Are Classics A Must Read?

[Christine]

when my oldest daughter was 5, I found a children's edition of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night Dream." It was a big beautiful book with amazing illustrations. My daughter was turned on to reading from that one book, even though by the time she was 5 she had quite a collection of children's books. She will be 26 the end of this month, has remained an avid reader to this day, is a communications major, continues to love Shakespeare, and astoundingly...still has that very book she received when she was 5 years old.

You never know what book will spark a child's interest in reading. But for my daughter, it was that Shakespeare book that did it. She has read every classic you can think of, but will read any genre, any time period, etc. It doesn't matter.

My other daughters, however, do not like the classics. Even though they like to read, they are more into current suspense/thriller novels.

But to me, it doesn't matter. They love to read and I am very grateful that they do.

[Becky]

Dominae wrote: "Appreciation is fine and laudable.

However there is a trap which both sides of the divide need to be aware of. The passionate debates here have thus uncovered a mental and sentimental gulf.

Let..."

I totally agree. Sometimes I really want to read a classic or to put it another way something that really makes me sit back and go hmmm. Other times I just want something light and fun. I think they are both good. Everything can be enjoyed at the right time.

[Lance]

Christine Maria wrote: "when my oldest daughter was 5, I found a children's edition of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night Dream"..."

Wonder how that would've turned out if you'd tried Richard III .

[Len]

I'm one of the few who have actually read Joyce's Ulysses. I ground my way through it by reading aloud about half of the book. It's overrated. More to the point, he had women doing what they would never do. Joyce could probably imagine a woman leaving a loaded gun in the children's section of Target just to make a political point as the Open Carry morons in Texas claimed. No woman would ever do that.

Issac Asimov's Foundation and Robot novels are 20th century classics that reached few lists of great novels yet books like novels like Prelude to Foundation are as good as Ulysses. The best novels of Arthur C Clark are equally as good as Asimov's.

[Christine]

Len wrote: "...Issac Asimov's Foundation and Robot novels are 20th century classics that reached few lists of great novels yet books like novels like Prelude to Foundation are as good as Ulysses. The best novels of Arthur C Clark are equally as good as Asimov's."

Nailed it Len - these are classics whether or not they made it on some list somewhere. I have my own list of classics...like to think I'm just a little a head of the times.

[[deleted user]]

I don't know that I can argue they're NECESSARY. I know too many people who have zero interest in reading classics of any sort and nothing I say can change their minds. But I think NOT being familiar with at least a portion of the classics is like being handicapped by a lack of knowledge. There are way more people who are in the know than not, so you're going to miss out on so many references and adages in today's pop culture. I know I couldn't do without them. The classics section of any bookstore sucks me right in. I love historical fiction, and classics aren't JUST historical fiction as we think of it today--they were literally written in the time periods in which they are set! It's like having a window through time. The past will always be relevant, and what better way to connect with it than through the (usually) honest and detailed thoughts and descriptions of the people who lived it? I feel so much more attached to the people of a certain day and age by reading the classics than merely by reading history.

[Len]

You must be a Jane-ite.

[[deleted user]]

I am. :) Haha, how could you tell?

[Len]

It was an easy guess. Not even Charles Dickens is read today as much as Jane Austen---excepting Dickens Christmas Carol, of course.

[[deleted user]]

I'm a lover of both!

[Marc]

I'm curious why it's so important to remain connected to the past through fiction? And I speak as a historian. The adage that the past repeats itself is both wrong (conditions are always different) and of limited use, since you never know which part is going to repeat itself when...

[Len]

Actually, fiction opens otherwise closed minds to great possibilities. Sci fi insisted that there were planets and civilizations beyond our own civilizations from the 1930's. The Astronomy establishment stood firmly against the idea for decades. Any astronomer who insisted in looking was browbeaten into silence. The prohibition was so great that a budding astronomer got a PhD in the 1980's for proving that planets don't exist beyond our solar system. His proof: none had ever been found.

That was then. Today, over 5000 planets have been found and 23 look like candidates for Second Earths and we've been seriously looking for not even twenty years. Civilizations are "out there". The probability that we will find them is so great that The World Economic Forum that meets yearly Davos, Switzerland said in its February 5, 2013 final report that the single greatest disruption over the next ten years will confirmation of a Second Earth. Even if we don't confirm a civilization along with confirmation that the planet has organic life, the report said, it will lead to economic upheaval.

And, if we confirm another civilization, what then? Past sci fi adventures offer a glimpse of what happens to a civilization when it meets one that's far more advanced. Fiction stories about China in the 19th century, especially those that focus on the European invasion offer clues. So do the stories about Spanish America in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Theology awaits in the wings. The confirmation of 51 Pegasi b by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz has taken theology back to the time of Sir Isaac Newton who imagined the Cosmos as a mechanism designed by God to run forever. At a stroke, it refutes Creationism and Atheism.

Confirmation of a Second Earth takes theology back to Thomas Aquinas and Averroes of the 12th and 13th Centuries. Reason will once again matter. Historians will be rushing to all the old tales of the Middle Ages like Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

In the 21st Century that promises great upheavals with uncertain consequences, we have only our histories and our literature to guide us .

[Jim]

It is important to remember that no book, generally recognized as meeting the criteria necessary to be referred to as a classic today, started out as one.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a classic as serving as a standard of excellence. Over time, a few of the novels released recently will, no doubt, be considered as having met the standard established to determine excellence and, therfore, deserving of the title.

Regardless of genre, if a novel is technically well written and the story so artfully narrated that it remains extremely popular among readers and continues to be commercially successful for several decades, it will have earned its place among the ranks of classical literature.

[Brenda]

A book is the cheapest and easiest way to travel you can have. And you can travel through time! Which is the great point of classic books. Read Dickens and you are there, in 1850s London. Read Sophocles and you are back in ancient Greece.
Unless you know how different it was in the past, you cannot know and value the present. Here's an example: women have been able to vote for only the past hundred years. Di dyou know that?