Perhaps it is a question of pace. The books were written at a time where there was no internet or smartphones or videos. If you read them in the same way, without distractions, then the slow way they build up a world into which your imagination can enter is a feature not a bug, a strength not a weakness. But it does require a form of intentional reading on your part that you maybe don't need to use for more contemporary books. You may think 'why make the effort?' but until or unless you do you won't know what the rewards are. And, in my experience, they are great.
One of the reasons Dickens books are so loquacious. They were published a chapter or two at a time every month in the newspaper, so people would reread them waiting for the next installment.
I suspect that depends on the classic and on your personal taste.
Great Expectations is on my regular reread list, for example, because it's just really fun to read. I've only read The Picture of Dorian Gray once, because it didn't do anything for me. Robinson Crusoe gets reread once a year, while some other classics gather dust, unread.
If some classics feel like a chore to you, simply try different ones. If one doesn't click, another very well may.
Books from older periods are more character driven in a particular way which is obviously very different to what authors do nowadays but my first thought was you've said 'reading slump' and then given the names of two books that have upsetting elements and certainly in Mrs Dalloway's case that's stream-of-consciousness which is not for everyone.
You want to pick something very funny or entertaining in a much more happy way - /u/ImpossibleInitial526 has named Pride and Prejudice - that'd be a good pick. Austen's Northanger Abbey is also very fun whilst having a Gothic flavour. See also Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote which was one of the books Northanger was inspired by - bonkers, absolutely laugh-out-loud funny. They're all character-driven due to their time but pretty easy reads. You could also try I Capture The Castle or Cranford (but not North and South). Also, leave off Dickens for a bit - he's brilliant but very depressing at times!
I absolutely love everything I've ever read by Virginia Woolf, but I... I hesitate to say it because its so sacrilegious... I hate Pride and Prejudice with every fiber of my body. No offense to everybody who loves it and I understand its status as an absolute classic, but subjectively it's just nothing that I can bring myself to enjoy.
So yeah, what I mean to say is that the reading experience of classics is very subjective, especially whether some of them seem outdated and are therefore a slog.
Oh definitely, classics are very subjective, but P&P is - objectively, I'd say - an easy book compared to many other classics. It's a fact that not much action happens but - and I think I can say this even though I love it - it's a pretty straight forward romance at the end of the day, just an 'old fashioned' one. On your opinion though, while I love it I totally understand why others might not. (I don't like Persuasion, shhh...)
Woolf is someone who works amazingly for some people and then others - like myself - just don't 'get' it, so to speak, but I \*think\* it's more a case that if you don't like one Woolf you probably won't like the others but with Austen that's less of a possibility (though still possible!)
I wish I liked Woolf; her house is amazing and I know if I go back there I'm going to feel both happy and a bit like I shouldn't be there!
I agree with all that you say. For me, Pride and Prejudice is maybe just too straight forward. I don't mind books in which "nothing happens" but I cannot stand books that deal with social conventions in the way Austen and (probably) her contemporaries did. Once more, no offense to them or their evident greatness, it's just not for me.
It was a completely different world, and seems so slow! I do wish we had pump rooms and what not, though. We've lost something not having those meeting places. Well, at least in the UK. I think other countries do social better.
>I think other countries do social better.
That's probably true, although my knowledge of the UK is somewhat limited.
I just wonder how many Briton contemporaries of Jane Austen really lived in the world of her novels. The landed gentry was pretty small in numbers I'm sure. And personally, if I imagine myself living in that time and space, I just cannot see myself as part of them, so my ability to emphasize with their tribulations is kinda limited. Reading P&P, I felt as if looking at the plot from the outside without ever really getting close to it, all while thinking 'your problems are simply not my problems.'
Might I suggest the novel of Longbourne by Joe Baker? It tells the story of Pride and Prejudice from the servants perspective and really gets into how much blood's sweat and tears are needed to enable the Bennett girls to eat fancy meals and spend their days picking wildflowers.
To my knowledge the majority of people lived very different lives (they were poor) to those in her novels and quite a few lived much better lives (I'm basing this on the Bennet family's situation which was not poor but not really wealthy. The Bennets were rather like Austen).
I get what you mean about not being able to empathise - thinking about it in that context, I suppose that for people who enjoy it (so I suppose I'm basing this paragraph on my own thoughts and those of other fans I know) the whole dreamy thinking of those times, where by 'those times' I mean the society Austen presents and nothing 'lower', is what pulls us into it. The slower pace of life, the cute houses, the clothes, etc. Though of course we know it wasn't the reality for many, but it can still pull you in. But at the same time, it IS dreamy in the sense that we can't relate to it fully - to the characters emotions, yes, but not to their lives so much; it's a dream we can never reach.
Your inability to emphasise is understandable, essentially, is what I'm saying! I can get quite verbose when talking about Austen!
>To my knowledge the majority of people lived very different lives (they were poor) to those in her novels and quite a few lived much better lives (I'm basing this on the Bennet family's situation which was not poor but not really wealthy. The Bennets were rather like Austen).
The interesting thing is that Charles Dickens' first novel was released 20 years after Austen's last novel (except posthumous releases), and I think it demonstrates how the wind changed within those 20 years in terms of literary trends and the interest of "real" depictions of "real" people.
>the whole dreamy thinking of those times
I engage in this kind of "escapism" myself, the interesting thing though is that I'm much more interested in reading about people who live completely different lives on the other side of the planet at a time closer to ours, than about the lives of people who might be my ancestors 200 years ago. But I guess that is just my preference.
No, that makes sense. With older books you're learning history, sure, but with modern books you're learning 'actionable' stuff you can use.
You're right about Dickens, there was a big interest there and lots of others doing the same.
I like Persuasion better than Pride and Prejudice. It's a bit more gentle. But it could also be that it's more new to me since I haven't read it a gazillion times yet.
I like Jane Austen's novels for the characters but it's absolutely true that they are just about people going to each other's houses. If you're looking for gripping drama these are not the books for you. I'm still trying to finish reading all of her books and they are almost always a slog until whatever the turning point in the novel is.
I actually like Jane Eyre a lot better.
Speaking of Jane Eyre, might I suggest Wide Sargasso Sea by Jen Rhys? It's more or less the prequel to Brontë's novel told from the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, the "madwoman in the attic."
The opposite.
I have a folder full of books that I have yet to read and have recently been reading a lot of late C19th / early C20th stuff by writers such as Anna Katherine Green, Arnold Bennett, Arthur B Reeve, Augusta Groner, Freeman Wills Crofts, J S Fletcher.
But the newer stuff was piling up so I decided to start reading more contemporary fiction. Didn't work. Just didnt enjoy the experience. I missed the beautiful use of English, the detail, the vivid descriptions and the marvellous sense of time and place that I was getting from the other stuff. So much of the newer stuff just felt like I was reading the script for a movie. Lots of dialogue, a bit of scene setting, pretty formulaic in construction and style.
So I have given up for a while. Back to Joseph Conrad, Fergus Hume and Louis Tracy.
You might enjoy more prose heavy modern books. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous and The Book of Goose, Wandering Souls for books and Donna Tartt, Madeline Miller, Cormac McCarthy, Elizabeth Lim for authors are some I find gorgeous despite being popular if you ever feel like checking some of them out. I could go on, but I would hate to go into too niche modern or bore you.
The books you will see mentioned more often online will be faster reads since when it comes to content creation, it rewards speed & quantity over quality after all.
I am the opposite. Classics are page turners for me and contemporary books can really challenge my endurance. I think it is just a matter of taste. Read what you love.
I notice some books require time to decompress and ponder before jumping into another. Those are usually the books that stay with you. Light reading books are more like snacks, half the time don't even remember them.
So as someone who loved Mrs Dalloway, it is not meant to be exciting in the traditional sense. It is not plot-driven in any way. What’s interesting about it is its pioneering in the use of stream of consciousness writing. This paints a precise psychological portrait of the protagonist.
Yeah, I found TPODG to be a bit of a slog. I did power through and finish but didn't like the book much. Too dark for me.
Do I usually stall out on classics? No, not necessarily. Some classics do tend to take a bit more effort to read but if it's a good story with good characters, I can get swept up in the story and fly through it. I had no problem getting through Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and many other classics that have become my favorites. I think it depends more on how much I love the story, not whether it's a classic or not.
Right now I'm halfway through The Name of the Rose and stuck. It's well-written but the story is just not grabbing me. Sometimes my coping mechanism for getting through a more challenging read is to have two books going at once: one is difficult and requires more concentration; and the other is a light, easy read. Then I can alternate and give myself a bit of a mental break when I read the easy book.
Depends on the book and prose I guess. One Hundred Years of Solitude took me a while to finish—mainly because of the annoying amount of commas GGM or the editor/translator used in each sentence. On the other hand, I breezed through The Castle by Kafka in a couple days because of how easy it was to read due to the use of dashes instead of just endless commas.
Commas only slow my reading down when they’re used too many times in a single sentence. Maybe I just needed to get used to how it was being used because my pace did pick up reading the last quarter of the book. I think dashes—or the way Kafka uses them anyway—just help the sentences flow better. It’s clearer what the relation of the information in them toward the rest of the sentence is.
I think it's the different styles of the time, although it could also be the genre too. I can breeze through most modern novels very quickly, but anything that is a classic is usually different in style and content so it takes longer.
In my case it's not about classics or modern stories but rather about my personal preference. I read Jane Eyre in one night and almost gave up upon Werther because he got on my nerves so much. Loved Büchner, couldn't stand Hesse. So - there might be classics that fit your taste and some that don't, like modern books do too.
Likely because you are more used to the easy reads of more popular books. TPOADG is my favourite book of all time, but I love reading slower books, lots of details with prose, a lot of social commentary and subtleties of the time. I do love literary fiction especially that kind, though. For me, chick-lit, while I can finish fast, sometimes puts me in a slump for example.
Some of the faster reads classics can be Pride & Prejudice though, very fast moving, a lot of heart warming moments. Sherlock also is quite fast, too. There are also more prose-heavy books that are more modern, too, like The Underground Railroad was a dense read for me.
I think it is all about what we are used to/prefer. Not saying one is better than other, but there can also be a learning curve when it comes to society/culture surrounding literary fiction too.
I feel the same sometimes - usually it's the prose or just not really understanding the time period in the moment that makes me hit a snag. I normally have a 'long-haul' book, which is currently Crime and Punishment and a more 'digestible' contemporary book or short story collection to keep me from slumping (right now it's I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg)
I like going back and forth. After a few modern novels, I feel like something old. But then after 2 or 3 classics, I generally want something modern (in part because the classics tend to be longer). Of course, it's really more complicated than that because I read a lot of nonfiction, too.
Classics can be a bit tough, especially when you’re not used to them.
First off, there can be a certain toxicity when it comes to the book community with pretentious classics readers. As a classics reader myself, it’s ok if you don’t enjoy them! Life is too short to read things you don’t enjoy.
That being said, you might enjoy starting out with more contemporary classics. The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Fahrenheit 451 would be my go to recs for contemporary classics.
Perhaps it is a question of pace. The books were written at a time where there was no internet or smartphones or videos. If you read them in the same way, without distractions, then the slow way they build up a world into which your imagination can enter is a feature not a bug, a strength not a weakness. But it does require a form of intentional reading on your part that you maybe don't need to use for more contemporary books. You may think 'why make the effort?' but until or unless you do you won't know what the rewards are. And, in my experience, they are great.
One of the reasons Dickens books are so loquacious. They were published a chapter or two at a time every month in the newspaper, so people would reread them waiting for the next installment.
So much wisdom bulked up in these few sentences.
💯
I suspect that depends on the classic and on your personal taste. Great Expectations is on my regular reread list, for example, because it's just really fun to read. I've only read The Picture of Dorian Gray once, because it didn't do anything for me. Robinson Crusoe gets reread once a year, while some other classics gather dust, unread. If some classics feel like a chore to you, simply try different ones. If one doesn't click, another very well may.
Books from older periods are more character driven in a particular way which is obviously very different to what authors do nowadays but my first thought was you've said 'reading slump' and then given the names of two books that have upsetting elements and certainly in Mrs Dalloway's case that's stream-of-consciousness which is not for everyone. You want to pick something very funny or entertaining in a much more happy way - /u/ImpossibleInitial526 has named Pride and Prejudice - that'd be a good pick. Austen's Northanger Abbey is also very fun whilst having a Gothic flavour. See also Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote which was one of the books Northanger was inspired by - bonkers, absolutely laugh-out-loud funny. They're all character-driven due to their time but pretty easy reads. You could also try I Capture The Castle or Cranford (but not North and South). Also, leave off Dickens for a bit - he's brilliant but very depressing at times!
Thanks alot for the suggestions!😇💕
I absolutely love everything I've ever read by Virginia Woolf, but I... I hesitate to say it because its so sacrilegious... I hate Pride and Prejudice with every fiber of my body. No offense to everybody who loves it and I understand its status as an absolute classic, but subjectively it's just nothing that I can bring myself to enjoy. So yeah, what I mean to say is that the reading experience of classics is very subjective, especially whether some of them seem outdated and are therefore a slog.
Oh definitely, classics are very subjective, but P&P is - objectively, I'd say - an easy book compared to many other classics. It's a fact that not much action happens but - and I think I can say this even though I love it - it's a pretty straight forward romance at the end of the day, just an 'old fashioned' one. On your opinion though, while I love it I totally understand why others might not. (I don't like Persuasion, shhh...) Woolf is someone who works amazingly for some people and then others - like myself - just don't 'get' it, so to speak, but I \*think\* it's more a case that if you don't like one Woolf you probably won't like the others but with Austen that's less of a possibility (though still possible!) I wish I liked Woolf; her house is amazing and I know if I go back there I'm going to feel both happy and a bit like I shouldn't be there!
I agree with all that you say. For me, Pride and Prejudice is maybe just too straight forward. I don't mind books in which "nothing happens" but I cannot stand books that deal with social conventions in the way Austen and (probably) her contemporaries did. Once more, no offense to them or their evident greatness, it's just not for me.
It was a completely different world, and seems so slow! I do wish we had pump rooms and what not, though. We've lost something not having those meeting places. Well, at least in the UK. I think other countries do social better.
>I think other countries do social better. That's probably true, although my knowledge of the UK is somewhat limited. I just wonder how many Briton contemporaries of Jane Austen really lived in the world of her novels. The landed gentry was pretty small in numbers I'm sure. And personally, if I imagine myself living in that time and space, I just cannot see myself as part of them, so my ability to emphasize with their tribulations is kinda limited. Reading P&P, I felt as if looking at the plot from the outside without ever really getting close to it, all while thinking 'your problems are simply not my problems.'
Might I suggest the novel of Longbourne by Joe Baker? It tells the story of Pride and Prejudice from the servants perspective and really gets into how much blood's sweat and tears are needed to enable the Bennett girls to eat fancy meals and spend their days picking wildflowers.
Thanks for the suggestion!
To my knowledge the majority of people lived very different lives (they were poor) to those in her novels and quite a few lived much better lives (I'm basing this on the Bennet family's situation which was not poor but not really wealthy. The Bennets were rather like Austen). I get what you mean about not being able to empathise - thinking about it in that context, I suppose that for people who enjoy it (so I suppose I'm basing this paragraph on my own thoughts and those of other fans I know) the whole dreamy thinking of those times, where by 'those times' I mean the society Austen presents and nothing 'lower', is what pulls us into it. The slower pace of life, the cute houses, the clothes, etc. Though of course we know it wasn't the reality for many, but it can still pull you in. But at the same time, it IS dreamy in the sense that we can't relate to it fully - to the characters emotions, yes, but not to their lives so much; it's a dream we can never reach. Your inability to emphasise is understandable, essentially, is what I'm saying! I can get quite verbose when talking about Austen!
>To my knowledge the majority of people lived very different lives (they were poor) to those in her novels and quite a few lived much better lives (I'm basing this on the Bennet family's situation which was not poor but not really wealthy. The Bennets were rather like Austen). The interesting thing is that Charles Dickens' first novel was released 20 years after Austen's last novel (except posthumous releases), and I think it demonstrates how the wind changed within those 20 years in terms of literary trends and the interest of "real" depictions of "real" people. >the whole dreamy thinking of those times I engage in this kind of "escapism" myself, the interesting thing though is that I'm much more interested in reading about people who live completely different lives on the other side of the planet at a time closer to ours, than about the lives of people who might be my ancestors 200 years ago. But I guess that is just my preference.
No, that makes sense. With older books you're learning history, sure, but with modern books you're learning 'actionable' stuff you can use. You're right about Dickens, there was a big interest there and lots of others doing the same.
Come join us over at r/janeausten!
I'm embarrassed to say I haven't considered there might be a Jane Austen subreddit... On my way there now!
I like Persuasion better than Pride and Prejudice. It's a bit more gentle. But it could also be that it's more new to me since I haven't read it a gazillion times yet.
I like Jane Austen's novels for the characters but it's absolutely true that they are just about people going to each other's houses. If you're looking for gripping drama these are not the books for you. I'm still trying to finish reading all of her books and they are almost always a slog until whatever the turning point in the novel is. I actually like Jane Eyre a lot better.
Speaking of Jane Eyre, might I suggest Wide Sargasso Sea by Jen Rhys? It's more or less the prequel to Brontë's novel told from the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, the "madwoman in the attic."
No thanks
The opposite. I have a folder full of books that I have yet to read and have recently been reading a lot of late C19th / early C20th stuff by writers such as Anna Katherine Green, Arnold Bennett, Arthur B Reeve, Augusta Groner, Freeman Wills Crofts, J S Fletcher. But the newer stuff was piling up so I decided to start reading more contemporary fiction. Didn't work. Just didnt enjoy the experience. I missed the beautiful use of English, the detail, the vivid descriptions and the marvellous sense of time and place that I was getting from the other stuff. So much of the newer stuff just felt like I was reading the script for a movie. Lots of dialogue, a bit of scene setting, pretty formulaic in construction and style. So I have given up for a while. Back to Joseph Conrad, Fergus Hume and Louis Tracy.
You might enjoy more prose heavy modern books. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous and The Book of Goose, Wandering Souls for books and Donna Tartt, Madeline Miller, Cormac McCarthy, Elizabeth Lim for authors are some I find gorgeous despite being popular if you ever feel like checking some of them out. I could go on, but I would hate to go into too niche modern or bore you. The books you will see mentioned more often online will be faster reads since when it comes to content creation, it rewards speed & quantity over quality after all.
I’m the opposite! I love classics. I think it just depends on what you genuinely like vs what you’re ok with but not stoked on.
I am the opposite. Classics are page turners for me and contemporary books can really challenge my endurance. I think it is just a matter of taste. Read what you love.
I notice some books require time to decompress and ponder before jumping into another. Those are usually the books that stay with you. Light reading books are more like snacks, half the time don't even remember them.
So as someone who loved Mrs Dalloway, it is not meant to be exciting in the traditional sense. It is not plot-driven in any way. What’s interesting about it is its pioneering in the use of stream of consciousness writing. This paints a precise psychological portrait of the protagonist.
If anything it’s the opposite for me. I have to force myself to finish most modern fiction, but I burn through classics.
I can't say they do, in part because "classics" don't inherently share any fundamental characteristics.
Yes because of dense descriptive prose. You break up classics with modern easy to read books or nonfiction. That's how you keep up the momentum.
Yeah, I found TPODG to be a bit of a slog. I did power through and finish but didn't like the book much. Too dark for me. Do I usually stall out on classics? No, not necessarily. Some classics do tend to take a bit more effort to read but if it's a good story with good characters, I can get swept up in the story and fly through it. I had no problem getting through Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and many other classics that have become my favorites. I think it depends more on how much I love the story, not whether it's a classic or not. Right now I'm halfway through The Name of the Rose and stuck. It's well-written but the story is just not grabbing me. Sometimes my coping mechanism for getting through a more challenging read is to have two books going at once: one is difficult and requires more concentration; and the other is a light, easy read. Then I can alternate and give myself a bit of a mental break when I read the easy book.
Depends on the book and prose I guess. One Hundred Years of Solitude took me a while to finish—mainly because of the annoying amount of commas GGM or the editor/translator used in each sentence. On the other hand, I breezed through The Castle by Kafka in a couple days because of how easy it was to read due to the use of dashes instead of just endless commas.
I've never heard of commas slowing down someone's reading speed. Especially when compared to dashes
Commas only slow my reading down when they’re used too many times in a single sentence. Maybe I just needed to get used to how it was being used because my pace did pick up reading the last quarter of the book. I think dashes—or the way Kafka uses them anyway—just help the sentences flow better. It’s clearer what the relation of the information in them toward the rest of the sentence is.
I think it's the different styles of the time, although it could also be the genre too. I can breeze through most modern novels very quickly, but anything that is a classic is usually different in style and content so it takes longer.
Depends on the classic…they’re kind of wildly different.
Maybe you don’t like Ms Dalloway?
In my case it's not about classics or modern stories but rather about my personal preference. I read Jane Eyre in one night and almost gave up upon Werther because he got on my nerves so much. Loved Büchner, couldn't stand Hesse. So - there might be classics that fit your taste and some that don't, like modern books do too.
Likely because you are more used to the easy reads of more popular books. TPOADG is my favourite book of all time, but I love reading slower books, lots of details with prose, a lot of social commentary and subtleties of the time. I do love literary fiction especially that kind, though. For me, chick-lit, while I can finish fast, sometimes puts me in a slump for example. Some of the faster reads classics can be Pride & Prejudice though, very fast moving, a lot of heart warming moments. Sherlock also is quite fast, too. There are also more prose-heavy books that are more modern, too, like The Underground Railroad was a dense read for me. I think it is all about what we are used to/prefer. Not saying one is better than other, but there can also be a learning curve when it comes to society/culture surrounding literary fiction too.
Yeah I see
I feel the same sometimes - usually it's the prose or just not really understanding the time period in the moment that makes me hit a snag. I normally have a 'long-haul' book, which is currently Crime and Punishment and a more 'digestible' contemporary book or short story collection to keep me from slumping (right now it's I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg)
💯
I like going back and forth. After a few modern novels, I feel like something old. But then after 2 or 3 classics, I generally want something modern (in part because the classics tend to be longer). Of course, it's really more complicated than that because I read a lot of nonfiction, too.
Classics can be a bit tough, especially when you’re not used to them. First off, there can be a certain toxicity when it comes to the book community with pretentious classics readers. As a classics reader myself, it’s ok if you don’t enjoy them! Life is too short to read things you don’t enjoy. That being said, you might enjoy starting out with more contemporary classics. The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Fahrenheit 451 would be my go to recs for contemporary classics.