The secret to reading more classics? Don’t treat them like homework.

I have never read Crime and Punishment (1867). I’ve been meaning to for years and thought my moment had come last winter, after a weekend spent researching the best translation for a Dostoevsky newbie. Then life happened, as it does, and the moment skittered on by. I set my brand-new copy on the shelf, and it has been sitting there ever since, spine uncracked, its pristine pages a testament to my lapse.

I don’t make this confession in shame. I read many wonderful books last year, some new releases, others longstanding members of my to-read pile. I offer it more in a spirit of solidarity.

If you’re reading this, I imagine you have your own Crime and Punishment waiting patiently on your bookshelf or online wishlist — that classic you’ve always wanted to read but never got around to actually reading. It could be Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Great Expectations (1861) or Brave New World (1932) or In Cold Blood (1966). Heck, it may even be Crime and Punishment. (Like I said, solidarity.)

For whatever reason, certain books elude our best intentions. Maybe we worry their dated language and cultural references will overwhelm us. Maybe we’re afraid the book will reveal our shortcomings as readers, and just like in school, we’ll be embarrassed for “just not getting it.” Or maybe it’s just a thick old boy of a book, and honestly, where will we find the time?

As familiar with the classics as I am, I’m equally familiar with these hesitations. And for some readers, they don’t just pertain to a handful of books but classic literature as a whole.

To help with this predicament, I reached out to my friend and colleague Henry Eliot. Eliot is an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, a former editor at Penguin Classics, and the author of Penguin Classics: In Search of the Best Books Ever Written (2019). He also hosts the Substack book club Read the Classics with Henry Eliot. Which is to say: He’s read a lot of classic books.

But before discussing how to approach the classics with more enthusiasm, our conversation turned toward the barriers that may keep readers from starting them in the first place.

What we talk about when we talk about the classics

Readers intuitively expect that the classics will present barriers to entry different from more modern books.

Unfortunately, one of the least justified of these expectations, and one many readers share, is that the classics are only ever serious business. Even the term classics, Eliot points out, can come across as “chilly” and uninviting. This reputation likely settled in during our formative years, when the classics weren’t presented as stories to enjoy but schoolwork to complete — a tasteless vitamin we had to swallow if we wanted to grow up big and intellectually healthy.

And sure, some classics are difficult. Some will feel like work — though, Eliot notes, hard books can also be some of the most rewarding to finish. The unfortunate part is how this schoolyard reputation has come to pervade all the classics, a category that actually represents a richly diverse bunch of stories.

Consider: Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) is a rip-roaring adventure housed in an absolute door-stopper of a book. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) is a sleek existentialist fable, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) is a modernist experiment that upends the very idea of reliable narration. These three books could not be more different, yet each is a card-carrying classic.

How should we view the classics then? I asked Eliot, and he offered three criteria.

First, a classic must endure. Plenty of books enjoy heaps of praise and accolades one year, only to be forgotten the next. Conversely, many classics were dismissed or censored in their day, only to be more favorably evaluated by later readers. If not for the Melville Revival of 1919, for instance, it’s likely only scholars of 19th-century American literature would know about, much less read, Moby-Dick (1851) today.

Eliot argues any would-be classic needs to undergo a “quarantine period.” His rough guiding principle is that a classic should endure for a human lifetime, say 75 years. Written between 75 and 25 years ago, and a book may qualify as a “modern classic.” Less than that — so, basically any book from the 21st century — and a book may still be infected with neophilia.

“Life is finite,” Eliot says. “I’m not going to read every book in the world, and I want to read the best stuff that’s out there. Even when I read something contemporary, I usually wait a year or two to see if it still feels buzzy. It’s a kind of quality control.”

Second, the book must be significant. That could mean cultural relevance or popularity, but it could mean a book that innovated a narrative form, created or transformed a genre, or became emblematic of a social movement, as well. Finally, and “most subjective of all,” it needs to be good. For Eliot, this is what separates a classic from an artifact. An artifact is inert, dead. It’s something academics keep under glass and only dust off to present during a lecture. But a classic remains alive and vibrant.

“It still feels like there’s a flame in there, [that] it’s communicating to us something today which still feels relevant and urgent and engrossing,” Eliot says.

As you likely noticed, these criteria say nothing about how difficult or laborious a book must be. They leave the category wide open for all kinds of narrative experiences. Some of those will be serious. Tragic, dour, disturbing, and possibly boring, too. But just as many will be hilarious, rollicking, romantic, contemplative, and fun.

A cultural shock to the system

Another potential barrier is that the classics, by definition, originated from another time and place. The expectation, then, is that modern readers will lack the knowledge necessary to engage with the story, leaving them in a kind of temporal culture shock.

The shock may be found in the language itself. The older classics in particular can feel like they’ve been half-translated by a student who ran out of time on the test — recognizable words clustered with foreign concepts that don’t neatly signal their meaning. Anyone who read Shakespeare in high school probably remembers thinking some version of, “What the hell is an ‘apple-john?’” or “In what world does wherefore mean ‘why?’”

Even if the language is perfectly sensible, the classics can still challenge us with outdated ideas and practices we have little or no frame of reference for. Nineteenth-century Londoners writing for other nineteenth-century Londoners didn’t tend to spell out the social mores or political happenings of their day. They assumed their audience had a certain baseline understanding that modern readers may not.

Again, while there is some truth here, this expectation can be overblown, too. As Eliot tells me, you don’t have to enroll in a college-level seminar or do extensive research to appreciate the works of Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, or Leo Tolstoy.

“Great books kind of teach you how to read them as you’re reading them, and you kind of fall in with the specificity of the place and the time relatively quickly,” he says. “It’s one of those strange paradoxes of literature that the more specific a book is in terms of its location and milieu and characters and so on, somehow the more universal [the story] is.”

And for those books that require more assistance, he adds, you can find editions with helpful introductions and footnotes to guide you through the trickier spots.

The temporal culture shock becomes more of an issue when we encounter material we find incompatible with our modern sensibilities. Character actions, communal customs, and societal hierarchies that would have passed unquestioned by a book’s original readers can be seen as sexist, racist, and cruel-hearted today.

The classics are no strangers to such controversy. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) has been censored and removed from school curricula for its use of the N-word and depictions of race relations in the antebellum South. Shakespeare explores antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice (1596–8) — with the question of whether he actively promotes antisemitism fiercely debated among critics. And the morality endorsed in the Iliad (late 8th century BC) can be unquestionably savage.

When confronted with such material, Eliot does his best to ground it in the story’s context and milieu. “You need tough skin when you’re going in as a reader,” he says. “I disagree with [such elements]. I take issue with them, but I look for what I can take from the rest of the book. I always try to look beyond the offending material and see if there are other riches to be found.”

He admits this can be difficult. When he read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), for instance, he found it to be an extraordinary work of literature and a disturbing evocation of a pedophile’s defense of his despicable actions. Eliot is glad he read the book, but he doesn’t believe he’ll return to it either.

Which brings us to one more expectation Eliot wants to put to rest: Just because you start a book doesn’t mean you have to finish it. You can disagree with a classic; you can find its content offensive and decide it isn’t for you. “That’s the power you have as a reader,” he notes. “You don’t need to give a book your attention if you don’t want to.”

Breaking into the classics

“My passion in life is to try to break down these barriers and show people how much stranger, darker, funnier, weirder these books are than the image we have of them and why it is always rewarding to read the classics,” Eliot says.

With that in mind, and our expectations properly set, I asked Eliot what advice he had for people looking to read more classics — whether for the first time or after a long break.

The first thing he recommends is simply choosing the right book. As mentioned, the classics span a range of genres and styles from many cultures and eras. Rather than looking for a book you check off some imaginary to-do list, choose the one that you want to read now.

“Reading should not be a chore,” Elito says. “Life is too short to slog through books you’re not enjoying. There are thousands of books out there, and lots that you will enjoy.”

If you don’t know where to start, Eliot says to consider F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). He recommends these three because they are “short, brilliant, and accessible titles,” which show the “breadth and scope” of the classics.

Eliot’s next strategy is his top one: Read in good company. Reading is often seen as a silent, standoffish activity, and for long stretches, it can be. But Eliot wants readers to recognize that reading with others is often rewarding. You enjoy the social benefits of sharing an experience with others, and having someone to support your reading can help you keep up the momentum when life happens (as it does).

Eliot used this strategy to finish a classic he had always meant to read but never got around to reading: Finnegans Wake (1924), James Joyce’s final novel and a notoriously difficult read. To show you what I mean, here’s the first sentence: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” (It goes on like that for 600 more pages.)

To help him out, Eliot enlisted his friends, and they decided to read the book over two months: 60 days, 10 pages a day. A perfectly manageable pace. They discussed the book over WhatsApp: sharing their insights, snapping pictures of favorite quotes, and encouraging each other through the pain points.

“I don’t think I could have done it without the group,” Eliot says. “If you’ve got a kind of block with the classics, or you’re feeling in any sense intimidated by them, having mates alongside you really helps you keep the moment going. The encouragement is helpful [too].”

Finally, Eliot says to plan your reading. He likes to know how many pages he has to read each day to finish a book by a certain time, which is helpful for longer books or steeper challenges. It’s also easy to tailor to your needs.

Say you want to tackle Finnegans Wake, but 10 pages of “commodius vicus of recirculation” seems a bit much for your day. Plan for two, and you’ll still have the novel wrapped by the end of the year. Read a chapter a day, and you can even wrap Les Misérables (1862), Victor Hugo’s 1,500-page epic, within a year.

Eliot admits that this strategy won’t be for everyone. For some, it will make reading feel more like an assignment than an extracurricular pleasure. Still, he finds it helpful for managing his time and gives him a goal to prevent him from reaching for his phone or scrolling aimlessly through Netflix.

And the more you read, the more personalized your strategies will become. As I discovered, Eliot and I both tend to have multiple books on our nightstands. This lets us see connections between books — the conversations great works have with each other, as Eliot put it. It also helps us avoid those between-book lulls. Still, others will prefer to focus on one book at a time, and that’s fine, too.

“Reading is such a creative process,” Eliot says. “You’re bringing so much of your own experience and life and wisdom and intelligence that the experience in your head is unique every time you read something.”

Building your personal library

Eliot shared with me a story about Umberto Eco, a writer famous for his enormous personal library of more than 32,000 books. People would ask Eco if he had read all the books he had collected. Eco would politely answer no and prompt the inevitable follow-up question: “Well then, what was the point of owning so many books if you haven’t read them?”

Eco would then have the questioner imagine a workshop with neat rows of spanners, screwdrivers, ratchets, and hammers hanging on the wall. Would you ask the mechanic whether they had used all those tools? Of course not! They own all those tools, so when the right moment arrives, they will be ready for the job at hand.

The same is true of books. As Eliot puts it, Eco saw his bookshelf as not just a display of acquired knowledge, but as storage for potential knowledge and experiences.

I have not yet read Crime and Punishment or, honestly, many other classics. That’s okay. If anything, the classics are patient. Some have waited for hundreds of years for us to read them. They’ll be waiting for us when we’re finally ready for them.

But if we want to read them, we need to start. Life is finite after all, and the more books we read, the more we open ourselves up to alternative lives and perspectives on the world. As Eliot put it, we “enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human when we read.”

It’s true of any book, but with the classics, Eliot adds, we get that same sense across time and culture. When you read The Odyssey or a medieval poem or a Victorian novel, you enjoy the “thrill of recognition” of our shared humanity over time. This continuity that links us to those who came before, and we join an “invisible crowd” of readers who have read the same book across the ages.

“It’s a feeling I love: that I’m joining a kind of fellowship or legacy of readers for a book. It’s something that will come in time to some contemporary books, but it’s something very special to reading the classics.”

This article is featured on Big Think.