old books

my truth

I can’t tell you how long it’s taken for me to admit this to myself, but I’m going to come right out and say it: I read Dracula at uni and found it boring. The best bit is the captain’s log but I ended up skimming the second half and getting a 2:2 on the essay because I ‘didn’t go into enough depth’. If only the tutor had given Bram Stoker this note the second half of his book might have been halfway readable amiright???? God it’s exciting to admit I don’t like a Classic. I’m as thrilled as an Austen heroine who just spied a 45 year-old man with land.

My issue with The Classics is, like most things, not really about the books at all, but about a chip on my shoulder. Bigger than a chip, actually. I’ve been carrying one of those massive baked potatoes on my back ever since I did English Literature at Durham with a lot of clever, privately educated people who would wax lyrical in tutorials about how funny they found HG Wells’s Tono Bungay while I sat in silence having been unable to get through twenty pages. One of them lived in an actual castle, wore shoes filled with holes and always seemed to be holding a plum, but that’s beside the point. I remember gawping at these people and thinking ‘I thought I loved reading, but I didn’t laugh once at Tono Bungay. Oh god it turns out I’m thick’. Out loud I said: ‘Yeah yeah such a funny book’ before unsuccessfully trying to get off with one of them (not plum boy).

I’m old enough now to see that intelligence doesn’t mean you were moved to tears by Beowulf. It just means you enjoyed Beowulf. Some people enjoy old films, some people enjoy Marvel films, and that should be that - except there’s nothing like four years of fusty academics telling you one is better than the other by default to make you think, well, one is better than the other by default. So many students made catty comments about Gone Girl and ‘airport books’ and a girl once got drunk at the English Literature garden party (yes, this was a thing) and told me her guilty pleasure was Jane Eyre. I mean what are you supposed to do with that information other than presume you are comparatively stupid? My guilty pleasure was illegally streaming Gossip Girl while eating those Ritter Sport bars nobody ever buys, except me in 2006-10. The problem isn’t the old books or the girl who liked Jane Eyre of course, but the performative snobbiness around consuming culture (you get it in art, in music, in everything really) that seems to be embedded into academia. Posh old white people decide what’s in the literary canon and everything else is mush for the idiot masses. It’s classist! And, as with everything classist, I spent the first half of my life popping it onto my ever-growing shoulder potato.

For years I equated liking old books with lofty intelligence and wealth and power and mystique - qualities I desperately wanted, because I don’t have them - so I pretended to love the old books. The more I pretended, the more stupid I felt, the more I muddied my actual opinions which led me to an (incorrect) post-graduation epiphany that I’d simply stopped enjoying reading. I’d gone from a teenager who used to fall asleep at school because I’d been up til 4am finishing The Subtle Knife, to someone who hated bookshops. Philip Pullman wasn’t the right sort of author, and I didn’t want to be the wrong sort of person; the degree had turned me into such a self-hating snob that I felt the only section worth looking at was the Classics, and because I couldn’t bear to be confronted with my stupidity, I just stopped going to Waterstones. I avoided bookshops entirely until, six years later, I picked up Gone Girl in an airport WH Smiths on a whim and basically shoved that whole thing into my eyeballs in ten seconds flat. My brain was starving. I’d conflated reading with worthiness for so long I’d actually started to believe liking Dante’s Inferno made you a more interesting person than Daisy Jones and The Six. I’d forgotten books could be fun!

Now I make a point not to judge what I read - there’s no such thing as trash, okay? Sometimes I want sweeping American familial drama, other times I want ‘who killed the sexy posh lady at the hunting party’. Sometimes I need to understand death or pain a little better because I’m hurt and lost, and other times I fancy a quick read about two people nearly boning for 150 pages who then bone.

No Classics, though. They’d made me feel too stupid for too long, and I didn’t wish to bring that into my adult life - until someone last week said ‘Rebecca is actually a really good old book, I think you’d love it’. So I bought it and broke the Classics curse by staying up til 4am to get to the end. Fucking ruined the following day, sure, but it was worth it because WHAT A TOME. Hadn’t seen the film, was gripped from start to finish, and it made me think about the other Classics I’d enjoyed.

I’d focused so much on the ones I hated, that I forgot I liked a few (not Jane Eyre, sorry, I put it down and then didn’t pick it back up again which isn’t a good sign is it). And I do mean ‘a few’ because I was battling imposter syndrome and that reading list was lonnnnng, so please pop any recommendations below to help me continue my healing Classics journey. And bear in mind if you recommend something purely to look intelligent, I will kill you.

NB I had to delete some books off this list because despite this being the entire point of the post I realised I was embarrassed about how short the list was so started SNEAKING BOOKS IN THAT I DIDN’T REALLY ENJOY THAT MUCH . O, what battles rage within us.*

*This isn’t a quote from anything, I just made it look like one to seem smart.

The Yellow Wallpaper 

The lecturer referred to it as a study of historical female hysteria and how women had started to use writing as a way to break societal norms, but I’d refer to it as ‘woman goes bonko in a room and it’s incredibly short’. Really interesting to read the context around it, and the whole thing rockets along.

The Bell Jar 

While we’re on the topic, I might as well give a nod to the ultimate Woman Goes Bonko book. Actually, I don’t think it is the ultimate Woman Goes Bonko book (I recently read Nightbitch where the main character turns into a dog) but it’s the OG Woman Talks About Depression In A Refreshingly Direct Way Without Saying She’s Got The Vapours etc book.

Mrs Dalloway

Alright, this is the last Woman Goes Bonko book on the list, but worth a mention because it’s got everything in it: post-war PTSD, posh people having a bad time, existential crises, sexuality stuff, a party. Who hasn’t been stressed about organising a party?? It takes place over the course of one day and is incredibly brisk considering the complexity of the themes (e.g. bonko) (I hope bonko is an okay term to use, but I think it’s fine considering I’m a woman who has definitely gone bonko so let’s just say I’m reclaiming it).

Middlemarch 

Didn’t start this until the night before my tutorial (due to being intimidated by its 50,000 page length) but while I only intended to skim the first few chapters I ended up continuing. I even thought ‘ooh I might finish this one, what a shame there’ll be spoilers in the tutorial tomorrow’. Thankfully English Lit students talk such bullshit you can’t actually get a handle on what they’re saying, so I finished it a week later spoiler-free and got a terrible grade on the essay because the tutor said it was just ten pages of me saying how much of a nice time I’d had reading it. If you’re starting to wonder whether I regret my choice of degree then bear in mind a) I got rejected for creative writing at Warwick so had no choice and b) if I hadn’t been bored to death I wouldn’t have joined the uni sketch group and got into comedy and met my best friends so it all worked out in the end.

Bleak House

Exactly the same as the Middlemarch experience, but Dickens. Have tried other Dickens but can’t get into them because I keep thinking ‘oooh hahah I’m reading Dickens look at me’. Also it’s difficult to muster the energy and enthusiasm to open something called The Pickwick Papers - fuck me that’s a dull title. At least Bleak House involves an adjective. It’s also a really good story, you care about the characters, and happens to be pretty funny. Well, not laugh-out-loud funny but some of the names are amusing. There’s a man called Mr Chadband. I’m not selling this very well am I. 

Frankenstein 

A relief after Dracula, this met my expectations exactly: yes it’s old but it’s creepy and interesting and so much happens and you genuinely feel for the poor lad (monster). I remember being so relieved I could actually get through it without stapling my eyelids to my brow bone.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I don’t think anyone’s managed to make a good film out of this which is wild considering it’s such a cool concept. The main character Henry talks in this incredibly witty, silly way which starts to grate three quarters of the way through, and I once said in a tutorial that this could be intentional (so the reader starts to see how superficial Henry truly is) to which my tutor managed to utter ‘Yes that’s… right’ in a voice so strangled with surprise I realised how unengaged I’d been for the rest of the term. To be fair to me, the last tutorial had been on how Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be seen as a gay allegory strengthened by the fact that the alter ego Mr Hyde always entered the house through the back door. Imagine sitting in a room where a load of people are earnestly discussing how a man isn’t using the back door to conceal the fact he’s turned into a full monster from his neighbours, but because it resembles taking it up the arse. Impossible to take that degree seriously.

North and South 

Have no recollection of this book except I know it was the only one I enjoyed in a module I hated (The Romantics). It’s possible I only liked North and South in relation to how much I loathed Byron (and everything I read about him as a man), and it’s also possible I only loathed Byron because so many students seemed to model themselves on his aesthetic and hang around speaking in couplets. In 2009. There was a guy at my college who dressed in paisley waistcoats and tophats and called himself Byron when his name was Ed. Although I suppose the actual Byron was called George, so maybe that’s okay. Anyway, have a go at North and South because it was a real beacon in the night for me, and see what you think.

Tender Is The Night

Talking of beacons in the night (green), I liked this more than The Great Gatsby, but this could have been my age. I think you’ve got to have had your heart and dreams broken a few times in order to relate to it, so I might give it another bash. Either way, I found Tender Is The Night more moving and beautiful, while scratching my favourite posh-people-being-actually-quite-sad -despite-all-the -money. There’s the potato again.*

*I don’t hate posh people, some of my best friends are posh people. Also I’ve worked on my potato in therapy so it’s all fine now, okay.

1984

Absolutely loved it. Sad it’s become something mad aunties misquote on Facebook when they see a rainbow babygro and think Primark’s gone woke or whatever, because it’s deeply irrelevant. I still reference double-think (a tactic the Party use in the book to spread confusion and misinformation) and when people don’t get it I’m able to say ‘oh it’s an Orwellian reference’ which makes me look well-read, and not like someone who sat a Romantics exam having only read one book from the entire period.

Brave New World 

The one where people love to discuss whether it’s actually utopian rather than dystopian, even though it’s about eugenics. Enjoyed this as much as 1984, although it’s definitely a slightly harder read if you’re not into the cold, creepy style of the prose. Basically it’s not for everyone, I say challengingly at 1am in the smoking section of the college bar, with a glass of port, trying to get off with you.

Catcher in the rye 

SORRY OK I THOUGHT IT WAS AN INTERESTING WELL ROUNDED CHARACTER STUDY I’M SORRY I ENJOYED IT. Amazes me that people go off about how shit this is because the protagonist is an arsehole, as though you can only write books about people who are good. Hate the book because you hate it! Personally I think a lot of people (men) identify too closely with Holden Caulfield which makes them feel confused and upset and that’s just good art. Also it’s v short, incredibly easy to read, and yes the main character is extremely annoying but there are quite interesting reasons for this. Almost as though that was the point.

Mr Pocklington’s Spyglass

OK I made this up so it looked like there were more books on the list. But I imagine it would be a sort of fantasy? Like HG Wells The Time Machine, but I can stay awake when reading it.

Well there we are. A long post, but hopefully it didn’t drag as much as Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy? More like Thomas I Think Your Stories Are Great But Stop Spending 45 Pages Describing The Curtains, You’re Making Reading Your Books Very Hard-y). Also I’m sorry if I’ve inadvertently trashed one of your faves (like Thomas Hardy) but it’s just because art is subjective.

I mean it about the recommendations, though. Please do put hot recs for good Classics in the comments because I’m up for more stuff I can read to impress people on trains. Or anything good you’ve read recently, regardless of the year it was written - I’m reading The Bee Sting at the moment and wow it’s so good!

See you next week

XOXO

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