When the classics were required and taught in school, some people joined the elite that requires and teaches them, leaving the rest in the lurch. The classics are only for people who can read well and have intelligence in the first place. Above all, you get out of something ONLY what YOU put into it, which explains how some people are actually capable of enjoying rap music or Britney Spears–or the various boy groups or screaming soul music: it is the enjoyers who are putting themselves into these things to the point where they can also find more than they did at first. Anything you can concentrate on brings its own reward is another or related answer about the classics, and then there is the one about how a classic like Ecclesiastes or Isaiah or Shakespeare are packed with all kinds of literary devices that people who learn about literary devices can appreciate.
The Biblical books mentioned are said to be the best written in the Bible but there are other good ones,and for instance there is the sheer parallelism of several different kinds to appreciate. Let us now take up the Odyssey: you will notice how the scene of Telemachus visiting Menelaus builds suspense, delaying the revelation of the name Telemachus by degrees, in one instance by proceeding from Telemachus’ grandfather being named to his mother, then his father, and then to naming him! You will notice Homer’s technique of modernizing two characters who would normally have been treated as committing hubris, namely Calypso and Circe who are converted from sorceresses exploiting Odysseus to women who perform the traditional role of Woman-As-Aid in that they help speed him home and thus join the other women in the Odyssey, who are helpful to O to begin with. Appreciating such literary devices and grammatical and syntactical and rhetorical turns is obviously not for everybody, but neither are the details of chess. Everyone must read at their own level. Then there is the fact that since brain cells don’t grow unless there are difficult tasks to do, making children do difficult tasks in school helps to grow their brain cells so that they can do all kinds of things with their minds, many of which will be of a practical nature. This amounts to brain training or mental gymnastics, which used to be practised in mathematics, for instance, especially in geometry. But no one takes geometry anymore because it just isn’t interesting to fashion and consumption-obsessed youngsters, nor does Latin, from which 85 per cent of the English vocabulary comes and therefore which, even if only Latin (and Greek) roots and prefixes were at least taught, would help students in all courses.
There is no brain training or mind training at all, thus no cell growth, since everything must be FUN and many subjects are not FUN to begin with. Students are told exactly what to “turn in” and given “points” for this even in college. Instead of getting grades for what they know ONLY. One is taught by teachers who actually believe that one should read only what is FUN, ie., immediately understandable, amusing in an obvious way, instantly accessible to people who have grown up completely immersed not in a culture that says NOT that you must work at first at something before you can enjoy it and be enriched, but that you must learn only what you LIKE, thereby ensuring no mental growth at all.
The Boat People escaping various Asian dictators come over here and their children get A’s and B’s right away in our worst slum schools because their parents insist that they study, because the value learning anyway, because they are happy that it is free and for everyone, because they value family instead of the individual free ride that the rest of us value. A study of them shows all this and that they found out that to their surprise Americans VALUED “fun and excitement” more than anything else. No wonder some people don’t read MOBY DICK with any pleasure, and if you think that one is bad, I suggest TRISTRAM SHANDY by Lawrence Sterne which I found completely impenetrable and not amusing like it was supposed to be when i read it as an undergraduate and only a little more interesting when I read it in graduate school, and although I still don’t really find it so great, I can see that it IS a classic. Now you take somebody like Gertrude Stein! Now there is some classic material. The books I have gotten the most out of are the ones I really put effort into understanding, including listing those literary effects mentioned above and learning a little about the rhetorical terms.
The best advice to those not understanding the classics is to say forget about whether you like something or not (this alone opens up whole new areas of enrichment) and pretend that you are going to give a lecture on this book to students or to the Wednesday Afternoon Friends of the Local Library Club, coffee and coffee cake afterwards. What would you tell them about this book? If you get busy on that you will be learning it yourself, since the best way to learn something is if you have to teach it to somebody else. This solves all the problems of getting organized and learning.