Hoi!
So, today I’m here with Rosianna because
she seemed like the perfect person for this video.
This has been requested quite a lot.
It’s one of the biggest questions I get from people usually
and it is how to get started with classics.
We both studied literature.
I did British lit and what did you do?
[Rosianna]: I did English with Study in North America, so that was
a lot of (?), a mix of english language literature from around the world.
Most of my first year was actually and a lot of it was, hm,
past and present, so it was very much like the canon
(?) used to read through??
[Sanne]: Today we’re going to talk a little bit about classics
and how we feel about them
and about reading them and then we’re going to recommend
some easy starter classics.
If they absolutely terrify you, these are good ones to get started with.
There's quite a lot of classic shaming.
[Rosianna]: Yeah. [Sanne]: …that happens in the world,
where people are just like “I can’t believe you haven’t read that.”
I get quite a lot of “How dare you call yourself a literature student.”
like “You did a degree but you haven’t read this and this and this.”
[Rosianna]: “You haven’t read Proust, how can you be a person?”
[Sanne]: Yeah, it makes people really scared to admit they haven’t read stuff.
[Rosianna]: People lie, that’s a thing, like they do these things all the time in newspapers, like
“How many books have you lied about reading.”
[Sanne]: Yeah, but why would you?
[Rosianna]: People lie, we shouldn’t do that, we have to get away from that.
And fact, like - this is something that I’m sure will come around later in
here - the canon is made up of many white old men,
many white English men as well, and very kind of privileged perspective.
[Sanne]: And it’s the same with that sort of shame of
young adult literature or anything else. I think, you know
it's the same with films. You enjoy what you enjoy, and you do it.
And that’s absolutely fine.
[Rosianna]: These are fantastic books, the ones we’re going to talk about today.
I think that they’re wonderful, wonderful books.
But classic isn’t the only mark of quality
and it just makes me really sad, because…
like, contemporary fiction is fantastic, like
romantic fiction is fantastic, historical fiction is fantastic, it’s just...
[Sanne]: And you read to enjoy it, so if you’re not enjoying it...
[Rosianna]: Same for classic shaming, we’ve all been there,
we’ve all been classic-shamed, like grammar-shamed, you know
just… maybe stop.
[Sanne]: I feel that people also say like “Oh, classics are so hard, difficult…”
[Rosianna]: Especially if you had to deal with them in school like…”uugh.”
[Sanne]: You might have read some that you don’t like, but here are some
of our favourites, that are good starters. Do you want to go first?
[Rosiana]: Yeah. I love this edition, so this is “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde across the board is a very great one to get started with
because he is so funny.
And even though his stories are like - for example, this one has a very dark,
dark side about a man who does not age, let’s put it like that.
There’s a lot of satire, it has a darkness to it,
but the humour throughout this and throughout things like
“The Importance of Being Earnest”, and the plays are other things that
people get really freaked out by.
[Sanne]: As a sort of ‘English-as-a-second-language’ speaker, I found
“The Importance of Being Earnest” quite tricky the first time.
It took me a while to get the jokes. I did a lot of sort of - I could read
the text, but I couldn’t quite get to the jokes.
[Rosianna]: Well, Oscar Wilde is a lot about language play and I
think that’s kind of one his biggest strengths, but I think with all
the classics, like.. read them twice. I think that reading them twice,
I mean it’s hard because some are longer than others
but by reading them twice because you get so much more out of it,
and it’s just... it's fantastic.
[Sanne]: I’m going to start with this one, because this was a really pleasant
surprise for me, I had to read it
for university, and it’s “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley.
This is one that everyone thinks they know the story, because
you’ve seen some sort of adaptation, or you’ve seen cartoons of it or..
but you really don’t, you really don’t know. It’s actually
really beautiful and really moving. I feel like it’s really atmospheric,
it’s set partly in Switzerland and partly in…Italy, I want to say?
my favorite thing about this book is that it is told as a sort of layered
story, so you start all the way on the outside and then it's basically
like someone tells a story, so you go one layer deeper.
And now within that story, someone else tells a story and you keep going
in and in and in, until you reach the middle, and you're the deepest in
and then you start going out-out-out-out-out. It’s really fun.
[Rosianna]: It’s great, because there’s a sense of oral history
which I love, I love it.
[Sanne]: Yeah and it’s a surprisingly easy read.
In the beginning the language of the first two chapters might be a bit tricky
but once you get in it's really compelling,
it's not that big and I absolutely adore it.
[Rosianna]: So, the next one I picked was
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes”, and if you like thrillers, or detective stories
and if you haven’t actually read the original Sherlock Holmes then
you absolutely must. The stories are
relatively short, they’re also really funny, there’s a lot of sarcasm, which is
what I look for in all stories, really.
and there are some great classic nemesis (?) as well,
if you recognize in the front of this cover.
I think the mysteries are really a weigh in to a great classic fiction. ??
[Sanne]: If you've already seen adaptations, you know
what the context is, you know the characters
and it is short, so you can read it bit by bit, really easy way into it as well.
[Rosianna]: But there’s also, like lots of little fun surprises and things that you
wouldn’t expect to hear about Sherlock Holmes.
[Sanne]: If you’ve seen the “Sherlock” TV show,
there's so many little, very specific references you only get
if you just read the book.
[Rosianna]: That’s actually a big part of why I like the program, it’s
clearly the ritual… [Sanne]:... is made by fans.
We’re going into Jane Austen.
Everyone always recommends “Pride and Prejudice”. I want to do
“Sense and Sensibility”. It’s one of the first Jane Austen’s I read.
This to me is so-so relatable and this, more than anything, made me realize
how much is like a soap opera and how much it still applies
to everyday life stuff that people still go through.
I recently recommended this as a
post-breakup book, as sort of, you can go through like all the disappointments
and all that sort of hyper-emotion - every sort of situation you could
have possibly been in is in this book but it also ends with like, hope.
It’s about two sisters and their mother and what happens when their father dies
and none of the possessions are left to them because they're women,
they have to move into a cottage
and they’re sort of on their journey of adapting to this new life.
Some men come into their lives and go out of their lives and the sisters are
complete opposites and they deal with things very differently.
Language isn't too difficult, it's quite funny as well.
It’s just a lovely lovely story.
[Rosianna]: To say, probably my first interaction with Jane
Austen was seeing the “Sense and Sensibility” film which was
starring Emma Thompson but also written by her.
And it’s Ang Lee, I think, who directed it and it is one of my favourite
films of all time and I’ve seen it so so many times
and that is another great way to get into it, like we were saying
with “Sherlock” the TV show. If you find it really daunting just like
watch the film first…
[Sanne]: That’s what I’m doing with Shakespeare.
I’ll read a bit, then I’ll watch a bit of the adaptation and I’m like
“Ok, I got it until there, I get it” and then you read the next bit and you sort of go along.
[Rosianna]: Of course it’s never gonna be like perfect like, fidelity-wise adaptation,
but that mood of it, that feeling of it and the language as well...
I think it's really helpful to get the rythm of it.
My next choice, my final choice is “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll.
Chances are again, you know the story, you might have seen the Disney film,
you might have seen one of many other films, you might have seen a play,
but the actual language play and the structure of this as well is fascinating.
[Sanne]: So much fun. [Rosianna]:So interesting and is broken up
constantly with the full rhymes and poems. Any kind of edition you have that
has the original illustrations by Tenniel, they’re fantastic and they’re so weird.
[Sanne]: My final one and the final one of this video is - again, it looks
a bit daunting, don’t be scared - Jane Eyre.
I think this is one of these books that I had the same experience as a lot of people had.
You start reading and you go "This is not quite as tricky as
I thought it was going to be”. The writing is surprisingly, sort
of easy to get.
[Rosianna]: I will say that it took me… I tried to read it, I think, when I was 12 or 13
and I had to give it like, a year and then try again because I
was just so - I would get into like 20 or 30 pages and then
I was just like “I can’t”.
[Sanne]: Well, I sort of compare it to “Wuthering Heights”.
To me, “Wuthering Heights” is like a struggle but worth it.
Absolutely worth it. And comparing this to
Wuthering Heights, this is a lot easier-going, the story flows really well.
There are so many beautiful quotes.
[Rosianna]: And if you find yourself enjoying that one then read
“Wide Sargasso Sea” directly afterwards.
Such a good reading experience! Oh my gosh, when I first
read them side by side... “Wide Sargasso Sea” is a
retelling of Jane Eyre in many ways from the perspective of one of the characters
who doesn’t get as much of a voice, and she’s kind of given a voice by Jean Rhys
and it's just such a fantastic book and that’s the kind of
modern classic, I guess as it were. [Sanne]: Classics! We love them.
I hope this has encouraged you to read some classics.
If you still don’t want to read classics, totally cool.
If you do want to get into them, then there’s a good selection.
If you have some good suggestions for easy British classics
- we might do an American version of this at some point - leave them in the comments.
If you've had a particularly eye-opening experience with the classics,
I'd love to hear about it as well.
Go check Rosianna’s channel - youtube.com/rosianna
She talks about books. She talks about lots of other things as well.
[Rosianna]: Thanks for having me.
[Sanne]: No problem. Thanks for being in the video.
[Rosianna]: Bye.
Doei!