Why I love. . . reading classics
Three reasons why you should read the classics.
They’re really good
It’s tempting to save this point until last, unveiling it as a kind of flourish; a minor coup de théâtre after a list of worthy or intellectual incentives. But really, why else would you recommend someone a book?
Of course, as with most things, not every classic book will be to everyone's taste. However, I'd argue that a book is unlikely to still be being read, widely, decades or even hundreds of years after it was written, if it isn’t any good. (Unless it’s so terrible it has gained some sort of mythic status.)
There are other things that feed into this longevity – I imagine there are lots of very good books which haven’t outlived their authors. But in the Venn diagram of what makes a classic, ‘lots of people over a long period of time have all thought this is a really great book’ is the central intersection.
They're like time travel
Dracula was written and set in the late nineteenth century. Jane Austen didn’t just set her novels in the Regency period, she lived through it. Little Women was published just a few years after the end of the American Civil War in which it is set. Classics give us the chance to immerse ourselves in a historical period from the perspective of someone who is living through it, or for whom it is much more recent.
To read a classic is not just to read about the past, it is to be picked up and placed down in it. The past lives in every element of the work; not just in the setting and characters, but in the ideas the author has chosen to explore and the language, structure and style in which they do so. The readers the author is writing for, the materials they used to write, the table at which they sat: they are all there, their influence quietly contained by the narrative.
Learn more about the historical context of three classic books
The details in classics you might have missed
Read moreClassics that were, at the time they were written, historical fiction, offer a kind of double time travel: the period they are set in, as seen through the eyes of another moment in time. A Tale of Two Cities is a mid-nineteenth century Dickens’ interpretation of the late-eighteenth century French Revolution. The wars of War and Peace took place fifty years before Tolstoy wrote about them.
They always have something new to say, and something to say about the new
Back to that Venn diagram. As well as being really good, for a book to last a long time, new readers need to be able to relate to it, regardless of how distant its setting may feel. These are books that so brilliantly explore the constants of human life – love, death, morality – they remain relevant even as their readers' contexts change. Our sympathies shift, our emotional response is recast, a book's emphasis and meaning widens, or narrows, depending on our own lives, but it always feels applicable and apposite. Classics are a window to a particular time, and also timeless. Magic on a page.
