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?

Hmm - interesting. I just had a bit of a google, and yes there are definitely problems with the whole 'attention spans are getting shorter' claims, not least because there are different types of attention, and it's also presumably hard to define whether people are unable to concentrate on longer things or are simply choosing not to! Fair point.

I think it takes different attention than we're used to. I tried several times to read Bleak House in the evenings before bed, as I usually would read and found it utterly dense. But one year I took it on holiday and found it utterly fantastic. It was something about the immersion and the adjustment to the syntax.

Yes it's habit. I read every night without fail, and usually have trouble making myself put my book down and turn the light off. I also read in several languages, so I'm used to having to concentrate a bit harder on books when they're not in my first language. I don't read old classics very often, but do read plenty of very long books (often sci fi or fantasy).

I've read plenty of classics over the years though. Like Dickens, loathe Austen! Generally not a fan of the kind of period fiction set in polite society which gets turned into elegant or cosy tv period dramas...

@Raskolnikov84

"Your observation is one of indubitable alacrity, and brings me the greatest felicity as I indeed have laboured sisyphus-like under the travails of the sesquipedalianism replete among the classics."

~ Jane Austen, 2021

Jesus Christ, Jane. Stop showing off.

@lazylinguist

Hmm - interesting. I just had a bit of a google, and yes there are definitely problems with the whole 'attention spans are getting shorter' claims, not least because there are different types of attention, and it's also presumably hard to define whether people are unable to concentrate on longer things or are simply choosing not to! Fair point.

I will admit I am self-interested here!

I just think so often, we beat ourselves up and we shouldn't. I am sure in a hundred or two hundred years time people will be talking very respectfully about our ability to concentrate on so many different things at once, with screens and social media and everything else going on. I think it's absolutely fascinating you and I can be having a conversation here, while I'm also dipping in and out of a book on my kindle and answering emails, and I've got a physical book beside me I was reading earlier, and in a minute I'll go check the news headlines and look down twitter. It'd make our Victorian ancestors' heads spin!

But I'm digressing really.

I think you need to differentiate between "easy to read" popular novels with shirt sentences (which I often find jarring) and literary novels which, unless for reasons of style, don't tend to do that. So probably the difference between Dickens and the Brontës ?

(thanks to pp for the heads up on the new edition of Venetia. One of my favourite of her novels. Alongside An Infamous Army)

We read Cranford at school when I was 14. I wasn’t very bookish then, but I loved it, and still do.

YANBU. I absolutely love nineteenth century novels and must have read well over 100 of them, but they can be hard to read, especially when you are not used to them.

Not enough room here to go into detail on all of them, but my thoughts on the best known authors are below.

Dickens: I am currently having a bit of a Dickens fest - having decided last a Christmas to re-read all his novels. They are definitely an acquired taste and it took me a bit of time to get back into the swing of the style. It's the detailed descriptions, and the sentences that go on for half a page that put people off, but there is some beautiful language as well as the complex plots and great characters. I've read all the novels except for Pickwick Paper, which I started years ago but couldn't finish. I am hoping to do so this time around. Hard to say what my favourites are: probably Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities, but I'd recommend anyone wanting to try one for the first time to start with Oliver Twist.

Jane Austen: I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 10 and thought it was the dullest book ever. A few years later I studied Persuasion for English A level and immediately fell in love with it and read all the rest, which I also love. I re-read all of them from time to time.

Trollope: The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire is one of my favourite books but he wrote masses of good ones, some very typical of him and some quite unexpected. I love his style and find him probably the most accessible of all his contemporaries. I re-read my favourites every few years.

Hardy: love most of them, but yes Jude the Obscure is depressing!

George Eliot: Silas Marner is another book I tried to read too young. I now love it, but it can't be denied that it gets off to a very slow start. I've read them all and Adam Bede is probably my favourite. Her language can be a little inaccessible at times because of the dialect.

Brontë sisters: these are the ones I struggle with the most. I so want to like them, but I really don't much. I like to like my heroes and heroines and I don't much like anyone in Jane Eyre and definitely not in Wuthering Heights. My favourite is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Dostoyevsky: I struggled to get started with Crime and Punishment at first but it was well worth it! I didn't like any of his others as much, but I confess I don't remember them very well. Perhaps they need to go on the 're-read' pile when I've finished with Dickens!

I think there are a lot of references in classic literature that we don't understand these days but which their writers took for granted. That's why it's often better to use something like Penguin Classics, with useful footnotes to translate the Greek or Latin, and to explain references to people who were presumably well known at the time, or to other literature and the bible. When reading Dickens I have been having Google maps open and I zoom in on various parts of London. Its fascinating to imagine how small London must have been in those days!

I am sure in a hundred or two hundred years time people will be talking very respectfully about our ability to concentrate on so many different things at once, with screens and social media and everything else going on. I think it's absolutely fascinating you and I can be having a conversation here, while I'm also dipping in and out of a book on my kindle and answering emails, and I've got a physical book beside me I was reading earlier, and in a minute I'll go check the news headlines and look down twitter. It'd make our Victorian ancestors' heads spin!

@SarahAndQuack - do you not give any credence to the idea that, actually, there's no such thing as multi-tasking, because we aren't really concentrating on more than one thing at once, our minds are just flitting between them? The fact that we do that so much these days may (or may not) be a good thing for our productivity, but I'm not sure it's great for our peace of mind!

I think there's also the problem that they are written in what is partially a different language because language evolves. So our brain has to do a bit of translation.

Additionally to that the contemporary cultural references and there's a lot of extra work.

If you think classic literature is hard, try Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Considered one of the hardest books to read by students of philosophy it is sure to give you a headache.

At the end of the day we all like to read different things
Though I am eyeing up the copy of Gone With The Wind on my bookshelf...

The ones I can't bear are the old epistolary novels of manners: the early 'realism' like Clarissa, Pamela (subtitled 'Virtue Rewarded', says it all), Tristram Shandy et al. They are endless, meandering, and I get about as much pleasure out of reading them as I would breaking rocks.

Austen isn't my cup of tea either. I 'get' the irony but still find her novels rather twee. As to the big the three-decker Victorian novels some I can take, some I can leave, but I do love Bleak House which many people seem to hate. Agree with a PP that Wilkie Collins is a rollicking good read.

Modernism and postmodernism are probably a more demanding read but I love modernism in particular (except D H Lawrence. I find his work difficult to read despite its supposed working-class pretensions: the way he writes their erudite, unconvincing dialogue is bordering on ridiculous).

I love the way the whole sphere of art and literature changed so radically in that period, the western world can't have seen anything like it before.

'Classics' is a big genre. I want to try the Hegel, I'm no philosopher but it's relevant to some stuff I'm currently doing. But I think I'll try a reader or one of those cartoon introductions first. His writing's impermeable!

Couldn't agree more. I read voraciously and have read lots of intellectual/challenging stuff, but the classics are just so slow.

Lord of the Rings is a brilliant story in a brilliant setting, written badly.

You do know that the marker of a good book is not whether it's an "easy read", right?

I think people's idea of an 'easy read' will vary considerably depending on what they take pleasure in (or otherwise). Reading Samuel Richardson for me is like holding my nose and trying to wade my way through eating a bowl of porridge with skin on it (which trust me, I'd find difficult)! Although the language isn't too challenging the bloody thing's interminable, most of the subject matter is grim as far as women are concerned, and the thought of reading it for pleasure is incomprehensible to me.

I've reread the longest novel in English numerous times (Pilgrimage), I love Ulysses, which is laugh-out-loud funny and unbelievably modern in its attitudes to sex, voyeurism and playfulness, and The Waves, which is a beautiful, poetic and philosophical novel. Both are notorious for being 'difficult'; I like a book that doesn't wrap all the narratives together neatly at the end and keeps you thinking and mulling over long after the pages are closed.

It's personal taste. I doubt many people love all classical literature.

Classic is such a broad term, as we've seen from this thread. Little Women is a classic, but a charming read and certainly not heavy or difficult.

One Victorian classic that’s def. not a difficult read and (to me anyway) is laugh out loud funny, is Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat. But I dare say I’m not typical.,

A Trollope favourite, from the Palliser series, but that can IMO easily be read in isolation, is The Eustace Diamonds.

I love Three Men in a Boat! Very funny.

Diary of a Nobody is also laugh out loud funny. By Weedon and George Grossmith. Glorious.

Love Diary of a Nobody. And I suppose it counts as a classic since it's continuously been in print since it first appeared.

Have not read the whole thread, but has anyone mentioned The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins? I read that in my first year of secondary school, and have re-read it a couple of times since. I love classic detective fiction, and this is one of the first detective novels in English. Also has an interesting narrative structure, as there are several narrators, all with different points of view.

@WoolyMammoth55

20 years ago I did a literature degree and I have to say it ruined me and I can't read modern novels at all... Mostly it's just such dull writing! The exception for me is Terry Pratchett whose mind I just love :) And some Latin American women writers, and some cracking modern short story writers too.

All-time university high point was speed-reading Moby Dick in 4 days as had a week for the essay - why does no one mention that the whole 500 pages are just one long gay knob joke?! Lithe seamen wrestling in sperm (whale) oil - at one point they dress the hunky "native" in a coat made from the whale's penis-skin - Moby DICK indeed. Honestly it is fucking hilarious when you get into it - or at least that's how I remember it!

I love a nice translation of The Odyssey - really rated Emily Wilson's recently. I like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf too. Those plus complete works of Jane Austen and some special poetry books are what I always have on my bedroom bookshelf, I like relaxing with favourite books that are reliable old friends...

What got me into books as a precocious tween was my mum's collection of vintage Georgette Heyer regency romance novels and I do think she's a genius, was delighted to see Stephen Fry agreeing with me recently:
www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/01/stephen-fry-on-the-enduring-appeal-of-georgette-heyer
If you haven't tried her stuff my favourites are Cotillion, The Talisman Ring and The Grand Sophy - not life-changing but lovely entertaining easy reads and her writing is fabulous.

As you can guess from my username, one of my favourite authors too! Off to read the Stephen Fry article.

Some are very difficult. I've never gotten along with Dickens for example. Tolkien also. Not sure what it is about it, maybe the text density, dialogue, who knows.

Love Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and what I love the most about them is that their actual view points and lives were very different to the fairy tale stories their books portray. There are hints of darkness in Jane Austen through what happens to proliferal characters and the true nature of the society she lived in - and I love seeing that as I re-read them with a different lens.

The Moonstone is great! Definitely a page-turner. I can imagine people being absolutely glued to it when it was first published. And it features one of my fave bad luck things that can happen in a Victorian novel, someone who turns into a gibbering wreck...after getting caught in the rain.