Not going to be a ton of material this week, as I am travelling, but a bit of a kerfuffle on the twitter machines caught my eye. There are people suggesting that they read fan fic instead of classics because fan fic is meant to be enjoyed and classics are meant to be studied. Now, read what you want — I am not going to ever argue that you should not read what brings you pleasure. But classics are just books and most of them are good books that you can read just because they are good books.
Classic books are usually something in addition to being good reads. They usually have something about them that makes them important beyond their literary pleasure. They may be representative of a turn in literature, or speak to a specific time period especially well, or represent a literary or social style exceptionally well. But they are first and foremost books, and most of them are just good.
Not all of them of course. You will never convince me that Ernest Hemmingway is anything other than self-satisfied, preening garbage, for example. But Shakespeare is awesome. Jane Austin invented entire genres and is fun to read. Garcia Marquez is stunning. Dostoevsky tells incisive sociological tales. Even something as disconnected from me in space and time as Beowulf, in the right translation, is a rollicking adventure story.
Part of the problem, I think, is that we generally encounter these books first in school. We are taught them not as books but as instructional material, as representative of something “important” rather than as a good book. Part of the problem is that we are much more diverse country than even a few decades ago and the canon has struggled to keep up (I went to grammar and high school in the 70s and 80s and note that my examples are almost entirely white and almost entirely male. That they are not entirely English speaking is something of a miracle and a testament to the dedication of my public-school literature teachers), making it harder for kids who aren’t from a specific gender, class, or racial background to find themselves in the books. Part of it is that we encounter them perhaps too young. I enjoyed Moby Dick much more in college than I did in high school.
Mostly, though, I think we forget that they are books. We are conditioned to read them not as stories but as CLASSICS. And we miss that they are, in fact, books. Most of them were written with no stronger desire than to tell a good story, and most of them succeeded. You don’t need to study classics; you just need to read them. I promise if you pick up a classic, you will likely find yourself engaged, moved, and entertained, just as with any other really good book.
Except if you choose something by Hemmingway. His stuff still sucks.
Leave a Reply