Book critic mode...engage!
This month my book club was reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin", by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I thought it was kinda boring until the halfway point, then it got really good. Wasn't a big fan of the dialogue, though...but you learn to ignore that. But that's not what I wanted to talk about.
I have a friend who couldn't get through it, and we had an interesting discussion over the phone about classics and books in general. At the book club meeting, the conversation turned in that direction as well. It seems like all of the members, whether they like classic books or not, agree that reading a book just so you can say, "I read this! I'm so scholarly!" is not why you should read it. I think the best way to put it is: classics for the sake of classics is entirely missing the point. I think lots of people, even if they try to avoid it, usually read a classic book with that kind of thing in mind (I know I do!). I'm not saying that it's the only reason someone reads a classic, but it's often there under the surface.
So...that leads to the question: how do you define a classic, then? It seems to be a really subjective thing. Is any book a classic if it's old? Do you have to learn something from a classic? If so, then there are a lot of modern books that have powerful messages. And, as my friend was saying, sometimes modern books are more relevant to real life because they are written by people in our time, who are faced with more or less the same problems.
But...does a book have to be relevant at all? What about fantasy? I guess you can say that fantasy has a lot of symbols for real life, but what if a book wasn't written that way? What if it you don't learn anything from a book that can be applied to your life, but it was powerful in a different way?
I'm kind of going off in various directions here, but what I'm trying to say is: does a book always have to "teach you something"? Is it only a classic then? Or is it just an old book? Or is a classic just a book that you love, for whatever reason? (That makes it a more personal definition, of course.)
So...what do you think? Do you know what I'm talking about? Agree? Disagree? I'd love to hear people's opinions.
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3 comments:
Great post Nicole!
I don't know if a book always has to teach you something. For me, a classic though, is a book that I can return to again and again and again, and still learn stuff from. Thats just *my* definition though. And I definitely have books that I don't learn stuff from that I consider favorites though
But yeah, my definition of a classic is just something (be it a book, piece of music, movie, artwork etc) that I return to again and again and that I learn from everytime.
Sorry for the hastily written reply and bad grammer.
Nice post!
Yeah, I would agree with what you're saying.
And it wasn't so much that I couldn't get through Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was just that I wasn't getting anything out of it and was also having a busy month.
So for me, Uncle Tom's Cabin wouldn't really be a classic then, at least not the part I read.
It seems to me that "classic" is a culture-based term and cannot be easily defined. It applies to literary works that have a significant impact on a large portion of population either because of the timeliness or importance of the issues (or both) reflected in them. Many of these issues are culture-dependent (i.e. Leo Tolstoy may be not as timeless to a Japanese reader as he is to a westerner). Also, by the virtue of touching upon important topics classic books often shape our view and leave significant "footprint" in the collective consciousness of whole generations. So, at the end of the day, "classic" is something that a large group of people believe it to be such.
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