Throughout all of my years as a student, I have never understood the groans and complaints from students when their English teacher brings out the classic books for the next unit. Do others not love getting to read narratives written from another time? Or perhaps the content was just confusing and very hard to understand. Either way, I personally thoroughly enjoyed the trenches of understanding the difference between “thou” and “thee” when reading William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
In order to validate the my sense of sanity, I asked several other classmates to share their opinion on classic books that they have read in the past. I first talked to Cora Hall, a junior currently enrolled in AP Literature and Composition. “I like reading [classics] just because it just is a bit harder to read,” She said. “Actually taking the time and having to understand, even if it’s not poetry. You have to actually take your time and it’s not like the book talks that are being produced now.”
When I was first getting into reading classic books, my first thought was, how does a novel achieve the title of “classic”? Harriet Sanders from the Pan Macmillan publishing company states, “It will have a certain complexity and depth, which enables it to transcend the time in which it was written.” And later continues, “A classic brilliantly articulates universal themes- like love, morality, death, adversity.”
This is what makes a classic novel, the ability for the ideas in the book to be applied in any time period, which makes the books more memorable because they were written so long ago, but can still be applied today, thus shows the beauty of classic books.
Natalie Johnson, one of the English Language Arts teachers at ADM, teaches AP Literature and Composition, American Literature, Literature Lab and Composition. Currently she is teaching The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to her American Literature class. “I think literature is always timeless,” Johnson said. “I always like to make that connection of these things that were written so long ago, they still endure those messages, those characters and things they went through in the 1920s.”
Some of the most famous classic novels are still being read by many today, such as 1984 by George Orwell, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and of course, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Many of these novels depict the story of characters that go through many hardships, explore love and all follow the development of their characters.
One of my favorite classic novels that I have read in high school was Night by Elie Wiesel. The autobiography published in 1956 is a beautifully written first person point-of-view of that atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust. It follows the story of Elie and his family beginning when he lived in Transylvania, to his life in concentration camps. This novel is like nothing that I have ever read before and is a true story. The fact that it was a true story made the novel so much more impactful and powerful and shows the atrocities in World War II from a first person hand account.
So really, classic novels have all the benefits. They can help make connections to the past and dystopias to show how morality doesn’t change much throughout years fortifies the truths that all humans live by, and also exposes people to different cultures that they might not have the chance to experience in person. It also teaches important lessons from the past to help address the present and the future.
