Why are classics (books) praised by everyone but read by no one?

[No Wikipedia Cites]

Mark Twain defined a literary classic as "a book which people praise and don't read"

I remember Mark Twain's quote of that. But is this true? Why do people not read the classics? If they aren't read much, why are they 'classics'?

Please explain.

[Bridget Burke]

Which people?

In the last few years, I finally read the Jane Austen books I'd known more on film--why, yes, she's very good! All those film versions are perhaps a bit too romantic & not quite witty enough.

And I've spent lots of time recently with Ford Madox Ford; specifically his Parade's End--a classic that really is not that well known. Ford was hugely prolific & began becoming "out of style" even when alive. (He was bit of a premature fogey.)

There are others out there who share my enthusiasms. Do the masses care? Maybe not. Their loss...

I read widely & mostly not "the classics." Over the centuries, people who read have read widely & perhaps not wisely. But certain works keep coming up again & again.

[jordanr2]

I've always heard it as "something everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read." I think a significant part of people's resistance to the classics is simply the perception of them as dry, dusty old things that were forced on us in school - we carry forward our memories of having to read The Scarlet Letter and Heart of Darkness back in the day, perhaps before we were ready for them, and associate that with a great deal of books written before a certain recent point in history.

[jordanr2]

Originally Posted by Bridget Burke

And I've spent lots of time recently with Ford Madox Ford; specifically his Parade's End--a classic that really is not that well known. Ford was hugely prolific & began becoming "out of style" even when alive. (He was bit of a premature fogey.)

Nice! I'm intrigued by the upcoming miniseries of Parade's End - agreed, though, about the perception of him as something of a perennially unfashionable figure (with the exception of The Good Soldier, another of those books that everyone seems to know a little about but not many seem to have read). There's a chapter in J.M. Coetzee's veiled autobiography Youth where the main character, sitting in a library reading some very obscure work of Ford's for his thesis, suddenly falls into despair that he's forcing himself to read this stuff.

[Bridget Burke]

This bit from Alan Judd's biography of Ford Madox Ford explains a bit more....

Ford was not a hero in the Hemingway mould: he was vulnerable, untidy, sentimental, funny in a way that Hemingway could probably sense but not see, and genuinely heroic; he was superior in age, status, experience, knowledge of his craft, sensitivity and ability; he was unaggressive, fat and wheezing, had fought in the trenches and was unaccountably popular with women. There was much that Hemingway might have found hard to forgive.

Looking for more, I came upon Kenneth Rexroth's Classics Revisited & More Classics--brief, brilliant books with many excerpts available online. From the chapter on Parade's End comes an explanation relevant to the OP:

The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life with thorough approval and with that necessary identification that Coleridge long ago called suspension of disbelief. It is not ideas or ideologies or dogmas that become unacceptable. Any cultivated person should be able to accept temporarily the cosmology and religion of Dante or Homer. The emotional attitudes and the responses to people and to the crises of life in most fiction come to seem childish as we ourselves experience the real thing. Books written far away and long ago in quite different cultures with different goods and goals in life, about people utterly unlike ourselves, may yet remain utterly convincing — The Tale of Genji, The Satyricon, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Burnt Njal, remain true to our understanding of the ways of man to man the more experienced we grow. Of only a few novels in the twentieth century is this true. Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is one of those books.

Personally, I read a lot of nonfiction & quite a bit of genre (SF & a few mysteries.) Don't really keep up with current "literary" fiction. And, lately, I've been finding certain classics increasingly seductive....

[Le Ministre de l'au-delà]

Originally Posted by No Wikipedia Cites

I remember Mark Twain's quote of that.

There are those who would consider Mark Twain a writer of 'classics'.

[Kimstu]

There are a lot of people of all literary tastes who wish they read more than they actually do. Consequently, there are lots of books of all genres that a lot of people would like to have read but have never got around to actually reading.

Since "the classics" are known at least by reputation to most readers whatever their individual literary tastes, then naturally there are a lot of people who have heard of them but haven't read them. And thus it may seem at a superficial glance as though nobody actually reads them.

Which is, of course, bullshit. Check out the sales figures for classic novels to see that a hell of a lot of people are buying them (and not just high school and college literature students, either). Or look at online book discussion sites to see that a hell of a lot of people are reading them.

Often interest in a classic book, as Bridget noted, is spurred by seeing a film adaptation. George Eliot is a case in point:

[...] George Eliot's novels have had some notable BBC television adaptations: Daniel Deronda in 1970 and 2002, Silas Marner in 1985, and Middlemarch in 1994. The Middlemarch production resulted in paperback editions of the novel entering the best-seller lists for the first time since the novel's original publication [...]

[Kim o the Concrete Jungle]

I've always found it very suspicious that people who sing the praises of Don Quixote only ever seem to mention stuff that happens in the first couple of chapters...

The thing I find with most of the older writers (let's say, for the sake of argument, everyone prior to Dickens) is that they like to interrupt their fiction with long essays on morality or philosophy, which are quite tedious to me, because the arguments are usually facile and unsophisticated. Can any modern person truly read something like The Pilgrim's Progress without finding it ridiculous? I know I can't. Henry Fielding in Tom Jones is the one exception, because his little moral lectures are satirical and pretty funny. But even there, I find myself starting to skip them. Yes, okay, I get the point -- can we get on with the story now?

In short, I think it's this inability to get on with it that makes so many old books so difficult to read.

[Implicit]

Classics are having a bit of a revival actually. People with eReaders are downloading free digital copies of public domain classics by the truckload. A million downloads a week from Project Gutenberg alone.

[Simplicio]

Walden? Usually, when I read classics I like them, or at least understand why people like them, but I found Walden to be damn near unreadable.

Also, while I liked the whole book, I suspect the number of people that have read the first chapter of Paradise Lost is a lot larger then the number of people that have read the last chapter of Paradise Lost. The Satan bits are famous, the Garden of Eden and God bits not so much.

Same with the Divine Comedy actually. The Inferno is famous, no one ever reads the later bits.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Simplicio

Also, while I liked the whole book, I suspect the number of people that have read the first chapter of Paradise Lost is a lot larger then the number of people that have read the last chapter of Paradise Lost. The Satan bits are famous, the Garden of Eden and God bits not so much.

Same with the Divine Comedy actually. The Inferno is famous, no one ever reads the later bits.

"No one" is, of course, one of those bits of careless hyperbole that produce misleading generalizations that eventually lead people to open threads wondering how the classics can be so well regarded if no one actually reads them.

Personally, I like the Paradiso best, what with all the cool Ptolemaic astronomy.

[Simplicio]

No one reads "no one" in that sentence and thinks it literally means no one.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Simplicio

No one reads "no one" in that sentence and thinks it literally means no one.

I didn't say anybody did. I was just pointing out that that sort of hyperbole encourages people to mistakenly believe, not necessarily that literally no one reads the classics, but that the classics are much less read than in fact they are.

[Chronos]

One thing I've found is that many classics are rip-roaring page-turners once you get into them, but start off slow. So if you don't have the incentive to get past that early slow part, you might give up on the book, and miss out on all the good parts.

[VOW]

After I retired, I thought, "Yanno, I REALLY should read the classics!"

First one I picked up was "Pride and Prejudice."

It was the LAST one I picked up. It was AWFUL.

But the absolute honors for literary classics in the "Just Kill Me Now" category is ANYTHING by Faulkner.


~VOW

[Thudlow Boink]

Originally Posted by Simplicio

Walden? Usually, when I read classics I like them, or at least understand why people like them, but I found Walden to be damn near unreadable.

One thing I see over and over again in threads that discuss classics here (not to mention elsewhere) is that one person's "damn near unreadable" is almost invariably other peoples' "I love this book." Just from that effect alone, for most classics you're going to hear lots of praise (from some) and lots of disdain (from others).

[Thudlow Boink]

Originally Posted by jordanr2

I've always heard it as "something everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read."

There are indeed books that I'd like to have read but don't particularly look forward to reading—including but not limited to classics. You can judge how much a book is worth reading by two sorts of criteria: (1) how much you enjoy or are entertained by it while you're reading it; and (2) how much of value you have gained from having read it. Some books score high on one of these categories but not on the other.

In particular, some books are easy and enjoyable to read; they kind of carry you along. Others are more difficult: you have to force yourself to keep turning the pages. This difficulty isn't necessarily due to any fault or flaw in the book itself. It may be the book's age: it's written in an archaic style, or includes out-of-date vocabulary, or has lots of references to things that modern people no longer are familiar with or care about. It might be the book's density: it needs to be read slowly and carefully to really understand it. It may be that your (the reader's) mind works in a different way from the author's.

But, for some works, it's worth the difficulty, because of what you learn from the book, or because of the way its characters or settings or scenes or events or ideas become a part of you. Many (though not all) classics fall into this category, at least for me.

I think a significant part of people's resistance to the classics is simply the perception of them as dry, dusty old things that were forced on us in school - we carry forward our memories of having to read The Scarlet Letter and Heart of Darkness back in the day, perhaps before we were ready for them, and associate that with a great deal of books written before a certain recent point in history.

Yeah, part of the problem with classics is when people try to—or are required to—read them at the wrong point in their lives.

[Wendell Wagner]

Most people don't read books as an adult except on rare occasions. The median number of books read by an adult American per year is one. So if you talk to the average person who doesn't consider themselves much of a reader, of course they are going to say that they don't read classics. They don't read current books that much either.

Most people have a limited amount of time, even those who read a lot. Sure, I've read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, 1984, Crime and Punishment, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, The Lord of the Rings, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Titus Groan, Neuromancer, Hamlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Brave New World, Five Children and It, Pale Fire, Beowulf, and The Man Who Was Thursday. But when am I going to get around to reading War and Peace, The Sound and the Fury, Stand on Zanzibar, Mission of Gravity, The Phantom of the Opera, The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, The Count of Monte Cristo, Beau Geste, The Day of the Locust, The Age of Innocence, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Maus, The Dispossessed, Gravity's Rainbow, and Remembrance of Things Passed? Even if you read a lot, it's unlikely that you'll be able to read all the books that someone somewhere has called a classic. The few who have are generally those who are able to do it professionally by teaching about books or reviewing them, and it takes the whole lives to do it. And, no, I'm not interested in arguing about which of the books I've listed are classics, so don't waste your time posting about it.

[DrFidelius]

I am currently reading The Three Musketeers, and finding that I am quite wrong about everything I thought I knew about it. I keep finding that "classics" are as good or better than everyone believes, but I am still unable to make it completely through any Dickens longer than "A Christmas Carol."

[LavenderBlue]

Giants in the Earth. Lousy book by Scandanavian Nobelist that I was forced to read in high school. Bo-ring!

[WordMan]

Originally Posted by No Wikipedia Cites

I remember Mark Twain's quote of that. But is this true? Why do people not read the classics? If they aren't read much, why are they 'classics'?

Please explain.

It means that most folk assume the book must've meant something to historical folks, but not them.

They would be wrong in this thinking.

Same as it ever was.

Fortunately, this is an inappropriately over-broad generalization that is proven wrong enough that the books endure. Good books find a way.

[Lynn Bodoni]

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

One thing I see over and over again in threads that discuss classics here (not to mention elsewhere) is that one person's "damn near unreadable" is almost invariably other peoples' "I love this book." Just from that effect alone, for most classics you're going to hear lots of praise (from some) and lots of disdain (from others).

Yep. I can't stand Jane Austen, for instance. Couldn't stand her in high school, and I can't stand her to this day. My nook came with four books in it already, and one of them was by Austen. So I thought that I'd give it another try, maybe my tastes have changed and I will be able to enjoy it. Nope. Still can't stand her. I can't stand Dickens, either, not when I read him in high school, and not today. There are lots of people who enjoy both Austen and Dickens, but I doubt that I ever will.

Now, my tastes HAVE changed over the years, and I will occasionally re-read books that I hated when I was younger, but today I am able to enjoy them. Partly it's just life experience that enables me to find deeper meanings in the books. And it goes the other way, too. Books that enthralled me as a teen/young adult now seem to be painfully shallow.

But at least I do make the effort to try books that I have previously disliked, if I hear others praise them.

[RealityChuck]

Originally Posted by No Wikipedia Cites

I remember Mark Twain's quote of that. But is this true? Why do people not read the classics? If they aren't read much, why are they 'classics'?

Please explain.

You are aware that Twain was a humorist? He was being funny.

The kernel of truth in the joke is that there are classic novels that are not popular. Often that's because the language puts people off or that the writing is not the current style. They remain classic because the people who are willing to read them can still see the things that made the great.

Twain, of course, knew his joke wasn't true. At the time he said it, Shakespeare was the most popular playwright in America, and Dickens was still a massively popular author (though it may not have been considered among the classics). I'm pretty sure James Fenimore Cooper was also popular at the time, though Twain was -- to say the least -- not a fan of Cooper.

[Springtime for Spacers]

Originally Posted by Chronos

One thing I've found is that many classics are rip-roaring page-turners once you get into them, but start off slow. So if you don't have the incentive to get past that early slow part, you might give up on the book, and miss out on all the good parts.

Absolutely, War and Peace was the classic (heh heh) example of that for me. Once I got past the first 60 pages or so I raced through it, at one time reading 200 pages in one go. And that was in spite of the long passages of polemic -- at least until the last hundred pages when I confess I did skip a particularly long bit of polemic to get to the end of the story.

I do find film and TV adaptions a great way to get into classics. With Dickens I used to have a problem seeing the wood for the trees: his writing is so dense with character and description and I couldn't tell foreground from background. Reading Bleak House shortly after seeing the BBC adaptation gave me the map and I've gone on to read and enjoy most of the novels since. On the other hand no amount of George Eliot adaptions can get me over my antipathy. Of course no one is going to enjoy every classic .

[Springtime for Spacers]

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

There are indeed books that I'd like to have read but don't particularly look forward to reading—including but not limited to classics. You can judge how much a book is worth reading by two sorts of criteria: (1) how much you enjoy or are entertained by it while you're reading it; and (2) how much of value you have gained from having read it. Some books score high on one of these categories but not on the other.

In particular, some books are easy and enjoyable to read; they kind of carry you along. Others are more difficult: you have to force yourself to keep turning the pages. This difficulty isn't necessarily due to any fault or flaw in the book itself. It may be the book's age: it's written in an archaic style, or includes out-of-date vocabulary, or has lots of references to things that modern people no longer are familiar with or care about. It might be the book's density: it needs to be read slowly and carefully to really understand it. It may be that your (the reader's) mind works in a different way from the author's.

But, for some works, it's worth the difficulty, because of what you learn from the book, or because of the way its characters or settings or scenes or events or ideas become a part of you. Many (though not all) classics fall into this category, at least for me.

Yeah, part of the problem with classics is when people try to—or are required to—read them at the wrong point in their lives.

Yep, there are books I didn't think I liked much when reading them but which I still think about years after more fun books have been forgotten.

[DocCathode]

I think a large part of the problem is that many people just see this large monolithic thing called The Classics. They assume that if they didn't like one author they won't like the rest of them.

For the record, I despise Dickens but love Shakespeare and Poe.

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Wendell Wagner

Most people don't read books as an adult except on rare occasions. The median number of books read by an adult American per year is one. So if you talk to the average person who doesn't consider themselves much of a reader, of course they are going to say that they don't read classics. They don't read current books that much either.

Cute statistic, but not even close to being real.

Among adults, 73% of the population reads at least one book a year. Most read between 5-7 books, but the average number of books read per year by adults who read is 20. Even when you include the people who don't read, the average American reads 14 books a year.

http://surveys.ap.org/data/Ipsos/nat...%20Topline.pdf

[Dendarii Dame]

Originally Posted by RealityChuck

I'm pretty sure James Fenimore Cooper was also popular at the time, though Twain was -- to say the least -- not a fan of Cooper.

I read that Cooper became a novelist because he'd read a book by Jane Austen and said that he could write a better one. (It was in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, so it might not be accurate.) I told an English professor that, and I'll never forget the look on his face when he said, "Oh no, he couldn't."

As an English major, I read many of these books. Many were definitely slow going in places. OTOH, here and there were brilliant scenes or lines or characters that I thought were wonderful: Lady Catherine confronting Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, "Angels are but sharks well govern'd"--a line from Moby Dick, Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I also enjoyed seeing how the structure of the classics fit together.

That said, I didn't like Faulkner's stuff either. He started writing after he was fired from his job at the post office because he "refused to be at the beck and call of anybody with three cents for a stamp."

John Sutherland has written several fascinating books about the classics with titles like Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Was Heathcliff a Murderer? in which he discusses possible errors various authors may have made.

Sharks Well Govern'd--a great name for a band, IMHO.

[DocCathode]

Just thought of another reason. It's hard to find a good translation of those classics that aren't in English. IME Translations mostly come in two varieties-

Light and easy to read, but censored so as not to offend and leaving out many details.

or

Fully faithful to the original and leaving out no detail, but incredibly dry and boring.

I want to read Dante's Inferno, but have trouble finding a decent translation.

[Anaamika]

Originally Posted by VOW

After I retired, I thought, "Yanno, I REALLY should read the classics!"

First one I picked up was "Pride and Prejudice."

It was the LAST one I picked up. It was AWFUL.

But the absolute honors for literary classics in the "Just Kill Me Now" category is ANYTHING by Faulkner.


~VOW

Sense and Sensibility was much better.

-Mika, a reader of the classics. Some of the classics. The ones that appeal to me at any rate.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by DocCathode

I want to read Dante's Inferno, but have trouble finding a decent translation.

I enjoyed the Ciardi translation. I think Dorothy Sayers also translated it, but I never read her version.

[salinqmind]

I think Mark Twain was making a witticism. I've read classics in school and enjoyed some (The Odyssey) and loathed others (Heart of Darkness). A few times Mr. Sali and I get a yearning for self-improvement and try reading something good for us. He has enjoyed some of Ernest Hemmingway, which leaves me ice-cold with boredom. I enjoyed much of Thomas Hardy, which he can't get into at all. I'm hoping to get into Madame Bovary someday. I do think something like Cliff Notes, even if you aren't reading a book for school, is helpful to the casual reader.

[A Monkey With a Gun]

Originally Posted by Wendell Wagner

Most people don't read books as an adult except on rare occasions. The median number of books read by an adult American per year is one.

That's not true. While 27% of Americans admit to not having read a book last year, the median for the other 73% is 6.5 (mean of 20.4) books a year. 73% is "most people". Even if you adjust that median down to account for the minority that didn't read any, the median for all Americans is 4.5. source.

Ninja'd!

[Johnny Q]

Originally Posted by RealityChuck

You are aware that Twain was a humorist? He was being funny.

I'm pretty sure James Fenimore Cooper was also popular at the time, though Twain was -- to say the least -- not a fan of Cooper.

Or of Jane Austen for that matter.

[The Second Stone]

Of all the classics I have read, only Ulysses dragged, but it did have some amazing sentences and passages. Also, of the Divine Comedy, I only liked the part in hell.

All the other classics I have read have been wonderful. Including Faulkner. But I can see why many people would not like it.

[Jophiel]

I don't know if I'd trust a five year old survey. I know my book reading took a dive when I started spending my time on the internet. The number of people spending their time online (esp. Facebook, etc) now is greater than in 2007 and I'm sure that time came from somewhere.

This isn't to say no one reads books. I have no idea. I just wouldn't trust numbers from 2007 about it.

[Candyman74]

Originally Posted by No Wikipedia Cites

I remember Mark Twain's quote of that. But is this true? Why do people not read the classics? If they aren't read much, why are they 'classics'?

Please explain.

Because people refuse to read them due to those proud of their ignorance decry them as boring despite never having read them.

And those who have read them say they're really good.

Plus "nobody has read them" is untrue. Countless millions have. Just nobody you know.

[DocCathode]

Originally Posted by Candyman74

Because people refuse to read them due to those proud of their ignorance decry them as boring despite never having read them.

And those who have read them say they're really good.

I disagree with this. I was forced to read A Christmas Carol and Frankenstein in school. I went in expecting to really like Frankenstein. IMO It sucks. It is some of the suckiest suck to ever be called a classic. Carol was unbelievable, contrived, full of cardboard characters and shmaltz.

[A Monkey With a Gun]

Originally Posted by Jophiel

This isn't to say no one reads books. I have no idea. I just wouldn't trust numbers from 2007 about it.

Really, if you are going to doubt that cite and by doing so support Wendell Wagner's unsupported and incredible assertion that the majority of Americans read less than one book a year, one of you two is going to have to produce some numbers.

[Candyman74]

Originally Posted by DocCathode

I disagree with this. I was forced to read A Christmas Carol and Frankenstein in school. I went in expecting to really like Frankenstein. IMO It sucks. It is some of the suckiest suck to ever be called a classic. Carol was unbelievable, contrived, full of cardboard characters and shmaltz.

But they are good. Both of them.

You not liking them doesn't explain why so many people, as the OP says, laud them.

The answer to the question is: there are a lot of people who have read them who like them. There are a lot more people alive today who haven't, but that's not relevant.

And sure, some people won't. That's cool. Doesn't change the fact that many do.

Honestly, if everyone who ever read them thought they were shit, why would the OP's question exist?

Obviously I don't like every classic book, any more than I like every modern book. But the ones I like, I like; and plenty of others like the others.

[Princhester]

I've read a moderate sprinkling of classics. I find myself placing many of them into a category that I really need a name for; I put quite a few movies into it also.

It's a category of art in which I put works that:

1/ show tremendous originality and craft, which I admire, in some cases tremendously, but,

2/ I don't actually enjoy very much.

[Carmady]

I think it is about the word "classic" itself. For some reason famous literary works that I don't want to read, or which I have tried to read and didn't like, feel like they should be called "classics."

Books I like feel like they are alive. It feels wrong to call them "classic", even though it is accurate.

[DocCathode]

Originally Posted by Candyman74

But they are good. Both of them.

In your opinion they are good.

If you meant your previous post simply as opinion, I have no problem with it. But you said

And those who have read them say they're really good

As I (and you admit yourself) have read some of the classics and thought they stunk, this statement is obviously false.

[Candyman74]

Originally Posted by Princhester

I've read a moderate sprinkling of classics. I find myself placing many of them into a category that I really need a name for; I put quite a few movies into it also.

It's a category of art in which I put works that:

1/ show tremendous originality and craft, which I admire, in some cases tremendously, but,

2/ I don't actually enjoy very much.

I agree to an extent. There's a context; an artistic appreciation; and a recognition of their contribution.

I certainly wouldn't argue that they meet the entertainment requirements of modern culture.

But that doesn't make them shit, any more than the stuff people think is really great now is shit because people in 300 years won't enjoy it as much.

[DocCathode]

Originally Posted by Candyman74

But that doesn't make them shit, any more than the stuff people think is really great now is shit because people in 300 years won't enjoy it as much.

IMO a true classic must be timeless. Being too much of it's time is one of the many criticisms I have of Frankenstein.

[Candyman74]

Originally Posted by DocCathode

As I (and you admit yourself) have read some of the classics and thought they stunk, this statement is obviously false.

Sorry. Didn't realise I was talking to Sheldon Cooper!

To clarify: hyperbole is a common conversational device, interpreted by most as such. I feel my point was easy to understand, and that it would be clear to the casual observer that I wasn't claiming a unifying opinion of every person on our little planet. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm a fan of literary devices in favour of dry recitation. My mistake is that others recognise this.

Sorry, that comes across as snarky. I don't mean to be. Just trying to say my use if the words "those who" should not be construed as applying to 100%, but to many. I felt that obvious, but apparently it needs explicitly saying.

But I can see why you wouldn't be a fan of classic literature.

[Candyman74]

Originally Posted by DocCathode

IMO a true classic must be timeless. Being too much of it's time is one of the many criticisms I have of Frankenstein.

Then there is no such thing, surely?

I think Frankenstein is great. It's the Buffy of its time.

[DocCathode]

Originally Posted by Candyman74

Then there is no such thing, surely?

IMO there certainly are. I hold the Bard to be timeless. It's one of the many aspects of his greatness. I think Moby Dick is timeless as well.

[Jophiel]

Originally Posted by A Monkey With a Gun

Really, if you are going to doubt that cite and by doing so support Wendell Wagner's unsupported and incredible assertion that the majority of Americans read less than one book a year, one of you two is going to have to produce some numbers.

I don't need to produce anything as I said I have no idea. I'm not supporting anyone's numbers, I'm questioning the validity of a five year old survey regarding current reading habits.

[Candyman74]

Originally Posted by DocCathode

IMO there certainly are. I hold the Bard to be timeless. It's one of the many aspects of his greatness. I think Moby Dick is timeless as well.

I don't see how those are not of their time but Frankenstein is. I prefer Frankenstein to Moby Dick, for example.

I suspect this is - just like with modern books - just a taste thing.