To roll my eyes when someone says their favourite book is a classic

[Eyeroller100]

I'm an avid reader and I'm always looking for new books to read so I often ask people what their favourite books are. AIBU to roll my eyes every time someone mentions one of the classics.

I know people do love them and they may well be their faves, but I am quite skeptical as if they are saying it to make themselves sound better.

I've tried reading a lot of classics and I just can't get into them at all! They are pure effort

“I feel like those who enjoy the classics "think too much" when it comes to reading. I enjoy reading for sheer escapism. The thought of reading a book to analyse its deeper meanings like I did in English Lit seems like too much effort for me. And that's fine.”

But I hated English lit and have enjoyed many classics - probably because I have not had to study them in an English lit way, but can just use them for escapism

I do rather envy those who are talented at and enjoy analysing literature but it is not me

Also those “deeper meanings” etc IME tend not to come from actually thinking about the book in a rather “studying” sort of way - it comes through the reading itself

Rebeccaslicker I once mentioned to my cousin that I was going to see Hamlet and she started at me incredulously and asked why?!

Horses for courses!

You don't really mean the Classics, do you? You mean the canon. Different thing altogether.

Of course people lie. I could say I have read Ulysses but I haven't. Ditto Clarissa. But those kind of lies are usually quite literary lies.

I have a dyslexic friend who loves Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. She feels an enormous sense of achievement when she has read a book. Why shouldn't she have a little boast? She reads a lot of chick lit crap, too - but those two books are her favourites.

My favourites change with my mood - some days I would tell you The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous by Jilly Cooper is my favourite, on another day, I'd tell you Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami is my favourite, and on the next day I'd tell you The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is my favourite.

It's totally possible to love classics. YABU.

"When someone tells me their favourite book is a classic, I have a knee jerk eye roll reaction because I feel like those who enjoy the classics "think too much" when it comes to reading. I enjoy reading for sheer escapism. The thought of reading a book to analyse its deeper meanings like I did in English Lit seems like too much effort for me. And that's fine."

To me, that is escapism. Reading something from a different culture, entering another world, seeing how people think differently (or very much the same)- it's like a foreign holiday. Am just rereading the Iliad, for work, but new insights I have gained into it, partly through the new translation just come out (first into English by a woman), partly through some other reading I've been doing, means I'm getting a much stronger sense of being there: it's like Google Maps compared to an oldfashioned black and white photograph. Armchair travelling.

As far as children's books go, I enjoy re-reading the ones I used to love "Children of Green Knowe" and "Tom's Midnight Garden", but ones I'd never read before like "Harriet The Spy" and "Anne of Green Gables" were boring. I think the nostalgia hit makes all the difference.

Actually "The Borribles" is my secret favourite book of all time, though I tell people it's "Emma" which is only my second favourite. It's just a hard book to explain, you tell people it's a violent parody of The Wombles and their eyebrows start to make strange shapes...

I get that just because a book is a classic doesn't necessarily mean one will enjoy it BUT I also don't get pooh-poohing books because they are classics either. Some classics are good to read, others not. A book has to stand on its own merit not by whether it is a classic or not.

frasier I can understand seeing Hamlet but I do not understand why anyone would see The Tempest. I hated that play. However, it is all subjective, I guess.

If it were simply "trying to look clever" then someone's most hated book, or boredom inducing book, or book they are reading at the moment would elicit the same response, surely?

I mean tiptopteepe mentioned The Tin Drum. I don't like that book, it really unnerved me and I wouldn't read it again. However, by saying this it shows (unless you think I am lying) that I have read it.

Does that deserve eye rolling?

What I'm trying to get at is, is it the fact the person has read the book or says it is a favourite that elicits the eye rolling?

I'm reading Pliny's letters ATM. You can't get more classic than that. It's good. Gossipy and bitchy.

poetryinmotion13 I think my cousin's incredulity was the fact it was Shakespeare!

Omg I love "the tempest"! It's the history ones I find least interesting.

Frasier - when I was a teenager, we went to a brilliant production of "macbeth". My brother, who takes after my father, loathed it. The next day we went shopping with my mum and I was trying to choose between 2 (admittedly similar) skirts. For quite a long time.

Causing my brother to sigh, "I'd rather sit through "Macbeth" again than this!!" 😂😂

Ask about a book they've read recently and liked. I had to read Wuthering Heights for university and threw it across the room when finished, I hated every word, cheered when each person died; but then Jane Eyre is fantastic.
The Art of Racing in the Rain
The Other Hand

I actually enjoy The Borrowers far more as an adult than as a child because I can see where a lot of it is coming from; it's got a lot to say about teen need for independence, about restrictiveness of women's lives, about mothers and daughters, about generation clashes and about the courage of seemingly irritating and small-minded individuals. Homily really is genius. And the way in which the physical environment is used in the first book to summon up a sense of oppression and restriction. That worked on me as a child, but as an adult I see the clever writing that went into it.

corythatwas I still write my Es like "little half moons" because of that book!

fraser

I had a wonderful moment a few years ago when I walked into Winchester City Museum and found the exact cigar box that Pod built Arrietty's ceiling from.

Omg I love "the tempest"! It's the history ones I find least interesting.

And the histories are my favourites

My fave is A Tale if Two Cities. If that's too much like hard work for you, you're missing out.

Wuthering Heights absolutely is my favourite book; followed closely by Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations.
I like them not merely because they are classics (Hardy leaves me cold, and Portrait of a Lady left me losing the will to live) but because of the depth to the stories, the passion, the emotions, the social issues (particularly in Oliver Twist but in others too)
The darkness captured in Wuthering Heights seems unmatched in anything today.

I'd struggle to come up with a list of anything less than 10 books. But The Iliad would have to be on there. And pretty well anything by Hans Fallada. Also most things by Selma Lagerlöf (of Nils Holgersson fame). The Three Musketeers series (not least the sequel). And several children's books. So I'm probably not very mature in my literary tastes. But I do enjoy what I read.

corythatwas Will remember that if I'm ever there

My favourite book is lord of the rings,I have also read war and peace which is s great read once you work out by which character has which names as they seem to have three each.I have also read Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,etc I wouldn't know which modern books I enjoy as much but I do love Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde.

At my dad's insistence I'm currently reading fathers and sons because he said it would be a challenging read,

When someone tells me their favourite book is a classic, I have a knee jerk eye roll reaction because I feel like those who enjoy the classics "think too much" when it comes to reading. I enjoy reading for sheer escapism.

I enjoy reading for escapism, too, but I have the opposite problem: lazy, badly-written, predictable books make me 'think too much'. I can't get immersed or involved if I'm constantly noticing cliched moments, unconvincing dialogue, and huge plot-holes, or trying to remember where I've heard all this before.

It's like watching a film where the scenery wobbles and the star's obviously wearing Nikes under her Regency gown. If a book's character stares at herself in the mirror, biting her plump lip and lamenting the largeness of her crystal-blue eyes, and never speaks a line of dialogue when she could sigh/shriek/wail/lament/exclaim it, and never does anything without ten adverbs attached, and there's an overwrought line in italics every page to denote her tedious inner monologue, then... where's the escape? This is utterly familiar territory, and not in a good way.

While I'm reading a really excellent book, which may or may not be in the canon or considered a classic, I'm not sitting there analysing it, because the author has been so successful that I'm completely immersed. There were probably at least ten words and references I don't get per page of 'The Line of Beauty', but I loved it anyway because I was (to use a cliche) completely swept along with it. The best writing doesn't exhibit itself for appreciation: it's so good you don't notice the technique, even if you do go back and analyse it afterwards.