I never read The Great Gatsby in high school. Nor did I read The Color Purple. Or Lord of the Flies. Emma. Fahrenheit 451. Great Expectations. The Importance of Being Earnest. Lolita. Dracula. Anna Karenina. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hamlet.
You get the idea.
Sure, The Catcher in the Rye was one of my favorites as a high school student, as was To Kill a Mockingbird. I did read Shakespeare and stuff, a bit of Hemingway, some Poe, Voltaire, Virgil, and Faulkner. I did book reports on Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights. My school certainly didn’t deprive us.
But it was a matter of having time (or rather, not having time) to do things. At college, I was always reading, reading, reading. For my art history class, for my German class, for my intro education class, for my physics class on the Manhattan Project, for the dozen history classes I took….and so on. I didn’t really want to read anything else during the school year.
Sure, in the summer, I read lighthearted stuff, fun stuff. And, okay, exception: I did read Harry Potter, which I consider literature, whatever anyone else might say (I’m looking at you, literary snobs).
But here I’m talking about the classics that have been around for decades. Outside of my interesting-yet-challenging German literature classes laden with Goethe, Mann, Kafka, and Schiller, I didn’t read a single other classic as an undergraduate. There was simply too much else to do.
Fast forward to post-graduation, my first job, and a different kind of schedule. I had time to read outside of work. Regularly. For fun.
Whaaaaat?
I was teaching English abroad in Austria, and English teachers would recommend and lend books to me. I’d head to the local library’s English-language section if I felt like reading something in my native tongue, and began devouring some of the classics I simply hadn’t gotten around to yet.
That was the year I read Lord of the Flies, The Color Purple, Fahrenheit 451, and The Great Gatsby, among others.
The summer after returning to the U.S., I read Hamlet.
And liked it.
Enter a new job and set hours, a schedule when I had long weekday evenings stretching before me when I could sit on my porch with a glass of wine and a book. Enter Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, and Leo Tolstoy, stage right. And when I finally worked up the nerve to read Dracula (confession: since high school, I’d been afraid to read it), I wondered why on earth I’d waited so long.
The thing about reading literature when it’s not assigned to you in a class is that you appreciate it on another level. You’re choosing, entirely on your own, to read it. Nobody is giving you a deadline. You can think what you want about it without worrying about what a teacher or professor wants to hear in a presentation, or what the guidelines for an essay are. You read these classics because you want to. That’s it.
There is something satisfying in that feeling. Not only that you’ve (re)discovered these great books, but that you’ve sort of beaten the system. (“HA! I never had to write an essay about ghosts in Hamlet!” Or, you know, whatever.) You interpret the books how you want, can say what you want about them, and are not constantly looking for symbols or themes or metaphors or onomatopoeia or…you get the idea.
Not that I’m demeaning the high school English class or anything. I remember, to this day, every single book I read and some pretty animated discussions about them. I realized, however, that I enjoyed reading classic literature much more on my own, without all that structure and the pressure of deadlines and stressing about thinking up some interesting-ish and profound-ish point for a class discussion.
(Though there are always some exceptions. Some things don’t change between then and now: I didn’t like Romeo and Juliet my freshman year of high school, I didn’t like it when I glanced at it again in my twenties, and I still do not like it today. Sorry.)
Reading classic literature as an adult also came with the advantage of my reading level being a bit more advanced than it was at fourteen. I appreciated the books more not only because I read them on my own, but because I just “got it” much more than I did at the high school level.
Take To Kill a Mockingbird. That was one I read in high school and loved. I went back to it recently, for the first time in many, many years, and loved it more than I can ever remember in high school.
My list of the classics I have yet to read is still pretty long. War and Peace. A whole host of Hemingway’s stuff. (And I want to read all of Hemingway’s stuff.) The Grapes of Wrath. Frankenstein. The Scarlet Letter.
If I keep going, this might get a bit embarrassing. Huckleberry Finn. King Lear. Great Expectations. (See?) To be fair, I did start Great Expectations once.
Anyway. Maybe I’ll add a one of those to my “things to check out from the library” list this week. There are so many good books out there worth taking the time to appreciate.
An earlier version of this post appeared on Suite.io in March 2015. Since then, the list of books I’ve read has grown, of course, but the list of classic literature I haven’t read is still very, very long. And no, I have not yet tackled Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I’ll get to it, but precisely when and where I want to.
Photo: The British Library, https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/12458978503. First folio, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Public domain. London: Isaac Laggard and Ed. Blount, 1623.
