Hi Reddit,
I have a lot of time on my hands and I would love to try diving into one of the heavier of the classics like Proust or Tolstoy ( I think, never read either, hope you know what I mean, if not feel free to ask).
I would love to put the time into actually enjoying one of these classics that might be harder to read and requiere more efford but Im unsure of where to start and what approach to take. Fx do I just read it front to back like a normal book or would I be taking notes? Looking stuff up meanwhile? Do I reread it just after finishing or wait some months for it to settle in my mind?
I would love some thought about what book would be a good place to start with a deeper more thourough reading which would reward a reading like that. And feel free to point out focus points, pay attention to how the author builds charactors without ever showing their thought etc.
Hope I made it clear what im asking. What Im thinking is that if Im going to be putting in a lot of hours and energy diving into a book like this, it would make sense asking for some thought from people with experience doing it.
by darktrooper291
3 Comments
For the two authors you mentioned (Proust and at least Tolstoy’s two lengthy works) I think the number one thing needed is patience. You have to trust that what the author gives you will pay off in the end. They aren’t necessarily difficult in the material they present, just the length.
For some books I’ll take a few notes on characters until I have everyone settled in my mind, then I just read and tab some particularly insightful passages. I don’t do anything special for long works.
For more dense works, irrespective of length, I tend to read even slower than normal. Eventually I get acquainted with the work enough that the pace speeds up a tad but still well below your average page. For me if I read a simple book at 50 pages an hour I would end up reading the more dense works at 15-25 pages an hour.
As for looking stuff up or supplementary materials, that’s totally up to the individual reader. Sometimes I will sometimes I won’t. Your enjoyment, objectives, and growth are all things to consider. I’ve decided on a few projects to go down a rabbit hole on, with the rest of my reading just being normal reading. If I enjoy my projects then I may increasingly lean towards analysis and looking up references I don’t know. Knowing history certainly helps with a LOT of classic novels, I personally have always found the historical context of novels to be among the most interesting.
I gravitate towards long books so something like Anna Karenina fits right in, but reading Proust, which I’m reading right now, is a challenge in patience for anyone. It’s good to know about Proust that you don’t have to read his entire work to get great benefit out of reading it.
one small piece of advice – trust yourself as a reader! i remember having a similar moment in high school when i decided to challenge myself with a difficult book (my choice was crime & punishment). i even remember telling a friend i was going to “try” to read it, implying i might fail. what i found was that i actually loved it and found it much more readable than anticipated! i think that’s the case with a lot of classics. we regard them as difficult because that’s what we’re told, but you might surprise yourself with how easily you can get into them. tolstoy, for example, is extremely readable and exciting to engage with. proust – depends who you ask haha. it’s never a bad idea to annotate, read secondary scholarship, or even see if you can find free lectures from english/literature departments online (yale has a ton of free literature lectures on youtube, for example). but also trust yourself. if you’re someone who feels compelled to challenge yourself with a harder read, then you’re exactly the kind of person who might fall in love with the classics naturally, or at least with a lot less effort than you thought 🙂
I like listening to classics on audiobook, and since they are mostly public domain they can be on YouTube for free by hobbyists but audible has redone some classics with actors as the narrators and they are sensational. Sometimes if I am worried I missed a theme of a chapter I read a summary of the chapter online after I finished to clarify that I didn’t miss anything important. Happy reading! 🙂