Janine Wood at The Christian Science Monitor wonders why no one reads the classics anymore – especially Dickens.
“Classics are stupid,” said one 13-year-old girl, whose desperate mother had tried paying her to read Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” “I’d have to buy my son 17 North Face jackets before he’d look at a classic,” said another mother.
“Do you want chick lit, a page-turner, or a romance?” the saleswoman asked. Oh, how I wish she had asked, “Do you want Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, or the latest translation of ‘The Iliad’?” I felt as though I were at Wal-Mart instead of the bookstore, and that prompted me to wonder what other adults were reading. I asked around at the bookstore’s cafe. Nobody had read Dickens since college and even then it was a chore. “I hated all that detail,” one woman complained.
This is embarrassing. I haven’t read any Dickens either. I haven’t even tried. Not even A Christmas Carol. I just look at those thick, English, things, my eyes get foggy, and eventually I find myself looking at something else in an entirely different room wondering how I got there. I think I might have a problem.
5 comments
You must read A Christmas Carol, at the very least.A) It’s short.B) It’s absolutely hilarious. One of the funniest stories ever written in the English language. No, really. Even to a cynical post-modern like yourself. It’s a completely win-win situation. I’d recommend it to anybody, even those surly teens at the bus stop.C) Once you read A Christmas Carol, you’ll find yourself wanting to read other stories by Dickens.M) Then you can get some audiobook version of David Copperfield or Great Expectations, which make life easier.
Cy-cy-cynical post-modern? I thought everyone who knew me thought I was one bad post-po-mo mofo. Can’t I just be emergent or something?
Ok, fine. You can be emergent.
But po-mo has a better ring to it! “Emergent” is just…there. I read Nicholas Nickelby as a teeny bopper and found it smashing, certainly a page-turner and therefore better than everything and everyone in Great Expectations except Mrs. Havisham. I don’t know if I’d take to Dickens’ novels in a classroom setting though. He’s the sort of writer who, if you could enjoy him, ‘twould be better to meet him on your own than in a class with a bunch of quiet, passive students.
It’s settled then: A Christmas Carol, sometime pre-wassail, to soften me up for Nicholas Nickelby.Anyone else read any Dickens? Has anyone else, like me, used the word “Dickensian” without having read Dickens?