Before I began my blog Reading Matters I had spent decades neglecting the great novels and their authors. I think that's common for alot of us after we graduate from school. We rarely visit the classics again. I was taught Julius Caesar at Msgr Scanlan for example but until I started this blog in 2015 and more importantly began to participate in the Back to the Classics Challenge (hosted by Karen K at Books and Chocolate) it had never occurred to me to read anything else by Shakespeare. I just felt that as great as he was without a teacher to guide me I wouldn't be able to undersrand his plays.
But now in this year alone I have read Call of The Wild by Jack London, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I am also currently reading Middlemarch by George Elliot and later this year I will be tackling Macbeth and I am looking forward to it! And once again thanks to the Classics Challenge in the past four years I have read Laura Ingalls Wilder, Giovanni Boccaccio, Zora Neal Huston, ALbert Camus, Charles Dickens, Anne Bronte, Willa Cather, Anthony Trollope, Herman Hesse etc etc.
It begs the question does it pay to squeeze so many great novels into four or five year's worth of reading or is it better to read these great books one or two a year throughout the course of your life? I think reading them in a more spread out manner is preferable. Because cramming these masterpieces into four years during your later years means that rereading them a decade or two into the future may not be as possible and certain books benefit from a reread.
Regarding the classics I have read since starting this blog my favorites are:
Middlemarch by George Elliot
New Grubb Street by George Gissing
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hursto
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Bel Ami by Guy deMaupassant
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
Belinda by Maria Edgeworth
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Call of The Wild by Jack London
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
And of the above novels my number one favorite is Middlemarch by George Elliot even though I haven't yet finished the book. But I am almost finished and unless it falls apart at the end, which I doubt, Middlemarch will rank alongside Pride and Prejudice and Crime and Punishment as my all time favorite novels. Books like Middlemarch remind us of why we read.
Finally, when do you reach a point where you feel you have checked off enough boxes in terms of the classics so that you can slow down and focus on the great authors you like? I know I want to read something by Thomas Hardy. Stendahl, Thackeray. But there are so many other great writers I may never get around to and that's okay. Because maybe after you have read enough from the classics' list you can start focusing on your favorite authors from that list. Time is limited and so if you are a Bronte fan, as I am, better to read Villette by Charlotte Bronte than feel you have to read Homer's The Illiad, unless Homer is who you want to read.
Anyway those are some of my thoughts on the great books.
I love reading the classics. I started reading them on my own in my twenties because I wanted to know what the fuss was all about. I didn't read off a list, I just found my way through Maugham, Woolf, Wharton and James. And then I started branching out to Forster, Eliot, Dreiser, etc. I've managed to read a lot of classics since then. Karen's challenge has helped me keep going with new-to-me classics. And it's been fun. I look forward to reading your thoughts on Middlemarch. It's one of my favs! I love Dorothea and Will. :D
ReplyDeleteHi Lark, it's really good that you started reading the classics in your twenties. That's the way it should be done and you have read some fine authors. It reminds me that I must read more James and Wharton since I Loved The Bostonians and The House of Mirth. Maugham I have never read but like Thomas Hardy he's on my list. Dresser I believe I did read Sister Carrie in my twenties and its time for a reread. I am so impressed with Middlemarch. I also like Will and Dorothea and am rooting for them and I am quite taken with Lydgate as well although not quite finished with the book so not sure how things will turn out. The classics are great!
ReplyDeleteI love the classics, too, but I tend to ignore them for several years at a time before I realize how long it's been since I've read one of them. I read dozens of British classics in the nineties while living in London because they were readily available in nice paperback editions at one pound per book. Everyone on the tube and train was reading something, so this seem liked a good option at the time, and it allowed me to get into some of the lesser known books of classic writers.
ReplyDeleteI come into every new reading year with good intentions, but I never end up reading as many classics as I had hoped to read. That's probably because I tend to also try to read a number of books from the forties and fifties every year that no one would ever consider classics. I think those books give me a good feel for what the culture of the day was really like, and I continue to enjoy doing that.
I don't think I'll ever reach the point of feeling that I'm done with the classics. I love the challenge of reading them, and I'm amazed at how most of them truly deserve the praise they have received over the years. They can be intimidating, but the more you read them, and the more regularly you read them, the more comfortable you get with them.
Love your list...
Thank Sam and I too stayed away from the classics for years. I know what you mean about London and my favorite classic paperbacks are the Wordsworth editions which is a UK press and they are very affordable but most important the Introduction to the Wordsworth Classics by UK professors is superb. They really go into the book and get you excited about reading it.
DeleteThat said, one has to be careful with the classics. For example one of my all time favorites is Pride and Prejudice I read it when I was 20 and then 40 and loved it both times and so I was looking for the same experience with Austen's other books, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey but it wasn't there. Had I begun with those books I would never have given Pride and Prejudice a try. Similar to Edith Wharton. I read Ethan Fromme and didn't like it. Years later read House of Mirth and understood what all the fuss was about.
You are right to mix it up reading a classic or two each year but then focusing on more contemporary novels from forties and fifties. I want to start doing that more because not every classic is wonderful.
I absolutely love Middlemarch and have read it many times. I know that I cannot read every great book and so I have gravitated to favorite authors, favorite works, and try to balance rereading favorites, completing favorite authors, trying out new authors, and trying to read some contemporary works.
ReplyDeleteI also come back to comparing reading to eating. When I find something I love, why on earth would I only eat it one time and then never enjoy it again? By the same token, if I never try new things how will I discover new joys or broaden my horizons.
And, sometimes after reading something as magnificent as Middlemarch, I simply want to rest and read a fun mystery or memoir.
Hi Jane, A very good comparison. Books and food. My two passions. We can't read every great book even if we started as teenagers. There are going to be many great authors and classics that we miss. Think of all the poets out there for example going back centuries. And so after we do a good of sampling it pays to come back to our favorite authors and say goodbye to other writers who are no less great but are just not for us.
ReplyDeleteAgree Middlemarch is magnificent and the next book has to be a bit of a quick read.
I look forward to your thoughts on Middlemarch because I had never thought of reading it and want to learn more about it. I see some commenters here also like it a lot.
ReplyDeleteI have joined in on the Back to the Classics challenge twice and both time I failed miserably. Especially in following through with reviews. Granted both times were since Covid-19 started which could have had an effect, and I still have 4 months this year to improve, but still, I am having problems with it.
I have been working on my Classics list for three years and I have only read about 17 of the 70 books. First, I should have limited it to 50 books. But even so, I think my preferred rate of reading classics won't get me to the end for a while. Although I have read some other classics that are not on my list, The Woman in White, for example. Which I liked much more than I expected to.
Hi Tracy, I had planned to read Middlemarch last year. I picked it because I wanted to read one of the truly greatest novels ever written and Middlemarch falls into that category. But it's about 800 pages and that's daunting. What if I was bored by page 35? So this year I vowed I would do it regardless if I never wrote a review. I think there is a way to read these great books. I'm not young and so my eyesight absolutely requires a kindle for these gigantic books. With Middlemarch I committed to 30 pages a night, sometimes I read twenty but other nights I read fifty pages and I wasn't that far into Middlemarch before I realized that it is great and it's an enjoyable read too. I would also say that anyone who likes Victorian novels I think will love Middlemarch. But it's also true that there are people who won't like Middlemarch and that's fine too. The classics are a very individual thing. Some people like Austen, others Dickens. And I think that's great that you read 17 classics on your list. The important thing is to find the classics you love
ReplyDeleteSuch a wonderful and thought provoking post! I am so glad you are enjoying Middlemarch! It really is accessible once one gets stuck into it, right? I think that is where readers are often led astray with classics…by thinking they are inaccessible. I was afraid to read Dickens for years because I thought he would be “difficult”. Pshaw! He is one of my favorite authors of all time now. But I didn’t start to read him until this century. Other than books I read in high school or college, with a few exceptions, I didn’t read classics for pleasure until the late ‘90s really. The exceptions I think were mainly inspired by miniseries and Miramax films. I know I read Brideshead Revisited and A Room with a View in the ‘80s in my teens/twenties because of their filmed adaptations which I enjoyed.
ReplyDeleteThat is a good question about the pull between wanting to sample other classic writers and at the same time wanting to do a deeper dive into a new favorite author. Certainly with Dickens and Trollope, I have taken the plunge and have no regrets. But I’ve also never read Hardy or Thackeray and while I’ve read Middlemarch, I would like to try George Eliot’s other books too. Every reader is going to have a different balance, of course. Because outside of our reading life, there is “life” life, which gets in the way sometimes.
Thanks so much Ruthiella, Middlemarch was a great experience and what I found is that with an 800 page masterpiece it's not a bad idea to commit to reading 30 pages a night. That way it's less intimidating.
ReplyDeleteI think after one has sampled enough great novelists maybe it is better to do a deeper dive into one's favorites: Dickens, Trollope, Elliot, the Brontes because I agree there is only so much time. I have to say though after Middlemarch I'm hesitant to read anything else by Elliot because I fear her other novels are not going to compare. I really fell for Dr. Lydgate and I felt so bad for him and a part of me will be disappointed that I don't find his likeness in other Elliot novels. It's the same with Austen, I keep looking for Mr. Darcy in Persuasion, Northanger Abbey etc.
I will be posting my thoughts on Middlemarch but boy, how does one review a novel this brilliant with so many plots, characters etc. The great novels can't really be described. They have to be read.