Read the Classics: Intro in Read the Classics

Ever since the day I could get through a page from “One fish, Two Fish” on my own, I’ve been a voracious reader. My early elementary school teachers placed books on a letter scale based on difficulty, and by 3rd grade I was comfortably reading “Z’s“. By the start of middle school I’d knocked out the most popular young adult stories: Harry Potter. Percy Jackson, Divergent, The Hunger Games; but I came to a slight problem. As I read more and more of these stories, I found similar types of characters, I started to recognize cliches. The internet introduced me to reviews and writing advice and I became more picky about the books I chose. I remember the disappointment I felt after choosing a YA sci-fi novel with a very interesting concept: only to find that the book began with a shoehorned prophecy, that the main character was a girl who “saw things differently” and that the random boy she pointed out in passing would be a love interest. So I went out to find books that were bound to be both good and sufficiently challenging, and where better to start than the classics? At the start, some went over my head, I abandoned “The Count of Monte Cristo” In the second half as I was unable to keep all the characters straight,but I went back a year later and was able to finish it. My collection grew steadily: Moby Dick, Fahrenheit 451, Frankenstein; and I enjoyed them (mostly). It was a particular mannerism one of my high school language arts teachers that inspired these essays. He was one of the younger teachers, he wanted to relate to and engage kids, but that meant disrespecting what he thought they wouldn’t like. He liked to say, while we made a project based on the Iliad despite only reading one chapter of it, that he wanted to give us options outside of the “dusty old books.” If you are a reader who avoids the classics, or not much of reader at all, I hope to show you the magic I’ve found in so many classic works, so that you may decide to read them by yourself.