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

Why do you think they are called the classics? . Henry James the wings of the dove is the most powerful book I have ever read, I was tearing up on the train. Which is presumably ostentatious reading according to the op?

Lol is quite acceptable on an Internet forum! Lol

I really enjoyed the Harry Potter books, very much in the same way that I enjoy good crime fiction. They were very well constructed plots with a clever twist at the end. And Rowling was smart enough to include a narrative arc over seven novels that meant once you'd finished one you had to read the next.

Luckily, I don't think I ever read them in public, so can't be accused of reading them ostentatiously. (Wonders: is reading ostentatiously like breastfeeding ostentatiously? ie the very fact of doing it in public means you can be presumed to be showing off?)

MoreCheerfulMonica

I admit to being one of those who look slightly askance at adults reading children's books. Yes, they may be well written, but they're written for children and the way emotions and relationships are depicted (for example) reflects that.

Exactly. Children are the target audience.

When the hype was at its highest, you would even see daft adults reading them ostentatiously on trains and so on. Laughable
But they got so many people (children and adults) reading - how can that be a bad thing?
I tried reading Jane Eyre again last year (read at school) and couldn't get into it at all - it was just too gloomy. Couldn't get into Shakespeare either and ditto some other classics. But that's just because my taste lies in other directions. I'm more crime and children's books these days, and crime-wise I've moved from darker stuff to more country-house type cases. I'd only roll my eyes at someone who said they didn't read or who thought 50 Shades was great (now THAT was hyped). I just don't get people who don't read.

Yabu just because you can’t get into them doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Reading is subjective, no different from enjoying different tv programs. I adore Jayne Eyre, & Oliver Twist but I can’t read Jane Austin, I find her irritating. I might have to dig Jayne out again, I don’t know what it is about that story but love it! I love how dark Oliver Twist is, the musical made me think it was a children’s book but it’s not.

My all time favourite book is Do Androids dream of electric sheep? and I’ve been judge for that, as it wasn’t a book for a girl according to one teacher was fortunate to have another good teacher who got me to read lots of varied books & encourage me to read Philip K Dick who I fell in love with. I loved Harry Potter, some of it was long winded but it was a good story.

OP what is your favourite book?

YABU. I have read a lot of books, not as much as i'd like nowadays. I do not tend to re-read a book even if I have really enjoyed it. Things like Wuthering Heights and Dickens though are masterpieces and books you can enjoy for the beauty of the writing. Theyre more than just a good story.

I admit to being one of those who look slightly askance at adults reading children's books. Yes, they may be well written, but they're written for children and the way emotions and relationships are depicted (for example) reflects that.
Feel free to look askance at me then. I enjoy them and I don't care who knows it.

Oh and wrt to difficulty, I save classics for a holiday when i have lots of time to read. Once you're in the rhythm of the older style and language it becomes much easier to read them. Reading a chapter here and there after a day at work will make them seem hard work. You need to immerse yourself for a bit.

People who sneer at adults reading books that are marketed “for children” are seriously missing out! I recently reread Joan Aiken and the Harry Potters and that was fun, and I filled in the gaps of Diana Wynn Jones that I missed when growing up. I love YA novels.

I feel sorry for the sneerers for missing out on brilliant reads / retreads!

Lol is quite acceptable on an Internet forum! Lol

Indeed. As is adults reading whatever they like in public.

I absolutely love re-reading Malory Towers or Trebizon. Pure escapism from being an adult

But equally i was reading adult novels as a child, and those that I have reread as an adult I get something new from

My favourite is The Grapes of Wrath. A forrin classic, no less. What a full-time twat I am.

I'm not the reading police and I'm not going to confiscate your books, but nor am I going to waste my scarce reading time on books whose analysis of human relationships (which is what I like to read about) is pitched at a child's level of understanding. But each to their own.

A slight derail, but This is a lovely book about rereading formative books

www.goodreads.com/book/show/17801094-how-to-be-a-heroine

On balance, the majority on this thread thinks YABU to roll your eyes at people saying that "classic" books are among their favourites. Most here genuinely like these books and are not just trying to sound clever.

OP where are you? What do you think?

You're opening the bidding at Grapes of Wrath, Shatners? I raise you Madame Bovary (in translation).

Some of the classics were once popular fiction. Just outmof interest:

Dickens started his own magazines - mass circulation with lots of ads - in order to publish his own novels as serials. Books at the time were far too expensive for most people to buy, and the publishers tended to demand novels in 3 volumes, since this is what the lending libraries wanted - libraries were not free then and they could make more money that way.
One reason 19thc novels can seem over long and waffle is partly because of the 3 volume demand.
Dickens got fed up with the publishers' demands, hence eventually publishing his own. One of his magazines that came out weekly, cost only 2d (old pence) and thus brought his serials within reach of many people who could never afford to buy the books.

Thomas Harry's Far From The Madding Crowd was originally published as a monthly magazine serial, but it was a more upmarket magazine, and the editor (I think he was Virginia Woolf's father) forced him to change some of the more 'shocking' elements (unsuitable for young unmarried middle class ladies to read!) - however TH put them back in for the book version.

You can spot the end of each monthly instalment in FFTMC - Hardy wrote them with a cliffhanger at the end of each, exactly like modern soaps, to make the readers buy the next issue.

Dickens was the first to publish The Woman In White - as a weekly serial - Collins was a friend of his. It caused a colossal sensation at the time, not to mention sniffy disapproval from some of the wealthier classes, who thought it far too sensationalist for the weak-minded plebs.
Incidentally the book has never been out of print.

Your loss Monica, as children’s books are much more complex than you give them credit for, though you won’t see it that way I’m sure

Mine's probably 1984 and I'd recommend it to anyone who'd like to start reading more of the modern classics. I couldn't give a monkey's what other people are reading though, I'm just glad that people still read at all.

I admit to being one of those who look slightly askance at adults reading children's books. Yes, they may be well written, but they're written for children and the way emotions and relationships are depicted (for example) reflects that.

So how do you cope with classics that were composed at a time before this (arguably artificial) division into children's and adults' literature? And what about the (very common) situation where a text originally composed for an adult or mixed readership becomes re-branded as children's literature? Does it suddenly lose in its power of depiction?

@HerSymphonyandSong agreed. Super book. The same author's autobiography of Anne Bronte is similarly excellent if you haven't read it

I cope just fine, Cory, thank you. I appreciate that distinctions are fluid and sometimes perhaps artificial.

I’ll read anything at all and there’s not a lot I can’t find something interesting in but I have no shame whatsoever in admitting my favourite books are Harry Potter! I grew up reading them and they grew as I did, even now I’ll happily go back and re-read them time and time again and enjoy them just as much as I did then! I just wish I had long days where I could lie in bed reading as I did in the school holidays each time a new book came out!

Surely the whole point of a classic work is that it can be read at multiple levels? Which is why academics spend more time analysing Ursula Le Guin than they do Jaqueline Wilson. Both children's authors, but very different in scope and depth.