17 How to read the classics

As someone who makes (often unwilling) young people read classics as my regular job, a question I get a lot is: how do I learn to like these things?

They bounce off. It happens! Everyone has modern expectations of narrative, which is to say, fast-paced, fitting a certain pattern, full of cliffhangers and other excitement. The chunky cloth covers and small type put them off. The feeling that this is steamed broccoli meant to be good for you is definitely not helping.

There are a couple great roads into finding ways to love the classics. And I say that as someone who makes people read them practically daily. I also adore them. I talk a lot about genre fiction and so on here, but the classics are my whole thing. The older the better.

Here's how you get into them:

One, try listening to an audiobook instead of reading. Truly, it counts exactly the same. The voice actors interpret for you and make sense out of the long sentences. Downsides: it takes a lot longer, if you read fast at all, and you can't make notes on it, unless you're following along on the page. Which lots of people do! If this is something you ever need to write a paper about, definitely follow along on the page so you can put a post-it note where it needs to go.

Two, slow down. Slow way down. The pacing is much slower than modern fiction. It takes some getting used to. Even the sentences are often longer and more complex. The language and vocabulary and usage is different. When someone in a book written in 1800 is "making love" to someone, they are not having sex, okay? They are charming or romancing that person. You might want a book with footnotes to help with this sort of thing. Get a second-hand anthology if it has full texts.

Three, prep. Read a synopsis first so you know who's who and what on earth is going on. There's nothing wrong with watching a movie adaptation of a text before you read it. If it's a play, definitely watch it first! I don't think people should read plays anyway. It's like reading a recipe and expecting to be full. Those are directions for a thing, not a thing. But at minimum hit Wikipedia and read a synopsis so you know what the hell is going on.

Four, learn the background and context before you even start reading so you're not totally lost or confused by a truly alien culture compared to ours. An edition with a good foreword can be great for this. 

Five, a more complex point: remember that people back then were just as snarky and sarcastic as we are. Chaucer was snarky as hell. Sophocles loved putting people in impossibly awkward situations. Jane Austen was extremely sarcastic about people and their flaws. They were the same as us.

Take the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife." Okay, does she mean that, or is she being ironic? 

We figure out very quickly she's being ironic when Mrs. Bennet comes flying in and says a rich man has rented a house in the neighborhood, what a great thing for our girls! She has all these marriage-aged daughters and an aging husband and NO MONEY, no security, not even a house as they will lose it if the husband dies. One of those girls needs to marry this rich man and be able to take care of everyone else! 

Does he want to get married? Who is he? What's he like? Nobody knows anything about him except: rich and unmarried. But it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife, after all, so let's go get him, girls!

I've had students say this makes everyone shallow and so forth. No! Women of their class could not go out and work. They had to get married to support themselves. Yes, you can be upper class and poor. This is also shocking to modern Americans.

So knowing that background changes the first sentence, right? Now we get it. The joke is that everyone assumes this guy who just rented a house wants to get married. Let's all go see him and see which sister he wants to marry! It's embarrassing to the two oldest sisters, but the younger ones are kind of idiots like the mom. 

Six, if it doesn't ruin the story for you, get spoilers! Who marries whom? How do we get from here to there? There are many obstacles in the way. How do Jane and Lizzy not absolutely die of embarrassment from the behavior of their mother and sisters?

It helps to get the tone and plot beforehand, truly. Like if I am teaching The Iliad as I often do, I tell the class: okay, spoilers, here's who won the war. So that lets us see one hero as tragic, the other as favored by the gods. And the gods literally show up and help or hinder these people! 

Seven, tone. Jane Austen is being funny. It helps to know that. She's writing about the serious business of finding a husband and having a life. She writes about Lizzy's friend making an awful choice, but a choice that lets her survive. But she's being very funny about all the intricacies of trying to find a person you could marry and live with when it's deadly serious survival, but also absurd. It's easier to see this in a film adaptation, where everyone is trying not to roll their eyes every time Mr. Collins goes on and on about Lady Catherine, who treats him like dirt even while he's fawning over her and pretending that his connection with her makes him something special. Look how complex and human and funny that is.

Eight, start with something you like. Do you like war stories? Henry V. Do you like the supernatural? Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Do you like stories about young people figuring it out? Austen, Dickens. 

Nine, take a class. Sometimes you just need someone to walk you through them as you go. I swear I have shepherded dozens (hundreds? oh no) of classes through the densest classics and showed them how they are awesome. You can take a class, but make sure the person teaching it loves these texts AND can show you what's great about them. (Not everybody does, fair warning.) Also ultimately you're going to have to sit down and read them.

Ten, I hate to say just do it, because I find it nearly impossible to sit through 95% of nonfiction and saying "just do it" doesn't help me. I will be up and doing something else within five minutes and I will not retain anything I've read. Yes, I've read lots of nonfiction, and no, it doesn't help me get any better at it. I have to MAKE myself read it. Put the phone far away, get a relevant beverage, and sit there. I find the hardest barrier to get over is the initial one where you have to turn everything else off and sit there.

A few more strategies to try: 

• Take notes as you go, even if it's like "p278 Genji is a complete perv about some new actual child and says he's not." Taking notes helps, for real. It makes you focus on taking info out of what you're reading.
• Ask questions as you read. Write them down. Is Genji ever going to realize what a horrible user of a person he is? (No.) Is Genji going to get attacked by wild dogs that eat his liver? (Alas, no.)
  
• Setting a timer helps because then you don't read to the point of failure, which makes you hate doing it. Read for five minutes and stop. Read for ten minutes and stop. 
• Read a set number of pages. Don't keep going if you're not absorbing it.
  
• Cast the roles in your head so it's more vivid. 
• Imagine texting what you read to a friend. Or if you won't get distracted by touching that phone, ACTUALLY text it to a friend. 
• Get a friend to read along! That can be fantastic if you're struggling equally. Team reading.
• Draw brief sketches of what you're reading. This works very well for visual readers as you have to convert the story into images.
• Get mad about it. This got us through what we called "Frigging Genji," truly. Want to read something maddening? Here's someone presented as a hero who's a terrible philanderer and pedophile and child rapist. But it's written so brilliantly that if the person portrayed read it, they'd be like, yes, I am awesome and justified, it's true. They wouldn't be offended. While others reading would be backing away in horror. We all hated Genji so much! Hating a character is surprisingly effective in driving your reading forward. Unfortunately he doesn't get murdered by a child as we all hoped. Oh well. In my version he would be. 
• Articulate what's working and what's not working. This is extremely effective for me. Not just "I don't like it" but "I hate how the author writes women in xyz ways." Bonus, you can turn this into a paper if you do it right. My first academic publication came from something like this.
  

Classics are classics for good reasons. That doesn't mean you will like them if you go in cold. Sometimes you need a guide or other strategies to help you get to the good parts. Never take it as a reflection on you if you don't like something, though. Some of these things are not for you. 

The reason to get familiar with the classics is that they're part of the conversation you want to understand. You know how every TV show has a Rashomon episode? You want to see the original Rashomon so you get it. 

Once my VW bus broke down in Grass Valley CA and I was stuck for a couple of days waiting for a part, with nothing to do but read the paperback Shakespeare collection I'd stuck in there for emergencies. A few years later, a friend and I were watching My Own Private Idaho. I gradually freaked out because it was absolutely Henry IV. They even quoted from it. I kept saying, "This is Henry IV." My friend got mad because he was an English major with a master's and hadn't caught it and I was a composer conservatory dropout in those days. So maybe this isn't the best anecdote, or possibly it's a brag, if being a dropout with a broken down VW bus is a brag. (It definitely is not.) But knowing those plays absolutely affected how I saw that movie. 

Can you enjoy it without understanding all that? Sure! But why not get the whole thing, not just a piece of the picture? It's good to know where you are in the whole conversation that is fiction.