No, really. There’s a weird elitism that exists within English literature that heavily encourages its students to have an undying love for the classic works that have defined the subject. Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to love them. You don’t even have to like them. In fact, you can actively hate a work that thousands of other people love and you wouldn’t be wrong in doing so.
The beauty of literature is that there’s a topic for everyone and an author, somewhere in history, that has likely already written about it. The possibilities are endless and vast; the mind is capable of producing things larger than anything the universe could ever hurdle against them. And if you’ve taken a literary theory or philosophy course, you’ll know that it Kant (ha) possibly be any other way.
Many of the works we are assigned to read in our English classes leading up to university and then IN university are some of the most boring works the English language has to offer. And really, for what? To read the same adaptation we’ve already seen done a thousand times before but in a different form of media? Lookin’ at you, Shakespeare.
How these spotlighted works are gilded and gatekept is causing young readers to be turned off reading completely. The sentiment that goes along with this – that unless you enjoy the classics to the fullest extent and continue to refer to them as must-reads, you are uncultured – is such a harmful notion.
Not everyone will read Oliver Twist and stare at the pages in awe. Not everyone will enjoy reading the charged words of T.S Eliot, Oscar Wilde or the Brontë sisters. It’s just not feasible to expect every student, even students who study English at the highest level, to love and adore classic novels. It also makes reading less accessible.
Imagine you begin to learn how to paint. Everyone says you simply MUST use saturated primary colours because they are foundational, they are the colours that brought everything else after it and they will make your painting inherently good because they have already been established as important. But you prefer pastel secondary colours. Does it make you wrong to paint the sun a lavender purple instead of a bright yellow? Absolutely not; it is your time spent painting a picture you enjoy looking at with colours you like.
The same goes for literature. Sure, we need to read some classics because they really are important to our knowledge of literature and from a scholarly perspective, this is something that should be taken seriously. That said, there is no need to read To Kill a Mockingbird again if you could barely get through it the first time and relied on your teacher or professor’s lecture notes to make it through the exam. There is a very important difference between critical reading and reading for pleasure, the former is important and begrudgingly, I must admit that it is, in fact, helpful in understanding the larger parameters of literature as a subject.
HOWEVER.
Reading for pleasure is supposed to be just that: pleasurable. You have to actually enjoy what is written on the paper you’ll be staring into for the next several hours. Perhaps spanning over several days or weeks, depending on the length. Do you want to spend that time dedicating your precious waking hours to reading a book you felt peer pressured by a professor to read because “it’s the best book ever, it’ll change your life, if you don’t like it then you just don’t get it?” Like yes, Susan, we understand – you read Pride and Prejudice once and now refuse to shut up about it.
My point here is to not force yourself to like the classics of literature just because someone with a fancy piece of paper that says “English” on it told you that you should. There’s no need and honestly, there are better books written in the last 20 years by authors who aren’t problematic, who don’t depict horrendous scenes and who use language that isn’t confusing and inaccessible.
Read what you like because, at the end of the day, we’re all just floating on a rock in space; who cares what some dead guy wrote about 300 years ago? Certainly not me.