Many of us have the desire to be ‘well read’. It’s a desire to be – or seem to be – more intellectual by having read a lot of books. But is it the amount of books that you read or the quality? Is the quality less important than their popularity? What does it actually mean to be ‘well read’?
There’s a certain amount of book snobbery that feeds into this topic. One of my favourite Youtubers, Choncey Boddington has a video on canon snobbery (which you can find here) which is just wonderful and I agree with so much if it. Considering yourself ‘well read’ because you read only the classics seems absurd to me. Not that I don’t have love for the classics, Pride and Prejudice will always be a favourite of mine, but the majority of the literary canon was written by rich white men. There is a distinct lack of diversity in the British literary canon which makes me wonder why novels that so often have the same characters in a similar situation are, to some people, the be all and end all of acceptable and worthy literature.
To quote the classical Mr Darcy, minds must be improved “by extensive” reading, not reading the same, narrow selection of popular novels (can I also note the part where Miss Bingley, in an effort to impress Mr Darcy, picks up the second volume of what he is reading, having not read the first, and questions him about it. Miss Bingley is an example of those that want to seem superior through reading choices while having no appreciation for actual literature). Now that we live in an age where reading is not something left solely to the upper classes and we have access to a wide range of genres, why do some people look down on others for not having read the classics? In my first term of university, we read a lot of classics and sweet. mother. of. God. They were the worst. Just because it’s a classic doesn’t mean it’s good. Robinson Crusoe is a classic, considered to be the first novel and I was three pages in and I all I could think was ‘WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE WORST! Oh my God, we’re the worst. No wonder everyone hates us.’ Which is not surprising really, given the time in which it was written.
That goes on to my main issue with classics, which is what is absent from them. [This is the kind of boring stuff that a degree in English Literature gets you.] When you read that Mr Darcy earns £10,000 a year, you don’t question where that money came from. You don’t question how Pemberley was built, or what Pemberley may have been based on – apparently Chatsworth House, an estate built with money earned from the colonisation of Bermuda and Virginia, colonisation is frowned upon nowadays as it involves killing and oppressing people, we don’t do it now that we can’t force Pocahontas to marry a white man and change her name to Rebecca (which I’m sure she loved). Just as when you read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, you don’t wonder who’s picking the cotton supplied to Marlborough Mills. Human ugliness is erased from many of the classics because readers don’t want to think about massacres in the colonies or the products of slavery in their homes.
So when I say that I think I hate classics, I don’t mean that they aren’t good and that they’re not worth reading. I mean I don’t like that people attach some kind of intellectual superiority to a group of books. Assigning higher value to classics seems pointless to me, I’ve had the same reaction to modern classics that I’ve had to books published in the last year. Literature is meant to be experienced and enjoyed, deeming some novels ‘classics’ or ‘modern classics’ seems arbitrary. They’re popular. That’s what you mean. You don’t have to stick all of the popular books together in a corner of Waterstones, where Thomas Hardy might sit right next to Aldous Huxley like they are in any way related to each other. ‘Classic’ isn’t a genre, it’s an indication of popularity and I’m tired of people being ‘intimidated by classics’, we should be able to judge books for ourselves, not what publishers decide are ‘classic’ enough to brand as such.
Books For Becca 