AIBU to think classics are bloody hard to read?

[Blackbootswithredribbons]

Now, don't get me wrong, I've read some amazing classics in my time (Lord Of The Flies, Jane Eyre etc) but it definitely hurts my brain sometimes! Amazing stories but the long, pointless descriptions, written in that old fashioned way that makes you feel a little stupid sometimes .

So, AIBU?

"And who takes a 3 and 5 yo for a full length ballet at the royal opera House? We were bored and worn out and grizzley and they had to leave at interval and have never let us forget."

Surely it depends on the child and the ballet. I took my oldest to see The Nutcracker when she was 4. She was on the edge of her seat the whole way through. Having said that I already knew she loved it because I had recorded it the previous year when it was shown on television and she watched it constantly.

Two years later we went to see Sleeping Beauty, which was probably a bad choice as I hadn't realised it was so long. Half way through the third act, my younger daughter (4) was getting restless and I had to take her out. Her older sister insisted on staying in by herself to watch it to the end.

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing

I think we’ve all developed a short attention span from all the screen time tbh! And I include myself.

This is me I can't even wait a week for the next episode of a series. I also need silence to read these days

Fifth well yes.

My point is that we were too young. Our parents knew us.

Girls went nutcracker 5 and 7 great. Nutcracker magical.

This was die Fledermaus. Looked it up as obv don't remember. Ballet? Operetta?

My point is that parents taking children to stuff because it's edifying etc. Without any thought as to whether they will enjoy it/ go the distance/ understand what's going on etc happens too often. And tbf I've seen it with films and TV progs etc as well. Not just things seen as edifying.

I was taken to plays and opera when I was a young child and had no understanding of what was going on. For example, one about family incest went way over my head.

Luckily by the sound of it!

I love classic literature, don't watch very much television and find most modern books to be so simplistic I feel like my brain cells are dying. I am obviously not normal and that's fine, there are enough books in this world for every type of reader.

What authors / genres do you like?

For TV I mean obv some just don't like it.

Some streaming services have a lot of great stuff from over the decades on a range of topics/ entertainment.

Eg
Happened across a really good 50s film adaptation of 1984. Really faithful excellent acting.
DD watching a German documentary series about Franco at mo. V well made.
Citizen Kane? What about classics from Italy France Japan etc?

I mean I don't know you! And obv do your thing I do think there is quality thought provoking TV and film out there though. To suit many tastes.

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing

I think we’ve all developed a short attention span from all the screen time tbh! And I include myself.

Some of the classics had the same effect on me in the 1980s tbh 😴😁.

I'm surprised at how few of the classic books have abridged versions to make them a bit more more accessible/understandable..

@Itsnotover

It depends which one. Silas Marner - literally dull as dishwater.

Noooooo! Love Silas!

Most of us have much shorter attention times and focus now. That's probably part of it.

@KitchenKrisis
Thank you. I’ll try Nana.

@AmericanBookworm Most modern books are simplistic? It very much depends which ones you read. There are some very challenging books out there if complex is your thing.

@AmericanBookworm

I love classic literature, don't watch very much television and find most modern books to be so simplistic I feel like my brain cells are dying. I am obviously not normal and that's fine, there are enough books in this world for every type of reader.

If you think all modern books are simplistic, you’re reading the wrong ones.

@Clandestin I had intended to reply to your remarks on Villette, but lost track of which page your post was on. Like you, I cherish every word of that novel. And isn't it funny how every list of tips for novelists includes the edict, "Withhold information from the reader"? I see many modern novelists going through the motions and having one or two fairly predictable and well-signposted Big Plot Reveals. But Charlotte must be sitting in heaven reading, for example, "Eleanor Oliphant" and its Secret #1 and #2, with a quizzical eyebrow up thinking, "Rank amateurs! You call THAT blindsiding the reader?!"

I might give Dickens another go, based on this thread. I loved Great Expectations, but have abandoned other books of his because his tone, his bumptiousness and amour-propre put me off. It's possible that I might have just picked up the wrong book at the wrong moment. Wilkie Collins is so exciting, though, and Thackeray so witty, and George Eliot so wise, that I think my expectations of 19th century writers might be too, well, great. Still, I want to try again.

So, what is a good Dickens for a Dickens-denier to try? It irritates me that I ace literature questions in general knowledge quizzes unless they are on Dickens.

Some are tough to read but it's usually about getting used to how they write. I find Dickens annoyingly detailed and long but love Jane Austen. Can't stand Wuthering Heights but not because it was difficult but because it's awful nonsense

I like A Christmas Carol cos it's so short😂.
I do think Great Expectations is the best of the ones I've read. Pickwick Papers was funny interspersed with unreadable. David Copperfield I liked overall.

My favourite classics lite which I read with the kids are the Sherlock Holmes stories. I loved the first half of The Count of Monte Cristo (and all of the rather daft The Prisoner of Zenda!) Kids don't seem too traumatised.

This is what annoyed me about the Netflix adaptation of Anne of Green Gables.

I can’t bear modern sensibilities bolted onto the past. That is one reason why I don’t care for historical fiction. Of course, for example, there were gay people in Victorian times, but no one was out and proud! I think you can be very, very sure that most people would not even have known what it was.

This is what annoyed me about the Netflix adaptation of Anne of Green Gables.

[quote WhiskyXray]@Clandestin I had intended to reply to your remarks on Villette, but lost track of which page your post was on. Like you, I cherish every word of that novel. And isn't it funny how every list of tips for novelists includes the edict, "Withhold information from the reader"? I see many modern novelists going through the motions and having one or two fairly predictable and well-signposted Big Plot Reveals. But Charlotte must be sitting in heaven reading, for example, "Eleanor Oliphant" and its Secret #1 and #2, with a quizzical eyebrow up thinking, "Rank amateurs! You call THAT blindsiding the reader?!"[/quote]
I love encountering other Villette fans. And I also adore that the worked up a work of genius from the fairly unprepossessing material that was The Professor, and that Vilette somehow still works despite breaking almost all 'rules' of fiction writing at some point AND being crammed with fulminations against Catholicism, Belgians, and that the 'hero' is depicted as a puppet at the mercy of a cabal of sinister foreign Catholics, headed by a sinister hunchback etc.

What is your theory of what happened to leave Lucy alone in the world and penniless, given that she refuses to say?

@WhiskyXray

I might give Dickens another go, based on this thread. I loved Great Expectations, but have abandoned other books of his because his tone, his bumptiousness and amour-propre put me off. It's possible that I might have just picked up the wrong book at the wrong moment. Wilkie Collins is so exciting, though, and Thackeray so witty, and George Eliot so wise, that I think my expectations of 19th century writers might be too, well, great. Still, I want to try again.

So, what is a good Dickens for a Dickens-denier to try? It irritates me that I ace literature questions in general knowledge quizzes unless they are on Dickens.

I'd normally suggest Great Expectations, which I think is astonishing, but as you've already read and liked it, and if you don't like his cartoonishness, maybe Bleak House?

Re: Lucy's family disaster, I can't make it out. I guessed the first time that perhaps her mother had died and her father had been committed to trial for her murder, and eventually hanged. But the time-frame doesn't fit; justice didn't hang about in those days you were tried, convicted and had a noose around your neck before rigid mortis had set in on your victim! So I think Lucy's parents must have been notorious in some way, perhaps engaged openly in vice sexual or perhaps drug-related-- and their final public condemnation / arrest must have been the cataclysm.

Oddly enough, I was reading through some family documents and found a potted memoir penned by a female relative towards the end of her life c.1880. After a terse list of dates and major events, she wrote something like, "There were of course many private tragedies in these years, but it is not supposed that they would be of interest to the reader." And I found that delightful. But Lucy was far worse, of course- not merely primly omitting the facts, but goading the reader, sneering that they are too feeble-minded to cope with reality, so let them imagine any pretty fantasy they like. She is a cowbag and God I love her.

I have just put Bleak House on my e-reader. Thanks.

Bleak House is my favourite Dickens - I’ve read it a few times - though it’s not as perfect a novel as Great Expectations.

I adore Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. You have to read at a different pace to modern novels though.... I can romp through a Lee Child or Lynda La Plante novel in no time at all and have a thoroughly enjoyable experience, but with the older classics I like to take my time, savouring each paragraph.

Strangely, You might find the early Agatha Christie novels a good way into reading older fiction because she uses really quite formal language in relatively modern plots.