The Physical Act of Reading Classic Literature

We’ve discussed why reading genre classics is so important and some of the finer details of sorting through them. How do we then go about creating our little genre classic retinue? Because, surprisingly, this is a question you have to ask, sometimes. My primary genres are fantasy and science fiction, and they can be very difficult to navigate.
Older books, of which our classics are going to be, simply read differently than modern books. We see massive changes in tone, diction, pacing, and construction from decade to decade. There comes a point where you can start pinpointing a book to a ten-year period based on writing alone. So if you only typically read books, as a hobbyist, from 2000 onward, jumping even just to the 80s, you’re going to feel a shift. Going all the way back to the 30s or 40s will see a significant change in how books feel. This is particularly prevalent in the more stylized genres.
But the thing is if you’ve been through any modern education system you’ve read old books. You probably got through Dickens or Dumas or Dante mostly unscathed. You’re smarter and more adaptable than you think you are. But if you’re still concerned about getting tripped up by older writing, go backward temporally, and you’ll find that you acclimate faster.
So now we have to make our list. The first instinct is to just pop a quick search for classics of your genre. What you’ll find when you do that, however, is that random lists on the internet will be prone to bias. And you’re going to note there are some very specific demographics missing. Using science fiction as our example, there’s a pretty high chance that any given “science fiction essentials” list is going to be ninety-five percent white men. And while, yes, the genre has been dominated by white men, there are a number of women and non-white authors who have contributed monumentally fantastic works to the genre who are frequently brushed off of these lists. So you have to do independent research to fill in the demographic gaps.
The easiest way to do this is to search the demographic missing for a given decade. Something like “female/women science fiction writers of the 70s” will give you C.J. Cherryh, Jo Clayton, Octavia Butler, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Juanita Coulson. All of whom are typically absent from “must read” lists despite being award winning or otherwise influential writers in the genre.
In romance you’ll find primarily, if not exclusively, female writers, but you’ll note a lack a non-white writers. Every genre is going to have its “thing” that it has trouble breeching. A good survey of classics will try to account for that.
Another consideration for filtering is what specifically do you enjoy or what are you trying to get out of your survey of genre classics? Because you’re already working in your preferred genre, so that’s the first filter. When you’re picking our your modern books, however, it’s likely you don’t pick up every single book in your genre. You have some preferences. You can still apply those to classics. If you don’t like reading extreme body gore in your horror books, the likelihood that you’ll tolerate it in a book from the 60s is going to be low. There’s no reason to add another layer of difficulty when your journey is still new.
Also consider exactly what your journey looks like. Are you looking for just a general understanding of the mystery/thriller genre historically or are you looking to compare the way fictional murder investigations are handled through the years? Maybe you’re studying how our interactions with aliens are described from decade to decade. That’s also going to help you narrow down where you might want your focus to be.
Once you start generating this list, how do you actually find copies of the books in question? Really well-known classics are still often going to be in print. Which also means they might still be in circulation at your library. The vast majority of my classic sci-fi and fantasy reading as a tween came from library books. Is was actually because the library was a bit outdated that they had so many, but that’s a different story altogether. Second-hand shops then become the next best option before buying new. People are constantly parting with their “classics” through either spring cleaning or, more grimly, dying. You do not need to buy Lord of the Rings new. You will find the entire trilogy and then some in a second hand shop.
Second hand shops are also going to help you with the out of print stuff. When my mass market paperback of one of my favorite sci-fi novels fell into disrepair, I went looking for a replacement just to find that even later trade paperback editions of the entire trilogy were few and far between and for high prices. For some even well-revered classics, the yearly demand simply isn’t high enough to keep them in print. Many have never been converted to ebook and if an audiobook ever existed, it never made the jump from cassette or CD. So there are some books that you can pretty much only get second hand in physical form. And while that can make the search locally more difficult, things like Thriftbooks.com have made it way easier in the modern day to thrift for books nationally.
While you’re in this process, though, it’s very likely you’re going to find books from authors you’ve never heard of. And these books may seem like more fun than the classics that you’re on the hunt for. Still read them. Read them instead, even, if your time is that limited and a particular classic is giving you a hard time. Because what we’re attempting to do in a survey of genre classics, typically, is understand why a genre is the way it is. What does that transition look like through the decades? And books that sort of fell off, that never made it the level of classic, still give you that. They still show you what that genre used to look like, even if they weren’t of high enough quality or staying power to make it through the ages. They still carry value, and in fact will give you a better understanding of what your genre actually looked like, holistically, to the readers of the time. And that’s sort of the whole point.