Why classics are better

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I also like this article. Thanks for jogging that memory : ] Loading Does fanfiction count. Twelfth Night… just too queer to even begin talking about. Contribute to the conversation Cancel reply Yay! Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.

Time is the deciding factor, and modern books are still, well, modern. According to Wikipedia though how much is that to be trusted? And out of those 1,, most readers will probably only read a couple dozen in that year.

Out of those 1, best known books, only a handful of the best will stay popular by, say, Out of those , books published in , I only remember 2. Only those 2 made a strong impression on me. And that was only 8 years ago. Now imagine classics. They go through all of this and more.

There were many books which came out in , but you can probably only think of a handful Journey to the Center of the Earth, Uncle Silas , etc. Classics have gone through the wringer and been chosen as the best books time and time again.

In another century, those books which have stood the test of time will become the new classics. This makes worse authors able to publish. It also makes better authors able to publish too who are outside the mainstream, so I guess I can tolerate it. Anyway, what is your opinion about classics? Are they better then modern books? Or just the best classics are better than the average modern book, which is my opinion.

Let me know your thoughts down in the comments, thank you so much for reading, follow my blog for more musings, and, as always,. An avid reader and writer. View all posts by Madame Writer.

What an interesting topic and great food for thought. And I feel that amongst the trillions of books being produced, only a few made it to become classics over time and soo judging modern day stories in multitude does not justify this discussion.

Over time, a few of these so called modern day books today will also turn into classics and therefore I think you always get a couple hits each decade. Like Liked by 1 person. I agree completely! Even if I prefer classics personally more, it would be unfair to modern books to compare them all, good and bad, against the small amount of classics which are still popular today.

And Saint-Simon? And Cardinal de Retz? But even the great nineteenth-century cycles of novels are more often talked about than read. Dickens fans in Italy form a tiny elite; as soon as its members meet, they begin to chatter about characters and episodes as if they were discussing people and things of their own acquaintance.

Years ago, while teaching in America, Michel Butor got fed up with being asked about Emile Zola, whom he had never read, so he made up his mind to read the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle. He found it was completely different from what he had thought: a fabulous mythological and cosmogonical family tree, which he went on to describe in a wonderful essay.

Youth brings to reading, as to any other experience, a particular flavor and a particular sense of importance, whereas in maturity one appreciates or ought to appreciate many more details and levels and meanings. We may therefore attempt the next definition:. If we reread the book at a mature age we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us.

The definition we can give is therefore this:. There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective , we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing. Indeed, we may say:. All this is true both of the ancient and of the modern classics.

For this reason I can never sufficiently highly recommend the direct reading of the text itself, leaving aside the critical biography, commentaries, and interpretations as much as possible. Schools and universities ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite. There is a very widespread topsyturviness of values whereby the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say, and, indeed, can say only if left to speak for itself without intermediaries who claim to know more than the text does.

We may conclude that:. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known or thought we knew , but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy follows the life of Mildred Hubble, a well-meaning yet clumsy witch in training who never seems to get anything right. A large amount of the book series is set within the walls of a girls-only school, which is housed in a castle surrounded by vast plush forest.

Fans of the books can visit this fictional setting in real life, at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire. Lewis regularly holidayed in these mountains saying that the scenery "made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise its head over the next ridge". Type keyword s to search.

Dougal Waters Getty Images. To Kill A Mockingbird. Arrow amazon. Wuthering Heights Wordsworth Classics. Emily Bronte amazon.