How come I don't get classic literature?

[Simeon Ivanov]

Calumon: Maybe you shouldn't care and read what you like?

Um ... sorry, but what's a "Calumon"

Well I usually don't, but I have this ... like, little black feeling in the back of my head, tauting me that I'm an idiot because I don't get these books ... and I can't just reach out and kill him with fire, sadly.

 

[ntw3001]

I didn't like classics when I was at school. They seemed overwritten and poorly-structured. If you don't enjoy them, you don't have to. If you pick them up again in a few years, you might find that your appreciation has changed. I like Thomas Hardy now, for the exact reasons I hated him when I was sixteen.

People spoke, and especially wrote, more carefully and with a greater sense of the importance of language in the past; some of us think it is a genuine shame that that is no longer common.

Wrote, yes, when text wasn't a standard form of communication. But spoke? I don't see why. I certainly doubt that people in centuries past deliberated any more reverently on their sentence structure and vocabulary in speech than they do today. Humans were also humans in the past; social pressure doesn't change everything. What motivation would they have to construct their informal speech patterns more carefully than we do now?

I suspect that the decline in care over written work is largely due to the frequency with which we write. Formal speech and formal writing still exist, but most speech and most writing are not it, and admittedly a degree of informality in formal speech is currently fairly fashionable. The reason past language use seems more deliberate and considered is likely because writing survives, and informal writing in the kind of volume we see today is a relatively new development.

There are records of spoken language, but, for example, this soldier's account of Rourke's Drift seems an unlikely block of off-the-cuff speech [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Henry_Hook#Hook.27s_account_of_the_battle]. Citation needed, apparently, but similar language is commonly found in such reports. Who would have taken and recorded a direct transcript, and why? More likely, an editor tidied it up, there being more value in a clear record than a linguistically accurate one. It's certainly not to be considered a reliable record of the then-current mode of speech, and there's really no reason to suppose that speech was treated any differently then than now except to fuel some absurd, historically-constant belief that society is at all times at the brink of cataclysm following some kind of 'golden age'.

 

[zombie goat fetish]

It's just a matter of taste who cares what the herd think, if you don't like it you don't like it simple as that.

 

[Damien Black]

While much of the "deeper meaning" may have been unintentional, that doesn't make it any less applicable.

As for the length and descriptive density of most classics? Yes, they could be shorter. I, however, would not be so fond of them; part of what I like about older writing styles is that very same intricacy of description. Especially works like Milton and Dante, which are so intricately woven with symbology. Those that think this comes at the expense of character development or dialogue need to read some of the Russian Classics.

Even with that, choosing two of the longer works of the Western Canon and decrying them based on their length seems fallacious... I would compare it to reading the wheel of time series and thinking that all modern literature series are 11+ volumes long, or that no one writes non-serial works any more. Also keep in mind that getting a good translation is overwhelmingly important for reading works originally written in language foreign to you; it can be the difference between loathing the work for "grammatical inconsistencies" and having an easily flowing piece which is a pleasure to read.

Perhaps it's simply the amount of literature I have read growing up, but I have never had any difficulty reading Shakespeare.

 

[HerbertTheHamster]

I'm a 16-year old metalhead gamer

Found your problem.

People nowadays have no attention span. At all.

 

[Damien Black]

Some doesn't age well. Many of the classics are centered around issues of the time, issues we don't have today, so they don't ring quite as well. That, or heavy reading isn't for everybody.

I strongly disagree with this, most of the works that have survived to the present day have done so overwhelmingly because the themes and ideas explored through them are nearly universally applicable. While I hesitate to get into a philosophical debate on the human condition; as a species, we haven't moved so far from where we were even a few thousand years ago.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

Well I am reading a translated version of Hamlet ... so I guess it looses part of it's charm ...

Oh. Oh, dear. There's part of the problem, definitely. Something like Shakespeare loses quite a bit in the translation, no matter how skillful the translator is. You should really try to read him in the original English, preferably in a good annotated edition with footnotes that explain the more obscure vocabulary and allusions. (I'd recommend one of the Arden editions of Hamlet.)

There's also the issue of which version of the play you're getting (there are at least three), but that's really more of a concern for sad Shakespeare nerds like me. =)

Seriously, though, if anyone reading Shakespeare runs across something that seems odd or hard to understand, feel free to ask me anything. Not to brag, but I have actual degrees in this stuff.

 

[Tom Kulzer]

I had alot of problems like this when reading "classics" as a gamer. I thought they were all boring and too lengthy but than I picked up Romance of the three kingdoms and suddenly I cared about what I was reading. I'm an avid player of the Dynasty warriors games so I felt I was getting the real story of the yellow turban rebelion and the Pact of this. The game made sense why 100 boats were stuck together. When it was a horrible tactical idea, Plus some of the stratigies and plans they had were just amazingly heroic wether true or not the stories were amazing poorley written of course but amazing no the less. I think once you can find something to context it with they become great stories, Even if you have to stretch the story to do it. a la lion king and i want to say its hamlet?

anyway I don't think you are stupid or wrong just you lack anything to Attach it to. you are proably a visual learner like me so it helps to have something of intrest to connect the dots.
Maybe if you posted the 20 books we can help you decided what to compare it to in order to help you get the concept even if you don't like the book?

 

[Axolotl]

I'm a 16-year old metalhead gamer

Found your problem.

People nowadays have no attention span. At all.

Teenagers have never had a great attention span.

Seriously this is the main problem for the OP. It may sound pretentious but classics are something you like more as your tastes mature, you get to apprciate the slower pace, heavier prose and all the qualities that generally define a classic. This doesn't mean you're garunteed to like them in the future but just because you dislike something now does not mean you'll do so in the future.

My advice would be that, when reading for pleasure don't read something you find dull just because it's a classic. There's plenty of great literature that is great for teenagers (Vonnegut for a start) so try reading that instead.

 

[Gaiseric]

Twenty books over like 8 weeks?

Are you cereal?

I used to do that for fun back when I had a bunch of books to read. Granted they weren't all The Inferno or Hamlet.

OP: I feel you buddy. Classic literature is rarely interesting to me and is typically written in a way that I'm not used to making it a chore to get into(at least at first). Hell, I don't like most modern classics either.

 

[Kargathia]

Part of what makes them good is because they were the first ones to do so.

Dante pretty much single-handedly laid the foundation for the renaissance, and revolutionised a couple of genres.

Don Quichotte was originally written to take the piss out of a genre, so he's pretty much meant to be an incredibly annoying twat. And the mere fact you were thinking it'd be an awesome spectacle shows it's a good book, especially as it was written in a time that lacked CGI.
And that brings us to your main question: how can you appreciate something that's 400 years old?

You worded the answer yourself already. You can recognise the genius in that somebody wrote something like that 400 years ago, and it's good to see how things evolved since then. But you don't necessarily have to read the books for fun.

It's extremely useful to have done, but not always fun to do. Kind of like school in general.

I personally loved La Divina Commedia (even though I had to reread each stanza about 10 times to fully understand it), but I'm pretty sure I won't reread Don Quichotte or Robinson Crusoe.

 

[Mr.Squishy]

Weell, you don't have to like every classic book ever, opinionss are subjective (DUH) after all. For example, I just read Frankenstein, and found it to be very entertaining, while trying to start Crime and Punishement just gives me a headache. Chances are, you may like some, while others just do not appeal to you. I don't see a problem with that.

 

[Baneat]

Twenty books over like 8 weeks?

Are you cereal?

I used to do that for fun back when I had a bunch of books to read. Granted they weren't all The Inferno or Hamlet.

OP: I feel you buddy. Classic literature is rarely interesting to me and is typically written in a way that I'm not used to making it a chore to get into(at least at first). Hell, I don't like most modern classics either.

I read two books in a week and thought it was a lot, to get that for homework is insane.

 

[Kargathia]

Seriously, though, if anyone reading Shakespeare runs across something that seems odd or hard to understand, feel free to ask me anything. Not to brag, but I have actual degrees in this stuff.

Dude, where were you like four years ago... I still have painful memories of wrestling my way through annoted editions - it was a pain to keep track of the story when there are more footnotes than actual text.

 

[Galaxy Roll]

It's an acquired taste [http://xkcd.com/915/] better suited to a time long past.

You know.

The time it was from and made for.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Reading lots of classical literature is a lot like history and anthropology, because you're really learning about a different culture at a different time. And when it's good, it's really good - there's a reason people are still reading the Epic of Gilgamesh 3000 years later. But it sounds like you might not have a good translation, and quality of the translation is absolutely an issue.

 

[Gaiseric]

snip

I remember my classmates thought I was either crazy or lying when we had to record the books we were reading.

To get that many books as homework is indeed nuts.

 

[ntw3001]

I'm a 16-year old metalhead gamer

Found your problem.

People nowadays have no attention span. At all.

Pretty sure they have the same attention span as they always did. I'm not really arguing with you, but I do hate when people speak disparagingly about 'people nowadays' as though they're fundamentally different to people in the past. Were teenagers ever the target audience for these books? Certainly novels, as a current medium of entertainment, were more popular amongst the young then than now, but does anyone really suppose there's been some grand change in the nature of mankind? Would teenagers of the past seriously have spurned video games in favour of trawling through something slow-paced and thematically dense?

Again, it's more of a tangent than really a disagreement, but... ugh. It seems depressingly common to view any time before the industrial revolution as some kind of intellectual utopia, and today as the brink of the stupidocalypse.