It’s not uncommon for the hobbyist reader to completely abandon classics and more retro or vintage literature once they’ve moved on from reading for academic purposes. Why not? So many new books come out a year that just getting through all the new releases you’re interested in is a task unto itself. But then, on occasion, a reader will dip back through the literary back catalog, and what they find is…disappointing to them.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath raises this issue a lot. It’s considered a seminal feminist work, but it’s also extremely racist. And not just racism via apathy or ignorance or typical “I’m a white person who doesn’t totally get it” kind of racism. It’s actually a startling level of oblique racism.
And this is a thing that happens with a level of regularity. People dig into old books and, rightfully, don’t like what they find. So why bother? Why put yourself through that? It depends on whether you’re primarily a reader or a writer.
For readers, it comes down to what do you intend to get from what you’re reading. If it’s purely surface level entertainment (which is totally fine) then it’s perfectly reasonable to avoid the more socially treacherous of the classics. We all know what’s in there.
But if you’re the kind of reader who wants to explore reading from a more academic angle? A book is a snapshot of the time in which it was written and the opinions of the author. It is a reflection of the author’s place in society. Someone inclined toward maintaining a broad understanding of social history would benefit from that knowledge. They’d find value in that. We talk about studying history, so we’re not doomed to repeat it. The same can be said for understanding social opinion and expectations through history. Having an understanding of historical social constructs, lays the groundwork for understanding our current social consciousness. Fiction novels are an excellent source of that.
Therein lies the benefit to even the casual reader: easy access to first-person social history.
As a writer, you should absolutely be including classics and mainstays of your chosen genre in your normal reading cycle if you aren’t already.
Genre classics form the skeletal history of a genre. How did this genre become what it is? Why does it look like it does? Where do the tropes come from and how have they evolved? What have other books done before and how were those received at the time?
These are things a master of the craft needs to be aware of.
When I was still deep in video game development, we met a lot of new developers coming in with limited player experience. Two things would happen pretty frequently:
1.) They would think their idea was the best thing ever and no one had ever done this before. They would make very bold claims to the this effect. Completely unaware that the thing they were describing had absolutely been done before. Multiple times. So at best their marketing looked silly, and at worst they had ignore an essential resource they could have used to execute the idea better.
2.) They were excited to execute on an idea and baffled that it hadn’t been done before. Completely ignoring that there was a reason it hadn’t been done before. They would then attempt to reinvent the wheel right up to the same obstacle that every other developer previous to them had run into, and only then realized why that idea hadn’t been implemented.
This is what reading genre classics gives you, the knowledge of what’s been done before including successful and unsuccessful implementation of different concepts. This isn’t to dissuade or persuade you in one direction or another as a writer but rather to have synthesizable data to use at your disposal.
Pixels and Pins Studio 