Hello!

Amongst avid readers and the general perception of society, reading classics are often attributed to a ‘real reader’ – a sign of true intellectual curiosity and a real appreciation of literature.

I would like to call bullshit on that.

When scrolling through my wonderfully curated ‘For You’ page of bookish TikToks, I saw someone who had a scratch off poster of a ‘100 Book Bucket list‘ and she was scratching off the ones she’d read and starting a series of documenting her reading of the rest. I thought it was a really sweet idea so rushed to our dear friend Amazon to take a closer look at the books on the poster.

I don’t think a single one of them was written in this century and one of them was ‘Les Miserables’ by Victor Hugo, which is an absolute mammoth of a beast that I could probably use as a brick to build a house.

Marketed as ‘100 of the best novels ever written’, featuring titles from ‘Ulysses’ and ‘War and Peace’ to ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ and ‘Winnie The Pooh (Complete Collection)’, there is a real variety but all fall under the bracket of classics with no doubt.

Now don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I have a hard and fast rule that I will never read a classic, of the 100 on this poster I’ve read (or been forced to read at school) seven titles and I own or want to read a further 14 but what I mean when I say I don’t read classics, is that I don’t force myself to read a book purely because it appears on a list or a scratch poster like this one.

Reading is a hobby – something I do in my own time as a way to relax and spend time somewhere else without leaving my house. Why would I want to associate that with feeling obligated to read a book I have no interest in, written in a narrative style that I find difficult to understand that I won’t enjoy?

I want to be able to mentally switch off when I read – I don’t want to have to read a sentence three times to understand it or be expected to remember a character from 200 pages ago that was mentioned once but was actually a major plot point.

I love a contemporary romance as a palette cleanser because it’s like watching a cosy sitcom, I love fantasy because it takes me away from adult responsibilities like the cost of living crisis and I’m sure for many people, they get the same sense of freedom from reading classics and I’m glad they do – but I don’t.

Sitting down to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë probably isn’t going to be something that I’ll do on holiday and practically fall asleep reading in a sun lounger (though I’m happy to be proven otherwise). ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer isn’t going to inspire me to work on my own novels. ‘Crime and Punishment’ is going to feel like exactly what it says in the title – it’ll make reading feel like a chore and when the mental block of reading slumps can strike at any time, I don’t really want to play with the likelihood that I’ll fall into one by reading something because I feel obligated to.

If someone I follow online or a friend tells me that actually, ‘Anna Karenina’ by Leo Tolstoy is much easier to digest than I’d expect or that ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee is actually very tongue-in-cheek and takes the mick out of high literature classics, I’ll consider changing my mind.

But for now, I already have a list of over 300 books I own that I haven’t read which I got excited about and choose to buy, so I’m going to prioritise those (if I can actually implement my own book buying ban and stop bringing new ones home…).

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx