If you enjoy reading and think it’s a meaningful and enriching activity (as I do), and especially if you are an educator in a school or homeschool, then chances are high that you value what we loosely call “the classics” or “the Great Books.” Indeed, we call them classic or great for a reason: they’ve stood the test of time and have a lot to offer readers today. If you’ve decided to stop scrolling and start reading, you might well choose at some point to pick up a classic book. That’s excellent!
All too often, however, classic books come with a free ticket to the Great Book Guilt Trip. Trip experiences include the following:
• “This is a classic, so I should read it (even though I don’t think it sounds very interesting).”
• “I should keep reading this, but I’m not enjoying it, so I’ll just scroll on social media for a few minutes first . . . Whoops, out of time. Ugh, I really should read more.”
• “I got through it and checked it off my list, but I don’t think I got much out of it. I should have paid more attention.”
• And the bonus surprise trip: “Hey, I enjoyed this book. But it’s a classic, so I should have found it profound and life-changing, and I just thought it was kind of fun. I should have appreciated it more or understood it better.”
The guilt trip can strike hardest for classic books that are also widely popular. What if I just don’t like Flannery O’Connor or The Lord of the Rings? Am I a proper Catholic? If the Divine Comedy leaves me kind of bored, will they boot me out of the homeschool co-op?
Fear not, dear reader. You can, and dare I say should, ditch the guilt trip.
Reading for both enjoyment and appreciation is important for a healthy, well-formed mind.
I’ll put my own cards on the table. I do absolutely love The Lord of the Rings, and I consider it probably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, but fantasy just doesn’t appeal to everybody, and that’s OK. (Truly it is.) I don’t myself like Flannery O’Connor; the whole Southern Gothic literary genre just doesn’t appeal to me. And although I recognize the greatness of the Divine Comedy, and even included excerpts from it in my book Tales of Faith, as a literary work it leaves me cold. I don’t enjoy it.
What is a reader to do?
Let me begin by noting that there are more books, indeed more great books, than any one person could possibly read in a single lifetime. There’s no point in reading just for the sake of having read such-and-such books. Who cares if you can check off ninety-nine out of a hundred great works of literature—and by whose list, anyway?
Let me introduce a very useful concept: the difference between liking or enjoying something and appreciating it. As readers, we have certain things that we respond positively to; we say, “I like this” or “This was fun to read.” They’re easy for us to connect with, we’re able to engage with them very naturally and immediately, or we find them satisfying and rewarding. Our liking for certain kinds of reading is often considered a form of personal taste. I like science fiction; I like reading biographies.
Appreciation is a little different. To appreciate something is to recognize its merits, to understand that it is good, that it has value, that I can gain something by reading it. It’s possible to appreciate a book without enjoying it, and it’s possible both to enjoy and to appreciate a book. Indeed, when enjoyment and appreciation overlap, that’s usually when we declare, “I love this book.”
Reading for both enjoyment and appreciation is important for a healthy, well-formed mind.
Enjoyment is not trivial. We should delight in enjoying what we read and seek out things that we like and that bring us joy. It’s possible to squash one’s love of reading by being too dutiful in reading things that we feel we ought to read rather than what we want to read. Too often, dutiful readers suspect that one of the criteria for being a Great Book is that it’s a bit dull or difficult to read: ergo, if it’s fun and interesting, it must not be a Great Book. It’s amazing how the Great Book Guilt Trip can pop up out of nowhere and ambush us! No, no, no. It’s good to read things that are enjoyable, indeed fun, and there are plenty of worthwhile things to read that we would put in the category of “enjoyable” rather than “great.” For instance, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, especially the Jeeves stories, and Hergé’s Tintin comics (starting with Cigars of the Pharaoh, the fourth volume) might not appear on many Great Books lists, but they are thoroughly enjoyable, highly worthwhile, and indeed (in my estimation) great.
Appreciation is also essential, especially if we want to develop the virtues of charity and humility. Appreciation is the ability to recognize something’s merits even if it’s not to our taste. For instance, even if you’ve never read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you can probably recognize that it is a literary work of great merit. Now, when you read it, you might not like it very much, at least not at first. Sometimes that’s due to lack of familiarity—we need to have more context, more scaffolding, to be able to engage with a great work of literature. For that scaffolding, a good edition with notes can help (I recommend the Folger edition for a basic grounding in how to read and understand Shakespeare). It is also helpful to understand context: in the case of Shakespeare, to realize that he wrote his plays to be seen (and enjoyed!), not to be read, so a film version is really necessary. Laurence Olivier’s version is classic, and Kenneth Branagh’s full-length version is brilliant. Even if, in the end, you don’t feel inclined to watch or read any more Shakespeare, you’ll have gained some appreciation for a writer who is beloved by many and has had a profound influence on literature and the arts.
If we make an effort to engage with a work of literature like this, or a challenging nonfiction book, it often pays off, and we become able to grow into liking it. It’s important to realize, though, that appreciation doesn’t always grow into enjoyment, and that’s normal. For instance, I have read enough Dostoevsky to recognize that works such as The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are indeed great works of literature, but they’re just not to my taste, and left to my own devices, I wouldn’t choose to read any more Russian novels.
However, we must not fall into the trap of thinking that some kinds of books are worth appreciating, like the plays of Shakespeare, and others are just fun reading, like science fiction stories; we can like them, but they’re not really valuable or worth our time. No, no, no. There are many different kinds of books, different genres, styles, subjects; and in each category, there are good, well-written books, middle-of-the-road books, and bad, poorly written books. C. S. Lewis writes about this in his great essay “High and Low Brows” (found in Selected Literary Essays—well worth reading). How we categorize books as good or bad is another question entirely, and a complex one, which I’ll return to another time.
The essential point for now is that recognizing the difference between enjoyment and appreciation—and recognizing that both are important, indeed essential—helps us avoid the Great Book Guilt Trip. It’s good to want to explore great literature, not because we “should” or because we get some sort of bonus points for doing so but because it’s great for a reason: over time, many people have resonated with these books, found them meaningful, and in fact simply enjoyed them. Any particular book might not resonate with you, and recognizing that this is normal and to be expected makes it possible to relax and get the most out of whatever it is you’re reading.
To be sure, for some of the great books you read, you might think, “I have no idea why anyone thinks this is a classic” (fair enough!), but by approaching it with a spirit of humility, you can add, “But although it’s not for me, perhaps one day I’ll understand why it is a classic for others.” More likely, you’ll find that you can appreciate some books firsthand, rather than simply admiring them by their reputation, as it were, and—most importantly in my view—you’ll also find new things to enjoy.