One of the many things that gives me imposter syndrome as a humanities graduate student is the fact that I don’t like so many of the classic literary works that I’m supposed to be studying. During my undergraduate years, I was often in the awkward position of loving reading and hating most of the books I had to read for class. Part of this was that I tend to enjoy speculative fiction books and, at the time, very few professors taught speculative fiction books as part of their courses. I did love my Shakespeare class and a few of the novels I read grew on me through the process of discussion. But by and large, the books I remember most from that time period were the ones that I read on my own or with the CS Lewis society on campus.
In the years since, I’ve often felt the obligation to embark on projects to read the “great works,” however you end up defining that. I’m particularly enamored of the format set up in Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind of following a rotating, four-year schedule of reading books by period: ancient, classical/medieval, early modern, and modern. (The beautiful systematic approach appeals to me, plus it doesn’t hurt that it aligns well with the church’s Come Follow Me scripture study rotation.) My most recent attempt at this was following the Hardcore Literature Book Club on YouTube, which had me reading both War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov in the same year, which I’m not sure I can recommend for anyone looking to get enjoyment out of literature.
The issue with most “read the classics” approaches is that they tend to be based on reputation, with subsequent pressure to say that we enjoyed them even when we blatantly didn’t. My father-in-law had a habit of saying whenever one of his kids didn’t enjoy a canonical work that “the classics aren’t on trial,” with the implication being that you, or at least your character as a cultured person, is; that your worth as a person, or at least as a reader, is determined by matters of taste. Or rather by denying that this is a matter of taste at all.
On the one hand, I see the value of consuming books that we don’t necessarily like or immediately jive with. It can help us avoid the slump towards books that we “use” to indulge in favorite tropes. We all know someone who reads what seems to be the same romance novel over and over. By challenging us with something that we experience for the first time and have to work at. By doing so, we can expand our tastes: I didn’t used to appreciate edamame or hummus, but with repeated exposure, they are now some of my favorite foods.
And some books have been undeniably important to the world conversation. Part of my motivation for doing the double-Russian last spring was that I didn’t feel I could rightly be commenting on issues of belief in literature if I hadn’t at least been exposed to The Bros K. It’s such a formative work on the subject for our collective understanding. The canon is not as set as we think it is, but also, certain books are important for a reason. Sometimes we have to reach beyond our personal tastes to acknowledge this.
But sometimes the pressure to like a book that’s been proclaimed a classic can actually squash our ability to have a real conversation about it. I often felt this way as an undergraduate, hesitant to say that I found Victorian classics like Dickens and Hardy to be wordy and boring, because I worried about how it would reflect on my own character (and how it might damage my relationship with a professor who controlled my grade).
One thing that has liberated me at least somewhat from this perspective was reading about C.S. Lewis’s dislike of TS Eliot–not just personal dislike or professional envy, but saying that what he wrote was bad poetry (which would have been heresy in several of my classes). But from Lewis’s perspective, Eliot was simply a contemporary, not a major shaper of modernism that I met him as. Seeing this literary giant as a human person whose work was not universally praised gave me permission to realize that I could both recognize something as important and stand by the idea that I didn’t like it.
A book’s spot in the canon is not a mark of merit per se but a mark of engagement with the current issues in our public consciousness. As Daniel Coleman wrote in In Bed with the Word, books “stay alive because they are not hermetically sealed, closed off against new engagements, appropriations, and interpretations. … We play the texts we read into life” (84). Too often, students (myself included) approach the books they read in school with this “hermetically sealed” mindset, that we are here to measure ourselves against something which is externally judged to be worthy. But this attitude tends to result in a dead-on-arrival engagement with literature, kills the real connection (or lack thereof) we might have with the text. For me to really enjoy the works that previous generations have deemed to be great, I have to be free to engage with them as something living and real, something that represents the inner thoughts or imagination of a living person, who I may or may not get along with. Strangely, by giving myself the option to hate the classics, I find myself more likely to enjoy them.