A short history of why I read big ol' classic books

What story could possibly need so many words to tell?

I have always been fascinated by books — the way they look, how they feel, the very concept of them. That ink on paper can transfer a vivid and complex world into the minds of others, it’s a pretty baffling accomplishment.

Way to go, humans.

They’re beautiful. All lined up on a shelf in a comfortable home setting, it says something about that space, and the people who’ve made it.

I’ve liked what it said about those people.

I assumed library-havers were smart and creative, the types who list “curious” among their greater strengths. These people didn’t need others, they were comfortable in solitude. They were content with the tactile pleasure of cracking open a new book, thumbing the pages, and hearing the spine’s glue give way, opening a door to some other realm.

I saw some of myself in that whole scene, or at least some of who I wanted to be.

Reading may be solitary but I’ve always liked being alone, and I like the type of people who like being alone too (which as friend-making goes is an irony that’s hard to miss).

For most of my life I didn’t process those thoughts directly, but I recognize now that they’ve cast at least passive influence on my direction. I minored in English in college, and eventually ended up in writing.

As a kid, the Hardy Boys series was attention-grabbing, rewarding, and looked damn good side-by-each on a shelf, hardcover against crisp hardcover.

In those younger days, I wanted to impress adults by reading ahead of my age. I turned each yellowed page of Watership Down somewhere around 11, truly reading every word of it while understanding nothing. I just didn’t have the vocabulary to follow along. But I sure did consume the words, and surely learned a few by their context.

As I got older I went through two life phases in relation to reading. One where I was a hockey player, then there was the one where I drank my soul into a shadow. (There was indeed some chronological overlap of these two phases.)

I read little during the hockey days. In junior I remember being called, let’s say a “British cigarette” for reading The Diary of Anne Frank on the bus. You may recall this was the standard-issue chirp of the jock archetype in the early 2000s.

Hockey culture didn’t leave a lot of room for team book clubs, then.

It was around that time that I also came across a terrible theory that reading anything other than non-fiction was wasted time (I will park the resentment for that miseducation and move on), so when I did read, it was more popular stuff like Outliers, Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Slow etc. They’re books I’m glad to have read, but it was a different type of reading. I then went to University and read what I had to read, but I wasn’t a “reader” in the way I had aspired to be as a kid.

In the drinking years my job lost importance, and even my family was usurped on the priority list by the bottle. Reading didn’t stand a chance. By the evenings I was gone and plotting ways to get farther. The idea of trying to start and follow some nuanced narrative over weeks or months was never entertained, if it ever presented itself.

And so, I didn’t read at all.

When I got out of rehab at one month sober in the spring of 2019, I was delighted to discover that I had access to my brain once again. It was an immense gift, another chance to experience the things I’d once wanted.

At that time my favourite book was one that I read before I fully entered the “hockey player” years (junior hockey?), so I suspect it was about 20ish years ago. That book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, and it was the first time an author’s voice felt so distinct and enjoyable - even among the more esoteric topics - that I realized that maybe I wanted to write, too.

I love learning, and that book loosely explains the processes of the earth and the universe around us in a way that a layman can roughly understand. It was the perfect mix of surface level information on complex scientific ideas dashed with a pinch of wit.

For a taste of how it reads, here’s the intro:

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you-indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you.

Light writing on heavy concepts. There nothing better.

While the book was thick with information and the writing great, it had the clean topic divides of a textbook - which explains its girth - and wasn’t referenced much culturally. I was curious how any of the great fiction works could match its length and stay not just coherent, but captivating.

Getting sober in treatment, I read Sapiens purely because A) it covered a wide array of subject matter like A Short History, and B) it physically looked like the Bryson book too. Complex selection criteria, I know. Whatever you think of Sapiens, at that point it was the first book I had read from start to finish in probably a decade, and I was proud of having done it.

It still wasn’t a classic novel, but it helped me realize that I’d not only have the brain power to make this - this reading thing - something that New Me does, but I’d also have far more hours in the day, which could make this whole project of reading more viable. I could become more like the person I wanted to be.

That person was to know the inside of those more hefty, revered tomes. Not only did I want to read them, I wanted to be someone who had read them, for social purposes. With the classics, what possible story could require so many pages to tell, and be so good that it endures in the common culture for 200 years-plus? Think about that - Moby Dick, War and Peace, Great Expectation, The Count of Monte Cristo - these books are hundreds of years old and a thousand-plus pages, some over half a million words in length, yet so many people found them so compelling that they not only gave them copious amounts of time, they loved them, cherished them, and have reprinted them at levels that keeps them ubiquitous today.

What was in those things?

Culturally, references from these books pop up regularly. And so, I set out to be someone who was a part of the club of people who understood those mentions. My first accomplishment was Moby Dick, with it’s insanely detailed chapters on ropes and cetaceans, an exercise in patience which delivered a payoff that would help me commit through slower parts of books in the future. Maybe no book is in our everyday lexicon as often as that one (“finishing that book was my white whale”), and I’ve enjoyed every obscure reference I’ve heard since.

Over the past few years, my list looks something like the below, purely from a (mostly classic) fiction standpoint:

• Moby Dick

• Great Expectations

• War and Peace

• Oliver Twist

• Count of Monte Cristo

• Tale of Two Cities

• Of Mice and Men

• Crime and Punishment

• Old Man and the Sea

• Atlas Shrugged

• Blood Meridian

• Animal Farm

• 1984

• The Prince

• Treasure Island

• Slaughterhouse 5

• Wuthering Heights

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• The Catcher in the Rye

• On the Road

• Infinite Jest

• The Art of War

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I realize some of those (Infinite Jest, Atlas Shrugged, for example) aren’t exactly classics - in fact, they were both tremendous slogs if we’re keeping it 100 - but they were goddamn work to finish and so they’re going on the list the same way a hunter might mount his trophies on a wall.

One of the things I’m most looking forward to now, as I knock off much of my original list, is getting past the “have to” reads, and on to the ones recommended by reader friends who just have a pure love for books.

I’ve started East of Eden by John Steinbeck (and it’s already superb), and I’m tracking down a trio of books from Graham Greene (starting with The Power and The Glory), and Fay by Larry Brown arrived today. Soon, Yonder Lies Your Orphan by Barry Hannah will be heading my way.

I know that this never ends, and you never get through the list, you just discover the next great author you hadn’t yet read. I’ve loved every bit of this perpetual project, and while it gives me some weird dose of imposter syndrome - I am no literary critic, just a poser who likes literature - mostly I’ve loved how it’s afforded me another way to connect with people. People love their favourite books, they revere them. They bring them comfort, they make them happy, these books have expanded their horizons. Talking books with people who love to read, you get a sense of who you’re really talking to.

My thing with pursuing “classics” has been a pretty loose premise, but it’s the idea that if they’ve been so beloved for so long by so many, I’m at least going to get a memorable story, and satisfy a curiosity. But also, I’ll get the greatest number of people who’ve read these books, and so you’ll be able to connect with a larger pool of people.

Recovering the opportunity to be a part of the book world has been a gift. What I used to think of as a solitary pursuit has turned out to be a remarkably communal experience. I don’t know that today I’m the type of person I thought “library-havers” were back then, but I do know know that as I move through the list of classics the small library I have grows, which warms a spot deep in my heart.

Take us home now, please, Mr. Bill Bryson:

"The universe, as we have seen, is not a particularly benign or thoughtful place. It is indifferent to us. And yet, within this vast, uncaring void, we have somehow sprung into existence. We are here, against all odds, a tiny, improbable spark of consciousness in an overwhelmingly indifferent cosmos. Every day that the world keeps turning is a gift, because there are many things that could potentially end it."

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If you’d like to add your recommendations to the “To Read” list I’ve got saved on my phone, please do in the comments, I’d love to hear more about your favourite books and why you love them so much!