So I’m going to be honest with you here…

I’m not really all that fond of classics, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The general notion seems to be that you’re supposed to like classics, and that people who don’t are either (a) dumb, (b) not smart enough to understand them, (c) breaking some unwritten code of literature, (d) don’t know how to read, or (e) all of the above.

Now that’s just silly. There’s no rule that says that you have to like classics before you can be taken seriously as a reader/writer/person. Classics were written i...