6 Enjoyable Ways to Read Classic Novels—or Pretty Much Anything

Intimidated? Distracted? Bored? Need Another Way In? A Practical Answer to the Postliterate Panic

Depending who you ask, we’re no longer merely reading less; we’re becoming postliterate. That is, we’re losing the habit of reading, along with the attention and patience that serious books require. I don’t find the doomsday scenario convincing; the past was not so uniformly literary as we assume, nor the present so uniformly moronic. But the downward trajectory of the stats hardly buoys my spirits. Truth be told, I cry in my pillow five nights out of seven.

Nonetheless, I’m an optimist—if not by nature, then by practice.

Photo by Prasanna Kumar on Unsplash

Humans have two (among many other) remarkable traits: imagination and agency. We can picture alternatives to our present situation and use the canvas of our minds to sketch new approaches to whatever setbacks or difficulties we face. We can then tease, test, and try those approaches, take the feedback of our attempts, and refine our solutions. If at first you don’t succeed . . .

There are almost always means of improving any given situation. When addressing these disturbing stats last year, I discussed two possible answers: (1) keep reading and (2) model it for those around you, especially kids. Parents and their reading behaviors form a key factor in whether children will grow up to be readers themselves.

But let’s say you or someone you know finds yourself with a slightly different sort of problem.

The Spirit Is Willing, But . . .

Reading-crisis narratives up the ante in unanticipated ways, turning every abandoned classic into evidence not only of personal failure but complicity in societal decline. Way to let down the team, Jill.

That’s a lot of pressure, far more than any book—or reader—deserves. After all, it’s just Tolstoy; nobody’s bleeding out on the table. What if we lowered the stakes a little?

Maybe you wish you could read more but struggle to find time amid all the demands on your time and distractions of life. As the diced-up time of your day drifts downward like sad confetti around your ankles, it feels impossible to glue enough minutes together to either make progress on the books that matter to you or even discover what those books might be.

Guilt and shame lurk behind those feelings, naturally enough, ready to strike the moment you pause to ponder your situation. If you were only serious . . . if you were only more dedicated . . . better self-disciplined . . . After all, people around you seem to be making time for serious books, classic novels, the kind of literature intelligent people (a clan to which you obviously belong) claim they enjoy—and probably do!

But then you finally pick up that hulking tome and feel intimidated. It’s so freaking long! You don’t have time for that. Or your initial enthusiasm gets you through the first twenty pages. But then . . . yawn! Is this thing ever going to start? It’s so slow! The language is clunky and opaque. You put it down.

The next time the mood strikes, you can’t even find it. You look under the nightstand, behind a stack in the office. You can’t recall where you put it. Did you give it away, donate it? You pull it up on Amazon or Bookshop.org. You see it on a table at your local indie. It’s a sign. Obviously, a sign! Now’s the time, dammit. You’re ready to recommit.

But—and please excuse me for interrupting your newly forming resolution almost certain to disappoint you—if you try the same basic thing again, won’t you get the same basic result? I seem to recall a definition of insanity that dabbled with that formulation.

I get it. For years, the only crime about which I could definitively report in Crime and Punishment was putting it down. The punishment? Self-imposed: I’ve never benefited from a book my friends raved about. And I started The Brothers Karamazov more times than most smokers quit cigarettes. Eight times, nine times, ten? I lost count.

But I never quite lost hope, and that’s why I’m still around to offer you at least a shred of it—maybe more. Let’s try something else, shall we? I’m going to assume you want to read classic novels. Maybe not. No worries: These pointers are easily adjusted for most any kind of book. They come out of my own practice, which I’m pleased as a goat in garbage to say now includes classic novels on the reg. (This year I even finished both C&P and TBK; you can read my reviews here and here.)

1. Go Easy on Yourself

When we teach goal achievement at Full Focus, we stress choosing big goals that edge you out of your comfort zone. But in your enthusiasm, you never want to choose an initiating action you’ll later find intimidating. You’ll retreat back to the comfort zone—also known as Instagram, Netflix, or whatever nutrient-sparse media currently keeping you from reading. Nothing wrong with Instagram or Netflix if that’s your toast and jam. This ain’t morals; it’s math: There are only 168 hours in a week. Choose you this day whom ye will serve.

So, start with this. Pick something you think you’ll enjoy. If you find a book intrinsically interesting, you’ve got a much better shot of finishing it. There is no law in any state saying a book only counts if it’s difficult, you dislike it, or you dread picking it up. Just go ahead and punch yourself in the face instead. Or find something fun.

There are any number of reasons a classic novel might be tough going. Feel free to avoid any and all of them for now. Perhaps it’s long, defeatingly so. Awesome. Save that sucker for another time. Pick something more manageable. Yes, you might want to tackle Les Misérables, but what if you started with Of Mice and Men? You’ll knock it out in an afternoon. There are plenty of great classics on the short side of two hundred pages and many closer to a hundred. (Follow this footnote for a shopping list.¹)

Another reason a classic might be a slog: the language reads like a potholed street with downed trees and traffic jams and God knows what else. No surprise if the writing was old when your great-grandparents were alive. Thankfully, no one will throw you in jail for taking an offramp and finding an easier road. Pick something more contemporary or an author noted for a breezy style. An easy hack for that? Have a look at what high-school English students were reading in the eighties or nineties. Hurston! Vonnegut! Kesey! Get a few of those behind you, and you’ll be ready to approach more perilous passages.

Another way to ease yourself in? Audiobooks. There are tradeoffs, but audiobooks have the benefit of bringing much of the momentum to keep going when a book bogs down. The player is doing the work; meanwhile, you’re getting the dishes done or going for a walk. You’ve never been so happy about folding laundry!

2. Make It a Dialogue

I mean this in a couple of ways. First, find a friend or a group of friends to read the book with. Goal research would suggest this method as well. Sustaining commitments is more effective when we can fall back on the support of others. A date on the calendar with someone you don’t want to disappoint is sometimes all it takes—works for running partners and Moby-Dick.

Now, some of you may hesitate on this next bit, especially my lumping it under dialogue. Lump it where you want—and feel free to disregard if you choose. But sometimes you just want to get answers to questions now. What’s more, you may have a string of questions too narrow or particular to easily find decent answers on Google. Ask the elves and gremlins under the hood at Claude or ChatGPT.

Contemporary large language models are surprisingly good on exchanges about classic novels. And here’s a real winner: If the novel is public domain and you can easily get a digital copy—Project Gutenberg is great for this—you can upload that to the LLM of your choice. Now you can directly query the book itself. As Steven Johnson can tell us, Google’s NotebookLM (recently renamed Gemini Notebook) excels at this. I use Claude, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM all the time while thinking about literature. You have to watch out for hallucinations, but LLMs are a fantastic tool with a little care.

3. Get into the Season

Stories unfold in time, and that’s true for both the narrative and our experience of the narrative. Sync those up. I have, for instance, enjoyed reading classic horror and paranormal stories leading up to Halloween. Last year, I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein during the month of October, plus Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Stoker offers another opportunity to read in season. Dracula is composed of dated letters, journal entries, and diary pages. You don’t have to follow the sequence exactly. Read ahead, lag behind, whatever. But let the book itself give you the context for reading.

Timing reading with the season provides the sort of contextual cues to enrich and enliven all sorts of reading experiences. Last year I read both Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop during Lent. It was the perfect moment for both novels; my Lenten reflections added to my consideration of the themes in the books, and reflecting on the books added to my experience of Lent. Shusaku Endo’s Silence or The Samurai would both keep emotional pace with the season as well.

Now run with that idea. What about Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for summer? I’d suggest both J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman for the back-to-school season. Then there’s Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for guess when, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome for the deeper days of winter. When you’re finally ready for spring? Cather’s My Ántonia. And tax time! What about Franz Kafka’s The Trial?

We can let the external reality of the seasons enhance the subjective experience of the stories, reinforcing the overall experience.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

4. Couch It in a Bigger Story

C.S. Lewis coined the term “personal heresy” in a public debate with scholar E.M.W. Tillyard in the 1930s, an exchange later published as The Personal Heresy. Lewis argued against reading imaginative works of fiction or poetry as an author’s veiled memoir or an expression of their personal emotions or experiences. It’s reductive and misses the larger sense toward which an author strives. Literary critics sometimes refer to this as the “biographical fallacy.”

Point taken. But you know what sometimes makes a story more interesting? Couching it in a larger story. Historical and biographical context can deepen our enjoyment of a story. You don’t have to know jack about an author’s life, time, or place to appreciate their novels, but it might give you more footholds as you venture in. This is precisely why I often include something of the author’s story in my reviews of classic novels; it ups the interest level for me, and (I assume) for many of you.

As long as the added context illuminates the story instead of eclipsing it, Lewis probably wouldn’t complain. More importantly, neither will you. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that you have to slog through a history of Regency England to enjoy Pride and Prejudice. But you might want to ask ChatGPT a few questions about it. And if you’re taking a stab at Jane Eyre, ask it about English boarding schools during the period. The bits about Lowood likely came right out of Charlotte Brontë’s own time at boarding school.

And I’d bet money Lewis met Eustace Scrubb at school.

5. Amplify Your Engagement

Take notes. Scribble in the margins. Diagram the relationships between characters. See if you can plot the storyline on a graph. Keep a commonplace book to capture quotes. Externalize your thoughts about what you’re reading on a page or screen. Here’s an example from when I was reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island a few years ago.

Who’s who of early Island rulers.

This extends the point about a dialogue; it also makes reading more multisensory and enjoyable. A book is a machine for thinking and feeling, and if you want to rev it up, you have to actively engage it. It just so happens this creates a positive feedback loop; the more you engage, the greater the reward. This kind of engagement ends up generating the sort of intrinsic enthusiasm and motivation that carries you through a book—and onto the next one. (Lewis would, for what it’s worth, approve.)

As critics fret we’re losing our capacity for sustained reading, this also presents one way rebuild it. We strengthen our attention through use. Every scribble, every underline is a rep. Go for another.

To heighten engagement, also consider re-reading. We’re never done reading great books. The classics keep speaking, and our ears and hearts take different shapes as time passes. That’s true over years and decades. It’s also true over days. After I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, I immediately re-read it—twice. I did the same with Endo’s Silence and The Samurai. Give me a few more years and I’ll dip into Lewis’s Till We Have Faces again. I can’t keep my mind off that one.

Lewis approved this tactic as well. “I can’t imagine a man enjoying a book and reading it only once,” he penned his friend Arthur Greeves in 1932.

Re-reading a book is just like listening to a piece of music again. You don’t get everything on the first pass. You have to listen again—to see how a theme developed, to catch the echoes, and to understand how the resolution takes you full circle.

6. Read to Someone You Love

I was talking with my dad a while back. He’s an English teacher and has been his entire professional life. He’s 82 and still teaching. He’s taught Romeo and Juliet more times than I abandoned The Brothers Karamazov—times twenty. “You really need to read it aloud,” he told me, “to hear the rhythm of the language.” Shakespeare was meant to be heard, but there’s merit in reading aloud almost any text. Verbalizing dialogue brings it to life and helps you more fully inhabit the characters. It also has noted benefits for retention.

But let’s say you feel goofy reading aloud to yourself. No worries! Read to someone else—your spouse, your kids, roommates, anyone who will listen.

One of my favorite activities each day is reading to my daughter before bed. That wasn’t always the case. For a while there I struggled to read the oversized illustrated children’s books with trite little morals. I reached a point where I would have preferred to scoop my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon than read one more. So I stopped. When Naomi was five, I said it’s time to graduate to some books better suited for big girls. And we jumped into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then The Wizard of Oz. It’s life to me—and her. I can’t wait till I read her Pinocchio.

She loves the more involved stories, and I love that we’re getting to experience these stories together. We just finished Lewis’s The Silver Chair the other day, and now we’re neck deep in Grace Lin’s When the Sea Turns to Silver. And think about how much incredible stuff hovers above us at the horizon! Hopefully, she’ll come to love reading and carry the affection through the rest of her life. And taking a moment to share these stories, my time, and my voice is one more way I get to express my love for her.

You can find support for all of the above tips and methods in cognitive research and various studies. But that’s beside the point. You can just give one or two a try. Find an easy classic to get started, read it with a friend, throw a few puzzlers at an LLM, try matching the book to the season, do some fun research, scribble and take notes, and share your voice with someone you care about.

The broad decline matters—same with schools, curricula, and screens competing for the marginal time that might otherwise go to reading. But some of the best answers begin at the scale of us: one reader, one book, one conversation, one kid squirming at the other end of the sofa at a time.

Reading can be a chore, but that’s mostly a choice. To one degree or another, that’s true about the reading crisis as well.

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Why I’m Still Reading ‘Problematic’ Children’s Books to My Daughter

1. Here’s a list of mostly modern(ish) classics you can read in a day:

1. 197 pages: Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

2. 180 pages: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

3. 173 pages: Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem

4. 168 pages: Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

5. 163 pages: G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

6. 159 pages: Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

7. 157 pages: Graham Greene, The Third Man

8. 154 pages: John Wyndham, Chocky

9. 152 pages: Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

10. 150 pages: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther

11. 144 pages: Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas

12. 128 pages: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

13. 120 pages: Nella Larsen, Passing

14. 114 pages: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

15. 107 pages: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

16. 89 pages: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

17. 77 pages: Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

18. 73 pages: Osamu Dazai, The Beggar Student