AH... But to Read One More Classic!

Why do you read the classics? Is it for enjoyment? Are you educating yourself on the history of literature? Perhaps you're taking a course in high school or college. Or, you may have no idea why you are reading a classic.

Whether you're reading your first classic, or you've read countless numbers in the years (or decades), we find ourselves partaking in the larger history of books and literature. We can reach back in time to Shakespeare or Cervantes, or jump forward to Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson... then to Mark Twain perhaps... or even further still to T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

One classic just leads to another, and before you know it you may be enmeshed, addicted, and yearning to hold another book.

Here are just a few resources that might help you on your way to understanding (and further appreciating) the classics!

• A History of English Literature
• Succeed in Your Literature Class
• A Student's History of American Literature
• Biographical Dictionary of English Literature
• Literature in Time - Selected Reading List
• Studies in Classic American Literature
• What Happens in Literature
• Introductions to Literature
• What to Read

Here are a few quotes on reading the classics...

• "Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have." - Alan Bennett
  
  
• "A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again." - Carl Van Doren
  
  
• "A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man." - Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
  
  
• "A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness." - Ezra Pound
  
  
• "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." - Italo Calvino
  
  
• "The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish." - Milan Kundera
  
  

Enjoy the classics!



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