You Again?

So, here I am again, after a bit of an absence.  I switched gears a bit and decided I did not want to write a blog post on each and every book that I have been reading, opting instead to post reviews on Goodreads -- where I am sure you are all just rabidly enjoying every little nuanced thought I have on a particular novel.  My idea was that I would use this to write about "everything else."  Suffice to say, I have not had much of "Everything Else" to write about lately.  I recently started a new job and "Everything Else" was kind of tossed aside for a while.

But alas, I am back.  And although I just posted a wonderful review on Different Seasons, I felt the urge to write more about books in general.  I've spent a good portion of the year reading Stephen King novels.  My idea was to read everything he has published, in the order he's published them.  Because I cannot stand the thought of devoting so much time to one author (he's not the only one out there, you know), my method of madness has been to read two or three novels of Mr. King's, than move on to one or two other works before revisiting King again.  While living in New York City, I started a habit of devoting time to reading, at a minimum, three classic novels a year.  You know, those books you were supposed to read in high school but never did.

In order to tackle this habit, or goal, a few ground rules had to be set up.  First, why three?  Usually its been more than three books, but three is minimum.  Why is that?  Second, should the size of the book matter?  Thirdly, and most importantly, what is the definition of a classic?

The first two questions are more personal questions that pertain to my idiomatic goal.  First, three just seemed like a round number.  If I recall the moment I decided to pursue educational endeavor, it was May or June, and I realized that if I were going to begin reading classics, it had to be an attainable goal.  The first one I read was The Last of the Mohicans and I remember it taking a bit to slog through it, so three seemed to be the attainable number at that time.  Since then, its been on average five classics a year, but three remains my goal.

The second question, which pertains a bit to the first question, is whether or not the length of the book should matter.  If I were to pick up, say, War and Peace, should that effect my goal of three books a year?  If I were to tackle O, Pioneer by Willa Cather (which comes in at an astounding 208 pages), should I bump the goal up to more books?  To answer these questions, length should not matter.  Three is such a miniscule number that, even if I decided to read Les Miserables, War and Peace, and Gone With the Wind all in the same year, I should be able to do it with no problem.  And there was never a maximum number of books to read, so why should I care if I pick up a book that is barely 200 pages.  That just means the more the merrier.

Before I answer my third question, and the main question of this blog, I want to touch back on the beginning of the post.  I've been reading quite a bit this year.  More, I feel, than I usually do.  According to Goodreads, I've read 28 books thus far -- two of which were George R. R. Martin books and another The Stand, all three of which were thousands of pages.  As the calender changed from June to July to August, I realized on afternoon as I skimmed over my bookshelf that I had not read one classic this year.  Which lead me to pick up Jude the Obscure.  I followed that depressing tome with The Magnificent Ambersons.  So two down, at least one more to go before the end of the year.  I am looking at The Woman in White as my next adventure into the past, but keeping with the macabre theme of Stephen King that I have been absorbing over the past nine months, I may just try and tackle Dracula again.  I remember when I was 12 trying to read it and my mind just could not wrap itself around the Gothic style of writing.

As I finished The Magnificent Ambersons and moved back on with Stephen King, I began to think and wonder, Why am I doing this?  I have no assignments due.  I am no longer in school, so there is no professor slapping a ruler on the desk and demanding that I read these authors long passed.  Why do I feel this necessary urge to read classics when perfectly good books are being released every week for my consumption?  And these mental queries of mine lead to the ultimate query, What is a Classic?

I asked a friend, "How do you define a classic?"  Their response was "A classic is a book in the public domain."  For those who may not be familiar with the term, a book in the public domain is a work which the intellectual property rights have either expired or have been forfeited.  Which means, the work is deemed public property.  Have you ever wondered why certain books are significantly cheaper to buy than others?  Why certain printers sell books by Charles Dickens for $4.95, and a book of the same length by Stephen King for $8.99?  For the Charles Dickens book, all you are paying is for the cost of materials and distribution (and a slight markup so that the printer can make a profit).  For the Stephen King book, you are paying author royalties and marketing costs to Stephen King and his publisher, as well as materials and distribution (and a slight mark up).

In the United States, a book becomes part of the public domain at varying times, depending on what the laws were at the time of publication.  A good example of this discrepancy would be the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  This Side of Paradise, which was first published in 1920, is part of the public domain because any copyright protection it had has expired.  The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is still protected by copyright laws, because after 1923 a copyright law was put in place protecting it for 95 years.  So, in the year 2020, The Great Gatsby will enter the public domain.

 I asked my friend if they considered The Great Gatsby a classic.  Unequivocally, the answer was yes.  I told them its not in the public domain.  When they did not believe me, I looked it up on my smartphone and showed them (which is also when I read the information on Copyright Laws -- the link I am basing my information on is here http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm )

I wish the answer for what makes a book a classic were so easy as public domain.  But, alas, it is not.  If Penguin releases a book with one of their iconic black covers, slaps the word "Classic" after Penguin, is that the only qualification?  What about the Modern Library, and their line of classics.  If they print it and call it a classic, does that automatically make the book a classic?  Or is it the Barnes and Noble collection of classics?  If you look at each and every list, all three seem to publish the same books and all three slap the classic label on each title.  But someone had to tell them what a classic was.  My curiosity wonders just how a book earns the label of becoming a classic.


Someone somewhere must have made a list as to what constitutes a classic.  If I were writing a dissertation for a college course, I would break down my argument into categories as to what I felt were the labels that each book must fall under to be considered a classic -- labels like morality, effective use of language, accolades, themes, and what influence it may have had.  But you also have to take into consideration what literary canon the book or story comes from -- what may be a classic in Japan, Western readers may have never heard of, and vice versa.


Before I go any further, and dig myself an incredibly deep hole that I cannot hope to dig myself out of in one blog, I will give you what I think makes a classic: are people still reading it?  More importantly, are they still enjoying it, years after its been published? As an employee in the publishing industry, I can tell you that a company like Penguin or Barnes and Noble would not publish a book if no one was buying it.  So people must be picking up copies of Gargantua and Pantagruel for them to keep printing it (though I took no pleasure from reading that particular piece of so-called classic literature).  But, you may ask yourself, maybe they are printing these books because college professors are requiring students to read them as a bit of torture.  Which may be the case, but I know, with Penguin's collection especially, they are all well done editions on fairly nice paper stock.  Which means they are investing money into printing these books, which means more than just a few college courses are requiring them.  People are reading these books, so by extension, they must be enjoying them.

I have to admit, I tried to cheat a bit on my reading goal.  I did not want to read Jude the Obscure when I picked it up.  I did not want to read The Magnificent Ambersons.  But I did not want to cheat myself.  So I picked up those books and tackled them quickly, wanting to move on to the next book.  (I have to admit that I enjoyed both books immensely for reasons that will be touched on later, and that I am glad I read them.)

I realized as I was tumbling along towards the end of 2012 that of the 20+ books I have devoured this year, none of them were quite in that category of being considered a classic.  That is what lead me to this line of thinking.  I have read the older Stephen King novels, considered classics in the field of horror.  And that was what got me to question just what makes a classic.  Carrie, Stephen King's first novel, will soon be forty years old.  People are still reading it and enjoying it.  Is it because he is still alive and pumping out novels that it does not quite fall under the heading of a "Classic?"  Does that mean the author has to be deceased for a book to become a "Classic?"  I am going to say yes -- or at the very least, retired from writing.  I throw that last bit in because Catcher in the Rye (a book which I thoroughly hate and despise despite its label of being a classic) was considered a classic years before Salinger actually passed away.  But he had not written anything in many years; he was no longer contributing to his own canon of work, so thus his book became a classic.

I think that this is a fair definition of a classic -- are readers, like you and I, still reading and enjoying a book by an author who no longer writes books, either because they have chosen not to or because they have passed away.  The book itself should be at least ___ years old, showing that it has stood the so-called Test of Time (feel free to add your own length of time to what you would begin to consider a classic).  The only binding rule is that the author can no longer be contributing to his or her own canon of work.

Thus, Stephen King's books do not fall under my definition of classic, because he is still building his canon of work.  The sequel to The Shining is due out next year.  But, an author like Harper Lee, who is still living, has not written any novels since To Kill a Mockingbird.  I think we can all agree that particular work is definitely a classic.

Obviously my definition has some flaws that people will try to argue.  What about Fahrenheit 451, which was considered a classic long before Ray Bradbury's death . . . and he was writing until the day he died.  Obviously there are exceptions to the rules, but I think my definition is on pretty solid ground.  And that is the definition I will use in the future when considering my reading choices.

So why do I read classics?  If no professor is hanging over my head, threatening me with a demerit if I do not read a passage from John Milton and write a 5 page essay on that passage, what is my motivation.  As a former history and English major, classics serve two purposes for me on a personal level.  The English major in me, the lover of words and reading, enjoys the great lyrical writing of the past.  Todays books are written in a frenetic pace, always keeping the action going and forgetting the enjoyable things like setting and characterization, because modern humans (modern Americans, specifically) do not have the attention spans to read paragraphs with indelible prose.  In the classics, stories took time to develop, settings were described, and characters described.  I have a fairly vivid image in my mind for what Jude looked like as he wandered around the great university city of Christminster.  I can imagine what the schools and churches looked like, with their towers of granite and naves of marble.

The killer of these images in the book were television, and more recently, the internet.  Imagine, at the time Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain were writing, there was no television.  There was no air travel.  Farmers rarely left their farms and city dwellers never left the cities they were living in.  The only images they had were paintings and photographs.  If a person on a farm in Nebraska wanted to imagine what London might be like, they could read a Charles Dickens novel.  If someone living in a flat in London wanted to imagine what life was like in rural America, they could pick up Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.  With the advent of the television, images of the world were readily available.  Readers did not need the over described settings that were hallmarks of the past authors.  A few sentences describing the weather and in what city the story took place were all most readers needed.  They knew what London looked like now, because they had seen Big Ben and the Palace on television.  And why should an author bother describing a place like London today, when all you have to do is hop on the computer and bring up a Google map.

And its not that today's authors are lazy.  I am sure they would love to write long prose describing the nooks and crannys of a London flat that their main character inhabits, if only for the joy of describing a setting.  But if it has nothing to do with moving the plot forward, or no way of tying in with a later plot development other than being a place for the action to take place, editors will cut it out because a reader does not want to waste time reading about a 2 room flat in the West End.

Stephen King describes a pretty horrific scene in his novel 'Salem's Lot that has to do with rats.  In the early part of the book, he describes the proliferation of rats at the local dump.  But that's the last you hear of the rats, because the editor asked him to cut out the later scene because he felt it would be too much, even for a Stephen King book.  King wrote that he was asked all the time about the rats.  People assumed it was just setting an eerie mood for the rest of the book.  Many people thought it was superfluous to have the dump scenes in the book at all.  They did not want the mood set for them . . . they wanted to dive straight into the mud and blood and guts of a good old fashioned vampire book.  No one wants the build up anymore.  People actually seem to be personally offended in this day and age if an author describes something a certain way.  "That's not how I wanted to imagine it," readers say.  So reading a classic, for me, is like harkening back to the days before their was television, when it was up to the author to tell you how a place or person was supposed to look. 

The history major in me loves the classics because they are a snapshot in time.  If you are reading a book about the history of Victorian London, that's all well and good.  But to read a Charles Dickens book or a Thomas Hardy book, you have a mental image of what life was actually like for a normal person living during these years.  As with most novels, many of the themes may be over exaggerated by the author as they are trying to shove their point home, but the ideas are still there.  Jude the Obscure, at its root, is a book about a couple living together out of wedlock.  Thomas Hardy, subtlety, is attacking what he believes to be the hypocrisy of the church, the asinine attitude toward marriage, and the inequality of the sexes.  Its one thing to read a non-fiction book telling you these things existed and its quite another to read a novel that shows how these things existed, written by an author as he was living through these times, without the taint of hindsight. The Magnificent Ambersons, written before World War I, describes the growth of a city and with the growth, the dirt and filth and overcrowding that comes with it, and how the popularity of the automobile influenced this growth.  It was fascinating to read, because once again, here was an author, living during these times, writing a book condemning growth and overpopulation as it was happening around him.

Classics are worth the time to read, if you are willing to put in the effort.  If you are able to lose yourself in them, and keep most of your 21st century biases out of the equation, I promise you a fruitful and enjoyable time.