What’s So Great about Classic Books, Anyway?

A classic is “a book which people praise and don’t read.”
— Mark Twain

I have a confession to make: although I’ve always loved books, I was a horrible English major. While the other English students at my Midwestern liberal arts school declared their passionate love for Homer, Spencer, Wordsworth, Dickens, Melville, the Brontes, Jane Austen, and the like, I could barely make my way through most of the books my professors assigned. I’ll admit I didn’t get all the way through even one full play in my Shakespeare class (though I like to blame that on the fact that I was distracted, at the time, because I was in England for my college’s summer program). So instead, to get through my classes, I skimmed most books and dashed off papers as quickly as possible so that I could return to what I really wanted to read.

What were these amazing pieces of literature that I actually wanted to read, you ask? Here’s a sampling:

• A very large amount of Star Trek novels based on the original series
• YA books with titles like Representing Superdoll, Underneath I’m Different, and Fantasy Summer
• Gothic romances
• Genre fantasy series

I also did read some titles of literary merit, such as the Narnia series, the Wrinkle in Time series, and Watership Down, but the so-called “trashy” books dominated. (Now, I don’t believe any reading is really trashy, but that’s a subject for another post.)

I did feel somewhat guilty about my slapdash approach to my major and also rather frustrated myself for being unable to enjoy the experience of reading classic books. Like brussels sprouts, or liver, I knew they were supposed to be good for me. But why? Certainly, classic books are usually well written according to the “rules” of writing, so we expect to see things like a plot without holes that keeps us interested, beautiful language, exquisitely constructed sentences, interesting characters that are developed well, and so on. But many books fulfill these requirements, and not all of them become classics — so what makes a classic stand above and beyond the plethora of good books to become a great book?

As I see it, there are two reasons: For one, as Italo Calvino said in The Uses of Literature, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Classics still have something to say to us now. Sometimes they give us lessons from history that remain relevant today: for example, our society still needs to learn to treat all people as equal human beings, and books like the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass work well for this. Even works of fiction can function this way, such as the warnings we encounter in books like 1984 and Brave New World. Or classic books may tell us something we personally need to hear (which can overlap with what our society needs to hear, of course). Human beings, no matter when they live, are all basically the same. We have the same struggles, the same flaws, the same character traits, the same greatness and littleness. So what was true for Hamlet and Tom Sawyer and Daisy Miller is still true for us today. And this is why we can learn from the classic book characters of the past. These books have a way of seeing inside us, and, as Clifton Fadiman once said, the more we return to them, the more they reveal ourselves to us: “When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.” It’s not just any old book that can do this for us.

Beyond self or cultural revelations, classics also show us what life was like during a particular time period, and they tend to encapsulate and comment on those times, such as how Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice not only illustrates class structure and women’s roles in Victorian England in great detail, it also critiques these things. In this way, a classic book can work as a historical document (but one that is generally less dry to read), and indeed, if a book doesn’t perform this function, it generally doesn’t end up making it through the ages as a classic. But why do we care? Why do we want to read history? Well, not only do we often find historical time periods interesting, we also need to know about them, so that we don’t make the same mistakes our ancestors did, right? And again, humans are humans, no matter how far away from us they are. We can relate to them.

So if classic books provide us with so many good things, why do we sometimes struggle so much to read them? For myself, I tend to get frustrated wading through language that feels outdated and ponderous. It slows down my usual fast reading pace and I get bogged down, forced to reread passages over and over to understand them. And yes, as I write this, I hear myself and I realize that re-reading is good for me! It’s good to slow down, I read too fast! I also get frustrated by interacting with a culture that’s unfamiliar to me, that throws out jokes that no longer work, uses slang I don’t understand, and includes people who relate to each other in ways I’ve never experienced. And as I write this, I’m realizing these make it all the more important that I do read these books, since encountering what’s different is one of the ways we change and grow as human beings!

So now that I’ve come to the end of this essay, am I going to declare that I’ve changed my mind and love all classics? Not exactly. Though I am warming up to a few, and I’m having a great time finding old public domain books for our beta test readers to try out on Legible. How about you? What has your experience been with classic books? Comment here and let me know.