucer in the original Middle English, by the way, is perfectly comprehensible provided you ignore the look of it and read it out loud the way it's written.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

For my purposes, "classics" translates as "out of copyright and available for free as an e-book." Alas, "To Kill A Mockingbird" does not qualify. I intend to read it someday but right now my entertainment budget is on a diet.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I think I'll start out slow and easy with some more Austen. Wouldn't want to eat a grub by mistake. Or even take a bite out of one.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I found Dickens more bearable than Faulkner. Maybe it's all in which books were chosen. Don't think I've read any Hardy; but I will keep your warning in mind.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) So it's still a cheat, but at least you haven't invested an hour and a half of reading time.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Austen's one of my all-time favorite authors. Most people who treat her as a "classic" and assume that means dull don't realize how nasty, and how funny, she is.

I recommend _Emma_ next, if you liked P&P.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Kip loves Chaucer in the original(it's his specialty, actually). Me, I favor the translations, because I can read them faster. But it's kind of a taste issue.

What *is* it about high school lit classes, anyway? Maybe I was just too young for that section of my brain to have matured properly? Maybe they can't go into sufficient detail to make things interesting because they can't leave anyone behind? I seriously don't get *why* I hated it so much then that I steered clear of any English-y class in college that I wasn't required to take, but now find some of it kind of cool.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) Thanks for the recommendation! I'll give it a try.

[mdlbear]

I may eventually give her another try, though I suspect ones' opinion of Austen may be gender-related. The only novel of hers I've read, some 45 years ago, is Northanger Abbey; it probably would have been funny if I'd been in the right mood, but at the time I was much more interested in the gothic novels it was a parody of.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Public libraries are your friend.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

My Dickens/Hardy aversion is entirely about a low signal-to-noise ratio, so we're probably not measuring on the same scale. To be fair, "A Christmas Carol" demonstrates that Dickens could get to the point when he wanted to.

I don't know whether Hardy could tell a concise story or not; I never got past all those descriptions of hedges. :-)

[allisona.livejournal.com]

I was the same way with Dickens. Really hated the Dickens I read in high school- I think I was just too young to appreciate it at the time and starting with "A Tale of Two Cities" was too complex for a Gr. 10 kid with no historical background to the work.

Discovered Dickens on my own in my later teens. Started with "Oliver Twist" and "A Christmas Carol" and worked myself into more complex works. Now I'm mad for Dickens and "David Copperfield" is one of my favorite novels, but it's no thanks to reading Dickens in high school.

As an English major, though, I've read more than my share of classics in school. Some I loved, some not so much, some were painful. My favorite authors are still pretty much all writers I discovered myself. Having said that, though, there is a huge lengthy list of classics I haven't read yet that I would very much like to read sometime in my life.

Must admit I can't really get into Jane Austin. I have tried more than once and no doubt will try again.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

You gotta remember: Dickens was being paid by the word, essentially. The longer he could string out his tales, which were being pubbed as serials in their initial appearance, the better for him financially. It always bugged the life out of me, though, when the plot would come to a screeching halt anytime the viewpoint character stepped into a new location and stopped to take a look around. Worse than the drydock scene in the first Star Trek movie.

Have you ever Kipl'd?

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I posted my reaction to Kipling's Captains Courageous a few weeks back in my own journal. I've been singing his stuff for years, but haven't really read that many of the stories, other than the Mowgli collections that my mom got for me when I was That Age.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

My impression is that we actually keep a lot of students in high school for too long. And most high school classes--except in very good schools, or those taught by extraordinary teachers--are just not very good.

If you like P&P...

[madrona.livejournal.com]

Jane Eyre NOW. I reread the damn thing every six months, and the preface to the second edition (which is amazing) more often than that.

Fortunately for me, I ended up in classes where everyone was assigned the same book, and there were *lots* of them. So I have a fair idea of what kind of classic appeals to me. William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are not worth it (except for A Rose For Emily, but only when I'm in the mood for some slow-dawning horror) but Alice Walker and Joseph Adler are. (Though you have to have a strong stomach for The Color Purple and Catch 22, the emotional payoff and humor are worth it. There is no payoff in, for example, The Bluest Eye or Beloved or As I Lay Dying. I mean, unless you like bestiality, incest and gangrene for their own sake.)

I've not been able to get through another Austen novel (I tried Emma and Sense and Sensibility and couldn't get past the idiots in the first chapter. Later found out that Jane wasn't so sure about P&P because the language was so sparkling she was afraid that people would miss the social commentary. Pity.) and didn't really enjoy Wuthering Heights, by Charlotte Bronte's sister Emily.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Ever since high school, I've thought that high school English classes requiring students to read Great Literature does a great disservice. Reading any book is a lot less pleasant when you have to do it on a deadline, have stupid class discussions about it, and write essays and take tests about it. Some of the books I had to read in high school were good, but experiencing them that way still made me less happy about them, and some of them were dreadful. I'm smart and a reader, but even so, the experience I had with required reading in high school, as a whole, makes me less likely to pick up a Great Book than I imagine I would be if I'd not had the experience. It's no wonder to me that average high school kids who aren't reading for fun, only the stuff they're forced to, grow up to be adults that never read at all.

Oh, and just have to mention my feeling of true horror at the thought of having to read FOUR Faulkner novels. I only had to read one (Light in August) and not only was it the worst book I've ever read, reading it is one of my most unpleasant memories of high school, and I don't look back on high school fondly.

[thymidinekinase.livejournal.com]

Now I feel all guilty - I had quite good high-school lit classes, and did not develop this sad disdain for the classics ... once I got over my Dad making me read Don Quixote when I was 10 or so.