# Why are classics (books) praised by everyone but read by no one? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 11, 2012, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454 "2012-03-11T10:43:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![No\_Wikipedia\_Cites](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/94ad74/32.png) [@No\_Wikipedia\_Cites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/No_Wikipedia_Cites)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/1 "2012-03-11T10:43:52Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/2 "2012-03-11T12:16:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![jordanr2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jordanr2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jordanr2)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/3 "2012-03-11T12:31:45Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![jordanr2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jordanr2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jordanr2)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/4 "2012-03-11T12:36:20Z")
> [@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. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/5 "2012-03-11T12:58:47Z")
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]([Classics Revisited (10)](http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/cr/10.htm#Parade%E2%80%99s) 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… ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/6 "2012-03-11T13:41:37Z")
> [@No\_Wikipedia\_Cites](#): > > I remember Mark Twain’s quote of that. There are those who would consider Mark Twain a writer of ‘classics’. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/7 "2012-03-11T13:54:03Z")
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](http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/6794): > [@](#): > > […] 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 […] ---
**Author:** ![Kim\_o\_the\_Concrete\_Jungle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ee7513/32.png) [@Kim\_o\_the\_Concrete\_Jungle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kim_o_the_Concrete_Jungle)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/8 "2012-03-11T14:07:28Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Implicit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Implicit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Implicit)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/9 "2012-03-11T15:47:43Z")
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](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top) alone. ---
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/10 "2012-03-11T16:12:15Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/11 "2012-03-11T16:21:29Z")
> [@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. ---
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/12 "2012-03-11T16:24:18Z")
No one reads “no one” in that sentence and thinks it literally means no one. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/13 "2012-03-11T16:28:35Z")
> [@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. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/14 "2012-03-11T16:33:03Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![VOW](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/vow/32/3043_2.png) [@VOW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VOW)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/15 "2012-03-11T16:33:41Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/16 "2012-03-11T16:34:37Z")
> [@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). ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/17 "2012-03-11T16:50:59Z")
> [@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. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/18 "2012-03-11T17:03:20Z")
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 Thurs_day. 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. ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/19 "2012-03-11T17:15:52Z")
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.” ---
**Author:** ![LavenderBlue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e95f7d/32.png) [@LavenderBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LavenderBlue)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2012, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454/20 "2012-03-11T17:35:56Z")
_Giants in the Earth_. Lousy book by Scandanavian Nobelist that I was forced to read in high school. Bo-ring! [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-classics-books-praised-by-everyone-but-read-by-no-one/615454.md?page=2)