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 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.
In your opinion they are good.
If you meant your previous post simply as opinion, I have no problem with it. But you said
As I (and you admit yourself) have read some of the classics and thought they stunk, this statement is obviously false.
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.
IMO a true classic must be timeless. Being too much of it’s time is one of the many criticisms I have of Frankenstein.
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. 
Then there is no such thing, surely?
I think Frankenstein is great. It’s the Buffy of its time.
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 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.
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.
Please note that I specifically said “median,” not “mean.” They are two different things. The median means that you arrange everybody in the group from lowest to highest and look at what the middle person in that range does. The mean means that you add up the number for each person and divide that by the number of people. In any case, I was wrong about the median number of books read, as people have pointed out. Since 27% of adult Americans read 0 books per year, 5% read 1 book per year, 8% read 2 books per year, and 12% read 3 books per year, that means that 52% read between 0 and 3 books per year. This mean that 3 is the median number of books read. I’m sorry, I heard the number 1 for the median at some point a few years ago and didn’t bother to look up the number, which I should have done. Note that 6.5 is the median for people who read any books at all, not for everybody. Yes, the mean number of books read is 20.4, but that is quite a different thing. What it means is that there are a minority of people who read a disproportionate number of books. Indeed, 8% of people read more than 50 books per year.
What I mean by timeless isn’t ‘I like this book’. What I mean is that the book isn’t filled with things that are currently in fashion. Frankenstein’s purple prose and fainting hero were in style at the time.
Shakespeare is of his time only in some language and political references. Macbeth works in feudal Scotland or feudal Japan. Romeo And Juliet works just fine on the west side of New York, or in Bosnia.
I don’t really get your distinction. None of them are not culturally and temporally placed in their place and time. I wonder if you just personally identify with some themes in some, whereas I identify with other themes in others? I still strongly suspect it’s a personal thing.
That’s still incorrect. 5%, 8%, and 12% are percentages of the 73% of people who read books, not of the total population. Adjusted for the total, you get:
0 books: 27%
1 book : 3.65%
2 books: 5.84%
3 books: 8.76%
That’s only 45%, which means that 55% of the population has read at least four books in the selected year and the median for the entire population is somewhere between four and five, which is what I said. This is the SDMB; facts and numbers matter.
O.K., that’s a pretty bad way to arrange the chart, but I guess there’s nothing to do about that. So 27% have read 0 books and 25% of the remaining 73% have read 1 to 3 books. 27% plus (25% of 73%) equals 27% plus 18.25%, which equals 45.25%. 16% of the 73%, which equals 11.68%, have read 4 or 5 books. The median is not between 4 and 5. The median, by definition in this case, must be a whole number, since the number of books reported by each person is a whole number. The median is either 4 or 5. If we were to guess, for instance, that 8% of the 73% have read 4 books and 8% of the 73% have read 5 books, then 5.84% have read 4 books. If that were true, then 51.09% have read from 0 to 4 books, so 4 would be the median.
The point is that you were wrong by at least 400%. That’s not an acceptable margin of error and it does not speak well of your larger point.
What larger point?
I think a big problem is that reading a classic often feels like reading a cliche-ridden mess with impenetrable vocabulary. Of course, a lot of these “cliches” originated with the work in question, and a lot of times they actually deconstruct the cliche and the books who played follow the leader lacked the nuance. Hell, even other times the cliche you think is so obvious in this old book is a cliche that never really existed in the first place ("The Butler Did It"™). A lot of people think they know everything about, say, Dracula through pop-cultural osmosis too, when they really don’t (Dracula walks out in broad daylight, for one) so the plots they think won’t grab or surprise them because they’ve “heard this story before” may be a hundred times more surprising than they think.
I know when I read Pride and Prejudice in high school it felt formulaic and cliched. Rationally I knew it wasn’t, but it just FELT so worn out and like beating a dead horse. I think the perception of what classics are, and the idea that they think they know how the story will play out based on a few now-cliches that are bound to pop up is a big part of it.
This one:
We’ve established that people read a good deal more than you asserted. But, it should also be noted that the numbers don’t really say anything regarding the question in the OP. The poll doesn’t have a listing for “classics”. Let’s say our average Joe reads one book in a three month time frame. Did he read one of the Twilight novels and spend the rest of his free time shooting bottle rockets at stray cats, or did he spend those three months slogging through War and Peace while taking notes throughout to keep the vast cast of characters straight? We don’t know and the numbers don’t give an indication either way.
The question is why people do one instead of the other.
I suppose I should give a stab at answering the question. One of the reasons people skip over the classics is that there is a tendency to think of them as a “genre”. We’re doing that here by putting them all in the same category. If you ever walked into a brick and mortar book store, back when those used to be a thing, you probably saw books divided into sections. There would be separate aisles and shelves for NEW!, thrillers, romance, sci-fi, etc. There would also be a section for “classics”. It’s a disservice to some great books.
To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t have a damn thing in common with Crime and Punishment, but you might find them on the same shelf. Somebody might not read Huckleberry Finn because they hated Moby Dick and subconsciously view them both in the same genre of “classics by American authors”. Hell, they are labelled as such. By lumping “the classics” together into one genre we take away what made them individually classics to begin with.