Say, have any of you read “Great Books” by David Denby? It’s about a writer (Denby) who goes back and takes a freshman literature course at Columbia when he’s in his 30s. I think. I bought it ages ago and still have not read it. But I bought it because I believed he was addressing the themes tht some of us are bringing up…
I’d love to hear if any of you have read it. Might motivate me to dust it off and crack the thing.
Chiming in with whoever said you kinda have to learn to read them to really appreciate them. I was blessed with an English teacher (Dennis Curtin, freshman year) who was really exceptional at making the incomprehensible less so.
You have to (well, you don’t HAVE to, but it helps) regard these books differently than current popular reading. They’re classics because they stand out as examples of interesting use of language, then-current political/social climate, umm… lots of things 
If you look at them as historical observations, it helps make them make more sense, and you’ll get more out of them.
For the record, historical significance aside, I really can’t abide Dickens. I appreciate him, I just hate reading him.
Most teenagers can appreciate Shakespeare if they’re taught correctly and they give it an honest effort.
The reason Shakespeare is largely underappreciated is because HE WROTE PLAYS, NOT NOVELS! You simply cannot develop an appreciation for Shakespeare by merely reading his plays. To appreciate his genius, you must watch the plays performed or, better yet, participate in a production yourself.
Could you appreciate the genius of films like “The Godfather” or “Touch of Evil” by just reading the scripts? Of course not.
As ‘just a kid’ try some of the more action-oriented classics.
Alexandre Dumas wrote some fun books: Three Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask, Count of Monte Cristo
Jack London is a personal favorite, as well as an ‘easy’ read: Call of the Wild, White Fang, many short stories
Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson had many classic adventure stories.
Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy); Rudyard Kipling (Jungle Book, Captains Courageous); Richard Burton (Arabian Nights, and, well, the Kama Sutra - sort of an adventure !!)
James Fenimore Cooper wrote the Last of the Mohicans, along with the rest of that series.
Then one of my personal favorites - Edgar Allen Poe.
Of the ‘dull, drab, English Victorian writers’ - Thomas Hardy was alright.
Then you can move on the the Romantic poets - really good stuff.
I’ve read Denby’s “Great Books”. I had just finished a four-semester-long humanities curriculum as an undergrad and had read all of the books he covered and more, and finding his book was wonderful. Some of the insights that he or the other students had were new to me.
In fact, I think I’ll start reading it again this week. I recommend it, even if you haven’t read some of the works he covers.
I loathe the word “classics” used to refer to novels of enduring value because it makes reading them sound like an unpleasant task. I hate the idea of Jane Austen being consumed like a spoonful of vile-tasting medicine that is supposed to be good for you.
Good books last because they speak to the shared experience of their readers. Jane Eyre, for instance, starts off with the eponymous heroine’s miserable childhood at the Lowood School. Who has not felt lonely and friendless at some time in their childhoods? Jane Austen’s novels are popular because readers can relate to her tales of the raptures and confusions of love.
It’s okay to not enjoy a great novel. Not every author suits every taste. I like Thomas Hardy immensely, but I find Vladimir Nabokov vapid and dull, and that’s a legitimate preference.
I also believe that some works should not be read by teenagers because they haven’t had the life experience necessary to understand them. Middlemarch, for example, is a novel best read after you’ve experienced failure in your life to better identify with the protagonists. Barchester Towers is a wonderfullly funny novel, but one would have had to experience office politics and the machinations of a boss’s spouse to appreciate the vicious Mrs. Proudie.
Have you read “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by Hemingway? It’s just as sexist as Kilimanjaro, but if you can ignore that it’s a good story.
See myreply on the classics as a semperate thread. I must have pressed the wrong buttom.
“The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves”
Many great works went unappreciated by me because I lacked the time or mood or effort, or even sometimes the background to appreciate them. Some did really bite, though.
Actually, I like her novels because they’re just funny. She was an extremely witty writer, with a great ability to coin a phrase.
“It’s okay to not enjoy a great novel. Not every author suits every taste. I like Thomas Hardy immensely, but I find Vladimir Nabokov vapid and dull, and that’s a legitimate preference.”
Interesting; I have exactly the opposite reaction. Hardy I find overly melodramatic and morose (I mean, Jesus, Jude, cheer up already! Lots of us didn’t get into our college of choice!), whereas the use of language in Nabokov absolutely floors me with its inventiveness…
Having read only a few “classics” (Tom Sawyer, Journey to the Center of the Earth, A Christmas Carol, Bambi, among a couple others I can’t recall) my first reaction is to say that anything written back “then” could be written better now, though I know that this is simply my writing style preference speaking.
However, I do fail to see why Shakespeare is taught in English classes across North America. Sure, he may have been a great playwriter, but we don’t go studying Star Trek scripts in our English classes so why are we studying ancient play scripts. Sure, the plays are great (I’ve seen good performances of Macbeth and Hamlet), but I think that going over them in class is a major waste of time (particularly when you consider that the average English student these days barely knows modern english grammer and usage, not to mention vocabulary and spelling). Keep in mind that I don’t have a problem with studying his poetry, I just don’t think that his plays were meant to be studied for their literary merits.
Classics are chosen specifically because they’re boring! How else can we teach our children about Onerous Duty?
But seriously, what makes a classic is some combination of what academics believe deserves the label, and what people will actually spend their money on in a bookstore if it’s sitting in front of them, and some other stuff which one would hope are most important, like the aforementioned human universals.
Some authors have fallen in and out of favor, George Eliot, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper.
For myself, a lot of what makes the classics fun to read is that they’re a look into a different time and culture. Even Mark Twain, who wrote about my part of the country, is showing me things that I would never have gotten a glimpse of, otherwise. (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn = highly recommmended!)
Anything from before say, the turn of the 20th century does take some getting used to, but once you’ve had some practice reading older works, it’ll get much easier. But there’ll still be authors you just don’t relate to. I like Trollope, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Gaskell (second-stringer), and yes, the dreaded Melville…but Hawthorne and Dickens I never gained much of an appreciation for.
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Gee, why didn’t I think of that analogy. :rolleyes: If you hadn’t noticed the plays are poetry, indeed a lot of it of the kind that fails to reach the right hand margin & even rhymes. Just because certain texts work OK only in one medium (& yes, reading a Star Trek script for its literary qualities is missing the point) doesn’t mean this is true of all texts. Why do you think Shakespeare’s works received the unprecedented honour of being collected in the First Folio? Because they were seen as more than just disposable pop culture even by his contemporaries, & worth preserving, in a form convenient not just for actors but for readers. (An unusual move at the time, when the idea of a literary canon wasn’t as firmly entrenched as it is now.) --N
Seconded - all Shakespeare’s plays are also poetry. Thats part of the genius of them.
Also they speak of issues that are just as relevant today as they ever were - love and hate, good and evil, peace and war.
I agree with crankyasanoldman who said earlier that she got more out of classics when she studied them.
This is the whole point - they are so deep that they need to be studied properly if you are to have any hope of even beginning to understand them.
But the effort is worth it.
Have you ever found that you hear a song for the first time (maybe on the radio) but you don’t like it much? Then after you hear it several times you start to see things in it that you missed before. After a while you realise that its a better song than those songs that you liked on first hearing.
Songs you like on first hearing are usually the ones you get bored of hearing. This is because they are very shallow, very accessible.
Classic books are the same. Shakespeares works become so much better once you re-read them and study them properly.
Eventually you reach the stage where you understand most of the ideas and themes in, say, King Lear and only then can you start to actually think about them.
But if you want an easy-to-read classic that can make you laugh and cry at the same time then you need look no further than Charles Dickens. Try Pickwick Papers, Hard Times or Oliver Twist.
Although, Star Trek becomes a lot easier to understand if you’ve read Shakespeare…and vice versa. Roddenberry paid homage to the Bard countless times.
Shakespeare’s work, in his time, was what television is in ours. It was considered common, and within reach of the ordinary people. Drawing a parallel, your great-great-grandchildren may well be studying ST scripts in high school!
Hmmmm, all very good points. I’ve been reading Forster, and combined with having read Moby Dick, I got a little frustrated. Forster was just boring, but then we started discussing him in class, and while he’s still boring (love stories are icky), I am understanding things better. Kind of like Crankyasanoldman.
I do see that once I broaden my frame of reference, and get older, I will probably be able to enjoy the “classics” a bit more.
Maybe what I should have asked was, why do some of these “classics” have staying power? I mean honestly, while people in 19th century New England would find all the whaling information interesting, even the biology of the whale that Melville discusses is outdated (example: calling whales “a fish”). So why do these stick around?
As kind of an aside about Moby Dick: what was the deal with Melville (or Ishmael, I should say)? He sure thought a lot of himself and sperm whalers, he’d belittle other kinds of whalers and would just go on and on about how wonderful sperm whalers were.
I’ve read several classics, and most I enjoyed because I have a simple rule: If I don’t like a book, I stop reading it. I read so much that it doesn’t bother me to put a book down. The handful of required books/stories I read in HS and college were usually boring.
Some great novels: Just about anything from Mark Twain. He is the John Grisham/Stephen King of classics (i.e. popular writer). Most of the books he’s wrote that I’ve read, I’ve read twice or more. Loved The Prince and the Pauper and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Charles Dickens’ - A Christmas Tale
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness somebody-or-another
Voltaire - Candide (I laughed my ass off with this story)
Don’t feel you’re not cultured just because you can’t quote the classics. Who gives a damn? I prefer popular fiction (Dean Koontz, Janet Evanovich, George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan), but I’m not sitting around fretting that the cocktail party crowd thinks I’m an uncultured lout. If I hung around with the CEOs, VPs, etc. of the world, I still wouldn’t mind admitting my ignorance that I don’t understand the works of Hemingway/Joyce/Austen.
P.S. Many of the classics are online, so you can read them for free: http://marktwain.about.com/cs/marktwainbooks/index.htm
One should keep in mind that Dickens and many other authors of the 19th century, were paid by the word…that is why some of their works are overlong. But “A CHRISTMAS CAROL” is one of the best written stories ever! “DAVID COPPERFIELD” is also a classic-but it is (in my opinion) about 30% too long-as I say, Dickens was probably having to make a mortgage payment on his house. I think that students should read the literature of the 18th and 19th century, if only to understand how different things were back then-these novels provide a wonderful window into the past. But, as i say, even the giants of literature wrote a lot of bad novels (chiefly to keep their creditors at bay).