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?

Yes...as a dyslexic some I can read some I can't...Dickens is awful. Not suitable for today as the language is old fashioned and tbh depressing. I read books I enjoy now and most are modern as they have modern language. Saying that I did like of mice and men. And cold fort farm.

Before our incedibly visual screen-dominated age and accessible world travel many people hadn't even seen beyond their own valley. The bicycle was revolutionary in showing people a world beyond where they could walk there and back in a day. So all those visual descriptions were really appreciated to help people understand and visualise stuff they had no references for in their brain or imagination. Now the whole of Hardy's Egdon heath or Dicken's smoggy London can be seen in a single screen flash.

Some classics are super easy to read though - The Colour Purple, The Outsider, - lots of the mid to late 20th C classics are.

Cold comfort farm

And the classics were appreciated by the working class. My grandmother was one of 8 kids from an East End two up two down, toilet shared by five other houses in the street. They had a full set of Dickens on their shelves.

Gosh it depends on the style. I found Austen unreadable.

Having had a difficult childhood (but not abusive) I felt an overwhelming sense of empathy when I read Jane Eyre when the young Jane finally cracked and could do nothing more but sit silently and tearfully in a bedroom and no amount of cheering her up worked. They tried nice food and letting her hold the beautiful painted China plate with birds on it I think.

Some modern books I find unreadable with street vernacular and slang and text speak. Every other word is literally or basically etc

We went to Haworth parsonage a couple of weekends ago. The Brontes were just such an amazingly talented family. But I beyond hated Jane Eyre at school - he's locked his wife in the attic, Jane. Run. - and I never understood what the hell was happening at the start of Wuthering Heights. But I was young so I was inspired to try Wuthering Heights again. Didn't even make the end of the first chapter before I was eyeing up my Harlan Coben. Such hard work.
I'm now determined to read Virginia Wolfe's Mrs Dalloway. (In its favour its very thin.)
I'm determined to read a classic every other month. I want to sound intellectual!

I read Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir many years ago. It was beautifully written but so tragic and altogether depressing that it really haunted me. I’ve not read any more Zola.

I bloomin love Dickens. Those long books, with lengthy descriptions. A lot of the books are so vivid and compelling, witty and incisive.
It really slows you down and forces you to focus. Like the antidote to our instant culture.
Great Expectations and Bleak House are works of genius (in my opinion!).
Though I don't like Austen.

I agree that they are hard to read . Also many of us (including me)! Tend to read the paper /go on our phones laptops etc. Reading generally has gone down as people don't have time to sit down with a book .let alone classics written a few hundred years ago

Wuthering Heights is a wonderful book, but so strange and so different from the popular culture interpretation. I didn't find it romantic at all!
I really enjoyed Anna Karenina. Haven't read War and Peace.

@MsTSwift

Some classics are surprisingly readable. I genuinely enjoyed Middlemarch. Also struggled with Dickens except a Christmas Carol.

I really struggled with Middlemarch initially but, as my friend explained to me, the first character you "meet" is Dorothea and at that point you are supposed to find her irritating. It's actually a great book, and once you get attuned to the author's voice, very funny.

I've always felt you have to give a 'normal' novel 50 pages to see if it captures you, but for one of the big Victorian doorstops you need to give it 100 pages because they do progress more slowly.

Also, I alternate a 'big' book with an easier one: non-fiction, genre fiction etc.

Middlemarch is great. I can recommend The Mill on the Floss.
If you read the first chapter of Bleak House, you're drawn into the world of Victorian London. Everyone's lives are interlocking in the most fascinating way.
Pride and Prejudice I found dull.

@Maireas

Wuthering Heights is a wonderful book, but so strange and so different from the popular culture interpretation. I didn't find it romantic at all! I really enjoyed Anna Karenina. Haven't read War and Peace.

I found War and Peace easier than Wuthering Heights! Although I probably did omit bits of War and Peace. 🤫 That guy can go oooonnnnnn.

Oh, and my top cheat for anyone who wants to attempt one of the 'big' Russian novels: Doctor Zhivago.

It is deliberately written in the style of their Golden Age (late 19th century) and like them, deals with big ideas and historical events, but was actually written in 1957, so the style is much more concise and it's much easier.

Heathcliff is not a romantic hero. Violent, abusive, probably a murderer. Cathy dies early on (spoiler alert). The language though, is vivid and compelling. Strange book, Emily Brontë had some imagination. As did her sisters.

@Auroreforet

I've not read much zola but try nana, sublime!!!

@WhiskyXray

What I hate and find hard to read is simpering, facile modern books where the narrator sounds like a half-drunk fuckwit wittering vacuously at some hideous party.

I recently started reading a thing called Shopaholic and I felt it was giving me brain damage, so stopped.

If it's a choice between that or Villette...

Villette (which my autocorrect wants to turn into Gillette) is one of my favourite novels, though I struggle with wanting to strangle Paulina ‘Daddy Issues’ Mary every time she appears. I love Lucy Snowe’s reticence as a narrator, the Gothic elements, are he claustrophobic oddity of it all.

Yes I think some books are called 'Classics' as that's the only way that publishers can get people to consider buying them.

It's the same as calling assorted organs, eyes, glands etc. a 'delicacy' so that people will eat it rather than chucking it in the bin - where it clearly belongs!

It took me four attempts to get into Wuthering Heights but now my favourite book

I find Jane Austen tedious and Thomas Hardy difficult to read, I love Tess but it was not an easy read the writing or the story

I loved Bonfire of the Vanities. I wish it was on audio

I download and listen on audio if I really like a book (my one extravagance)

Reading a few books from the same era helps, you get used to the style of language. I did a course on Victorian literature and was racing through them after a while.

Some classics are wordy, but I think sometimes that’s deliberate. Dickens uses circumlocution for humour, to demonstrate the ludicrousness of some of his characters and to get away with saying things which would have been controversial or too risqué if written plainly at that time.

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles

Yes I think some books are called 'Classics' as that's the only way that publishers can get people to consider buying them.

It's the same as calling assorted organs, eyes, glands etc. a 'delicacy' so that people will eat it rather than chucking it in the bin - where it clearly belongs!

Just because you don’t like some classic novels doesn’t mean anything other than you don’t like them.

When I first read Wuthering Heights (I think I was 19) I viewed it romantically. Have read a few times since then and it’s not at all quite the opposite. How Wmily Bronte could have written the book with so little life experience I don’t know but where it is set is the perfect backdrop for the story. It just wouldn’t work in the same way in day Devon.

@secretbookcase

And the classics were appreciated by the working class. My grandmother was one of 8 kids from an East End two up two down, toilet shared by five other houses in the street. They had a full set of Dickens on their shelves.

Same for my Grandad in a rural working class family! I often wonder whether we’re more entrenched in class ideas about what people should or shouldn’t enjoy now than we were 100 years ago.

I have very fond memories of my French A level (in the Netherlands) - it got me to read a very wide range of books and to my surprise I really enjoyed most of them. Except Madame Bovary, I had no time for her. What a drip, always needing romance in her life. I found reading plays surprisingly accessible - Le Diable et le Bon Dieu has snappy dialogue and really makes you think. I didn't get on with German lit quite so much, except for the mid 20th century stuff I picked. Dutch and English were a lot of fun. I've read 'classics' in 4 languages and got on with all of them, you just have to dive in. I think audio books are a really good way of engaging.

@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?

They are hard but completely worth the effort in terms of increasing your literacy. Beowulf - that was the worst.