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?

@Allmyarseandpeggymartin

I read this as “Mumsnet classics” are hard to read.

Thanks enough internet for today

Well, penis beaker wasn't exactly easy on the brain! Possibly enough internet though

I’ve tried but I can’t get on with Charles Dickens yet I love the tv versions. Jane Eyre I can read.

I tried to read To Kill a Mockingbird multiple times but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t be bothered to decipher the meaning behind every word on the page. Reading should be enjoyable so I read what I like. I like children’s books and young adult books. I like some adult books but none as much as some of the amazing books I read growing up that I couldn’t put down.

I have to read the classics in isolation from any other book, whereas modern books I can have 2 or 3 on the go at the same time.

My latest set was HG Wells. Absolutely outstanding sci-fi writer. Obviously most of his stories don't stand up to scientific scrutiny but the ideas he came out with were utterly remarkable and once you get into the cadence of reading Victorian writing, flow beautifully.

Language has evolved so much in the last few hundred years it's nice to be challenged by the different descriptions, tempos and prose used in "classics".

I don't read much (no time) but these are the only types of books I bother with. Those long detailed descriptions of a scene is where you get your mental picture from surely?

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

@CoffeeRunner

I don't read much (no time) but these are the only types of books I bother with. Those long detailed descriptions of a scene is where you get your mental picture from surely?

Or where you lose the will to live because we know what a field looks like. We don’t need a page describing it.

E M Forster, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell are all considered classics and are hugely readable but I've never gone for the Dickens, Austens and Brontes of this world. Just too much like hard work, you're supposed to enjoy books not endure them.

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing

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

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’m too ashamed to admit how many books I read a year.

It really depends on the book. Something like Jane Austen or Anna Karenina are actually very readable, War and Peace not so much. I don't like Dickens because he waffles on and goes off on huge tangents, but a lot of other authors have great stories. I do think you get out of the habit of reading more intellectually challenging books, particularly if you read a lot of thrillers or similar which are very plot driven. I try and mix it up and read one "easy" read followed by one more difficult read. This can be modern literary fiction as well as classics.

I love reading Dickens, but one does have to be in the right frame of mind, I think. Tolstoy I find very easy, likewise Henry James, but I just cannot manage Jane Austen.

You can't say 'Classics' as a group with any degree of real meaning. They're all different.

@Itsnotover

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

Oh God, we had to do that for our inter cert (Irish o level ish). I think it was so boring we changed books, but I've wiped it almost entirely from memory.

It depends on the author and what you think of a classic. They aren't just 19th century English books - they can be foreign and a classic could be written in the 1980s or even more recently.

As @Kanaloa says some older books are surprisingly modern. I find Jane Eyre like that in themes of female and working class emancipation. I can't stand Wuthering Heights.

One of my favourites is A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole which is set in New Orleans in 1960 which could have been written this year. Same goes for Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities from 1987. Both cover the same themes of racial politics in America and are extremely funny.

I love Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Stendhal's The Red And The Black - both were written about the same time of 1830-1850 and deal with scheming social climbers in England and France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars so about 20-30 years earlier. Again really funny and timeless.

I love adventure stories like Alexandre Dumas's The Count Of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers but if you don't want to read them the films are good particularly the sublime series of Musketeer films with Michael York, Oliver Reed, Racquel Welch and Roy Kinnear.

I suppose I like funny and sly classics the best and lots of people don't think they are. But the authors were young once and writing to entertain.,

Lots of people don't get on with Dickens. They are good stories but horribly mawkish. The best one is A Tale Of Two Cities.

I can't stand E.M Forster. He really didn't hide his misogyny and race and class prejudice as well as he did being gay.

And Thomas Hardy. Depressing woman hater.

Same goes for Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities from 1987.

I just bought a copy of this on ebay a few days ago.

@Classica

Jude the Obscure is the one I wish I hadn't read.

I shed too menny tears over that one.

Depends what you mean by classics. I like Dickens and find his stuff very readable, but I really, really struggle with Henry James.

Sometimes they are too long imvho. I don’t just mean Dickens - others are too and if I’m being honest I don’t think it adds to the book. It also puts me off reading them as I lose momentum.

I think so many contemporary books are far too long. And then you look at a novel from the 1940s and most of them come in under 300-350 pages.

@daisypond yes, I recently read Turn of the Screw hoping to be creeped out, and was so bored by the rambling nonsense that I would suddenly realise something had finally happened to advance the plot 3 paragraphs before and I'd not even noticed.

Too much like hard work especially Dickens. Did enough of that at school.

I love all the Brontes but find Jane Austen harder work. Have read P and P and S and S but that’s it. Like some Dickens. And Anna Karenina. But in general think reading should be fun and life is too short to plough through books because you think you ought to.

It's all practice. The more you read, the easier you find it. Except Henry James, he's AWFUL.

I'm convinced Moby-Dick would only be three pages long if all the long winded descriptions of the sea were removed.

Bronte, Austin and Dickens bore me to tears. There are some classics I absolutely love though.