Hey all! I’m new to reading classic literature.
I would like to read books like Crime and Punishment, In Search of Lost Time, 1984.
But whenever I look at study guides or discussion posts about these books, I find them to be very highbrow, intellectual and technical that I feel lost and not smart enough to understand them.
Any tips or suggestions?
Thank you so much in advance, I appreciate it!
by sherlyockholmes
16 Comments
1984 isn’t a particularly difficult book. A bit boring, perhaps.
C&P is a whole different thing.
It’s really not about how smart it is… it’s about what you want to spend time doing. If you don’t like highbrow/intellectual/etc, why read stuff that is?
If you would like to read it, read it. When I read textbooks the first run through I only understand like 10%. This is how you learn. 1984 is a story that can be intellectual or *just* a story. If it’s a goal, enjoy reaching it.
Never wait to read books. If you’re not enjoying them don’t be afraid to stop. Look forward to revisiting the book when you may have a bit more perspective/understanding.
> Crime and Punishment
Boring
>In Search of Lost Time
Half boring
> 1984
Very good
>I feel lost and not smart enough
Don’t feel like that, you are good.
Read books about subject you are interested in or/and with a style you like.
Don’t let them intimidate you! If you’re getting enjoyment out of reading them, keep going! If it’s not enjoyable, move on. Reading should be fun! And who cares if your reading experience with a particular book doesn’t match up with every single entry in some Wikipedia article about the book. If you enjoyed it, that’s what matters in my mind.
Don’t look at guides/discussion. You can better enjoy them after you’ve read the book. Don’t wait until you’ve become “smarter” to do something you consider difficult because you never will. You need to try the difficult thing while you’re “dumber” so you can get used to it, then you become “smarter” at it. You’re probably not going to understand everything instantly but this is not an issue. No one understands anything instantly and the process of not knowing almost anything to knowing *something* is what we call growing up. Read whatever you want and enjoy your readings!
“Difficult” books will make you smarter.
Ignore the discussions and reading guides. Read the books. If you enjoy them or appreciate the challenge of understanding them, keep reading them. If parts of them seem beyond you, skip them and read what you can. Even if you just enjoy the phrasing or dialogue or the basic story without necessarily “getting” the deeper themes, you’re still reading the book and getting something out of it.
As you read more, you may find yourself wanting to go back and reread books that were e challenging to see what you get out of them after you’ve had more experience.
Nah. I read hard to understand books in my early teens, understood barely anything out of them but I remember the feeling of recognizing that what I was reading was deeper than what I was grasping. Later I reread most of those classics and I’m glad I went through them younger so now I don’t focus much on the plot rather than their deeper philosophy and topics.
Forget the high-brow reviews or discussions. In my experience, a lot of them are typical ivory-tower intellectual masturbation.
You can still read those after or while you’re reading the stories and some of them will provide greater insight into what you just read. Some won’t.
Read animal farm before 84. It’ll get you used to his writing style and in fairness the opening is rather bleak.
Crime and punishment isn’t worth it in my opinion. It’s really only profound if you’re quite young.
Overall I’d recommend starting reading with easier simpler books and working your way up. And another is to consider using film versions as a way in; helps you give faces and voices to something that may not overall come across.
Finally remember there are two types of books out there, reading for story and for prose. Antoine de Saint Exupery is some of the best writing out there. Same with Graham greene. While War and Peace is really all narrative
Check out goodreads it’s a great site for this stuff much better than reddit
Never! Reading comprehension, like any other skill, strengthens with practice. Read whatever you want. With many of the classics, multiple read-throughs are required to fully grasp every nuance or theme. I often rely on other people to help my understanding of a text. There’s no shame in that.
Reading is how you get smarter. Just do it. The more you read, the more you know.
You are absolutely smart enough now, dive in and enjoy!!!
Just read for the love of reading. You may not ‘get’ everything in a book, but who cares.
Also, if you put it down, go back later and try again. I read one of my favourite books in the world on my third attempt. Sometimes you are simply in the mood and head space or not.
I studied literature in college, and while some of those study guides have some merit, they take the fun out of reading. I didn’t read hardly anything for YEARS after college. The difficulty with the classics, in my experience, is that their written in a slightly foreign and usually date language. Get yourself a dictionary and pick up the book. Most of the analysis stuff was written many years after the book was published and is a lot of theory and assumption. Read it for the story and if you loved it and want to, go look at the study guides and see if that add anything to the experience, like a point of view you hadn’t thought of. A lot of the analysis (at least for me) always came off as the writer trying to make themselves sound smart. It ruined a lot the stories for me. You are plenty smart enough to read the classics. Keep in mind, a lot of them were written in times when a lot of people had little formal education, but they were familiar with the language of the time. You’ve got this!
Side note, I read 1984 in the early 2000’s and it changed my perspective on a lot of the way I saw the world. Give it a shot. Orwell’s writing, while it’s been studied unendingly, it’s fairly palatable .