As a seventh grader, I read Ben Hur for the first time, and found it beautiful. Much like Owen Wister's Virginian, it is now considered to be overly long and wordy, but that may be more of a judgement against us as a society, than against the book as it was written. For me, the subject and time immersion was enhanced and completed by the love Lew Wallace had for his subject and story. In an age where there was no cinema, radio, or television, books became a Theatre of Imagination, words bringing worlds to life.
Yeah, in a sense I read classics more like I read scripture than how I read regular fiction, they're meant to be consumed differently IMO. I always have a hard time rating something like that because my assessment of its overall value is not all that significant.
There really is an art to reading a classic; a suspension of self in anticipation of the past knowledge, accepting it as a beloved work. But it is your contribution too, to tell us what we might expect, so as we open our minds to reading the work we don't go in unprepared! Hiking into a wilderness requires a map; Books are a landscape of other times and other minds.
As a seventh grader, I read Ben Hur for the first time, and found it beautiful. Much like Owen Wister's Virginian, it is now considered to be overly long and wordy, but that may be more of a judgement against us as a society, than against the book as it was written. For me, the subject and time immersion was enhanced and completed by the love Lew Wallace had for his subject and story. In an age where there was no cinema, radio, or television, books became a Theatre of Imagination, words bringing worlds to life.
Yeah, in a sense I read classics more like I read scripture than how I read regular fiction, they're meant to be consumed differently IMO. I always have a hard time rating something like that because my assessment of its overall value is not all that significant.
There really is an art to reading a classic; a suspension of self in anticipation of the past knowledge, accepting it as a beloved work. But it is your contribution too, to tell us what we might expect, so as we open our minds to reading the work we don't go in unprepared! Hiking into a wilderness requires a map; Books are a landscape of other times and other minds.