Reading the Classics discussion

Highlights? Emotional feelings for the characters? Or literary technics?

I love it when I end a book but still feel like the characters live on past the last page. I think that the emotional connection to characters is very important to a great book.

Each book is different. Dickens's characters are indelible and immortal--I often hear Mr. Macawber's voice. I see Dublin as it was during Joyce's lifetime, and I think of Thomas Wolfe's long never ending sentences.

Certainly characters that live on the page and persist in the mind identify a great book. But also a skilled narrative that grips the imagination may live long after the last page is turned. In short, there is no one result that indicates a great book. It isn't nonsense like "I don't know nothing about art but I know what I like", and no matter how great the book, it will accumulate its share of one star detractors. Putting all else aside, a great book may be character driven, plot structured, or just plain unclassifiable like Tristram Shandy, but the classic lives hundreds of years and may, I hope at least, live as long as the homo sapians continue to chose the savanahas over the trees.

If the book is truly a great book, we should be left with ideas or insights that we hadn't had before reading it.

We should have wrestled with concerns about whether we are leading the best lives we can, and if through that wrestling we decide that we aren't, we should have gained at least some inkling about what we can and should do to live better lives. We should have gained at least some particle of new understanding of at least one of the great questions of life -- what is justice, what does it mean to live a good life, is there a God, is there a purpose and meaning to life, what is our duty to our families, our communities, humanity as a whole, how can we bring more love and beauty into this world -- these and many other questions that classic works, if they are indeed classics, require us to confront.

Of course, we can read these great classics and learn nothing from them. As Russell Fears points out in his lecture course on "Books that Can Change Your Life," Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who went from safety in the U.S. back to Nazi Germany to oppose the evil he saw there, had read the same books as Otto Thorbeck, the SS judge who, in a court-martial that was a travesty of any sense of justice but having chosen "following orders" as his highest moral obligation, tried Bonhoeffer, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death.

They had both read the same classical works, but the lessons that each took from them were vastly different.

As Fears points out, reading these books isn't enough. It's what we do with their teaching that matters. What they mean to our lives and the choices we make about living those lives, I would suggest, is what should be left in our minds after we finish these books.

To Everyman: at half of your age, i am just so honoured to have your advice given above. I wish I could learn all kinds of serious things from you. What a pity you don't make any new friends now. If you don't mind, i wanna use some part of your response as my motto in my public profiles.

Ida wrote: "If you don't mind, i wanna use some part of your response as my motto in my public profiles. "

Sure. Just curious, which part?

"We should have gained at least some particle of new understanding of at least one of the great questions of life -- what is justice, what does it mean to live a good life, is there a God, is there a purpose and meaning to life, what is our duty to our families, our communities, humanity as a whole, how can we bring more love and beauty into this world -- these and many other questions that classic works, if they are indeed classics, require us to confront. "

I found this part very inspiring. Before this, i just enjoyed the plot, the emotion part of the classics works, but never though about what it means for my contemporary life.

Well said, Everyman! I always feel disappointed after reading a book if I haven't learned something by the end or if it hasn't made me look at the world in a different way.

I also love it when the characters feel so real that I wonder what they're doing whenever I'm not reading the book.

Everyman, you expressed it so well. Thank you.

A lot of really excellent points. There are a few books, 1984, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that just left me in awe at the end. I feel like an excellent book can make me really contemplate the problems of the world that the book is set in, and realize how big of a problem they can be in our own lives. To a much lesser degree, what with the dramatization and all, but still the problems of the book should be something you can get irritated by, and then realize how to kill it in your own life.
A book that just leaves me full of insights and thoughts throughout, yet renders me speechless, and incapable of intelligible thought at the end. Those are my favorite.

There are some books that I finish and leave me with nothing but fond feelings for it and I'm ready to start a new one immediately. Then there are books that will keep me up all night while I think about it and reread certain parts. They give me a "book hangover" where I cannot possibly start a new one because I'm still stuck on what I just finished.
The first book that comes to mind is "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo. The day I finished it, I stayed up half the night just thinking about it. It changed the way I viewed life and how I treat people, which is rare for me to find in a book. Typically the book ends, I spend a few hours or maybe even a day thinking about it and then I move on. I couldn't start a new book right away after "Les Miserables" because everything else just seemed so flat.
Connecting with the characters is a bonus, haha. I don't normally seek out a character to make a connection with, but when it happens I enjoy every second of it and they live on outside the pages well after I've finished the book and started a new one.

I read strictly for pleasure; I want to be entertained. I have a hard time shutting my brain off to sleep, so I don't want a message in my reading. For me, a good book leaves me with a warm, memorable feeling. Years later, the feeling, no matter how vague the memory of the actual story, will remind me where I was and how I felt when I'd finished the book.

Thanks, Everyman--especially when you say: "As Fears points out, reading these books isn't enough. It's what we do with their teaching that matters. What they mean to our lives and the choices we make about living those lives, I would suggest, is what should be left in our minds after we finish these books."

For me, the books which help me make choices are those where the characters LIVE that idea. I can appreciate and enjoy wonderful description and other narrative conventions,--but if the character stays alive in my heart as an example of the choices I hope to live, those are the books I treasure. Atticus and Scout are why I hold dear To Kill a Mockingbird; Antigone and Iphigenia stay with me from Sophocles and Euripedes.

I would ask my students at the end of a literature class to write about their "spiritual geneology"--those writers they had "met" who spoke to their lives. Those were the best essays I ever had the honor of reading.

Great rule of thumb, Philip: "I always think of a book as good when it leaves me with the desire to read it again sometime in the future." I'd love a thread where we share the titles of books we've read more than twice! :-)

I'd have to list half the books on my shelves if we had such a thread!

LOL, I agree, Alana :-) Maybe you and I could go for books we've read more than four times!

That still wouldn't narrow it down TOO dramatically... lol!

:-) I know--that's why I don't continue reading a book that hasn't captured my mind and/or heart by 100 pages. Remember Inkheart, when Meggie first can hear the books in the library whispering? That's how I feel sometimes--the ones I love keep reminding me how great it would be to go back to them :-)

I love having a lot of after thoughts when finishing a book. Some books are just in the right time and can help you answer the questions you ask yourself. Sometimes you keep on thinking about the plot or characters long after the end. I think a book should leave these very after thoughts and emotions when you finish. Food for thought so to say.

When a book is really good,my tastes buds will let me know:)There are certain books that will linger in my mind way after..Gone Girl,The Other Typist,We Need to Talk About Kevin,,for example.These are all in the psychological thrillers,I know that.BUT..these books,at least to me,were delicious!..:)

I do think I read various types of books for different reasons. While my favorite book is Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, that is not the one I chose to read when a family member was facing serious surgery. Rather, I went back to Jasper Fforde and his Thursday Next series, since I needed not only Fforde's deft sense of humor but also Thursday's feisty courage.

Books, for me, are like weather--I enjoy all kinds, even storms and rainy days. But finding the right book for the "weather" in my heart is a different story.

At times I need the clarity that non-fiction can bring to the chaos of my thoughts, and so turn to my favorite scientist/philosophers--Carl Sagan, Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould. Other times, I turn to fantasy, when I need works with magic, miracle, and mystery: J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman.

Ah, the wonder of how these words on paper (or on a screen) can be so important to all the "selves" we carry within!

Well said, Julia.