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At the beginning of all of this, I managed to make it to my local public library and pick up one book. Now, I wish I would’ve grabbed some more, but I greatly enjoyed the book I chose: The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. 

Aside from hearing recommendations for it from many strangers on the Internet, the thing that caught my eye was the review on the back, calling it a “modern classic.”

Since then, all I’ve had to read has been the childhood favorites I own, and I haven’t stopped thinking about the idea of a modern classic. It’s common to hear high schoolers annoyed at the required reading asking “why is this stuff classic, anyway?,” but really: what makes a novel classic?

As we leave RCL behind, I am wondering which of our favorite books will be remembered, and what they will say about us, hundreds of years from now.

The Secret History certainly feels like a classic, with its references to Greek philosophers and French literature, but it is not representative of our world. As aesthetically pleasing as it is, a story about a small liberal arts college with a dark secret says very little about the world today.

But if books that feel like classics aren’t destined to become classics, what is?

I can’t help but feel like the classics of the future will be the likes of Harry Potter: books that inspired a generation and more. It’s odd to think of beloved novels that way, but Dickens and Shakespeare wrote for the masses, not just the nobility.

Harry Potter is far from a perfect representation of our time, but no book can capture an entire world. The same could be said for any modern popular book series, or even any piece of classic literature.

In this historic time, I hope that the writing we leave behind reflects well on us. I hope that we learned all the lessons our favorite books taught us, and that we will be remembered as such. I hope that teens in the future will look forward to reading for English class, that the books that gave us so much hope do the same for them.

And, in the wake of this time of suffering, I hope we produce writing that helps us get through it, and does not let us forget it. The purpose of reading classic literature has always been to learn about times and experiences different from our own. I hope today’s world tells our story well.

With everything going on right now, I’ve found it tough to really focus on anything. This has made reading hard, as I’ve found myself unable to get invested in my current read, too focused on the news.

Books that are difficult to muddle through just makes things worse, so I thought this week I’d recommend some books that are easy to read, but take us out of these times and into other difficult times.

I’ve written about Vonnegut before, but his books have been helping me during this time. They’re easy to read and get interested in, and they can be a quick read or a deep one, depending on what you want to get out of it. Vonnegut expertly takes you out of the world you’re living in and into another one, where aliens can be characters.

Another author I haven’t mentioned yet is Jane Austen, who wrote about women’s lives in a time when they received little attention. When I read Pride & Prejudice, I was surprised at how quickly I became invested in the characters’ love lives and their relationships with each other. 

Her books are a comforting read for times like these; they feature women who face problems that feel trivial, and they always get a happy ending. Also, her books always feel delightfully old-fashioned to read, like you’re living in a period drama.

For someone who doesn’t want to muddle through books written so long ago, there are plenty of more modern books that capture your attention. Last year I read Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, and it’s stuck in my head since then.

It was written in modern language, in a way that’s easy to understand, and it tells a story that takes place in South Africa during apartheid. I was almost immediately invested in the characters, and it widened my horizons by teaching me more about a period in history I only knew a little bit about. 

All in all, this is a difficult time, and no one should feel pressured during it to read anything in particular, or anything at all, if they don’t want to! We are all looking for familiarity right now, so if you’d prefer to read Harry Potter for the fifteenth time, good for you! Just do what you enjoy, stay safe, and do what you can to get through this.

One of my first blog posts about classic literature was about Crime and Punishment, a long Russian novel by Fyodr Dostoevsky. Today, we’re returning to Russia to explore a different author from the same time period: Leo Tolstoy.

Tolstoy’s most famous novel, War and Peace, is a 1,200 page monstrosity that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, but if quarantine keeps up for much longer, I’m looking forward to getting to it soon! 

My focus for today, however, is a slightly less famous but still lovely novel, Anna Karenina. I made the mistake of choosing this novel for a high school research project, giving myself a one-month time limit to read 800 pages of dense story. But after I finished the four long weeks full of staying up late to read, I decided it was worth it.

Anna Karenina tells the stories of two parallel lives: Anna, who cheats on her husband and leaves him for a lover, ultimately killing herself due to her decision, and Levin, who is initially rejected by the woman he loves but ends up finding a happy marriage and a peaceful life.

While Crime and Punishment is a great novel because of its ability to dig deep into someone’s mind over a short time period, Anna Karenina is phenomenal because it can tell the story of two people’s entire lives, in enough detail that readers feel as if they know the characters.

When I think back to the novel itself, I remember very few actual events that occurred in it; only the major plot points of the story. The majority of the novel is devoted to the type of writing so specific to Tolstoy: it just describes the vibes of the story. Even if I remember nothing a character did, I can still remember some vague feeling or mood about them.

About halfway through the book, Tolstoy spends around 50 pages describing a character cutting grass. It sounds boring, but I found it to be one of the most engaging parts of the book: it allows readers to gain an understanding of the characters, as well as Tolstoy’s thoughts on social class.

In fact, much of the book is dedicated to Tolstoy’s thoughts on social class. Tolstoy was born and raised in the Russian aristocracy, and he remained there through a tumultuous time in Russia, when the country was becoming Westernized and radical ideas about economic equality were gaining traction.

Tolstoy imbues the novel with his hatred for the Russian upper class, and his desire to live a simpler life outside of it. The result is a novel that romanticizes poverty to an extreme degree, but obviously values the idea of living a simple life.

Tolstoy once said of Anna Karenina that if he tried to say what it all meant, he would end up rewriting the entire novel. More than anything, it is a portrait of Russia through one person’s eyes during a time of high tensions and great change.

Last week, I talked about the wonderful rhymes of Shakespeare’s comedies, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This week sticks with the poetry theme, but moves to my favorite modern poet: Mary Oliver.

Oliver was born in 1935, published her first book of poems in 1963, and died in early 2019. She is considered by many one of the best-selling poets of the United States.

As a poet, Oliver almost fits in with the Transcendentalists, heavily influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau. Most of her poems are inspired by the natural world, and she got most of her ideas from long walks in her hometown in Ohio or from New England, where she spent her adult life.

Her poems tend to be brief, easy to digest, and they combine imagery of the natural world with thoughts that reassure, challenge, or comfort. 

My personal favorite of these poems is “The Wild Geese”, a poem that finds comfort in the order of the world and reminds readers that they belong in it. 

Oliver attests her fascination of the natural world to her childhood, which she said was difficult but helped her write by creating her own world. It’s obvious in her poems that the world she created had a lot to do with the natural world, where she felt the most at home.

One of her greatest talents when it comes to the natural world was her skill of observation, of noticing the smallest details and finding meaning in them. She took walks for hours every day, but each poem covers a span of only a few moments, in which the natural world reveals its beauty.

My favorite poem that exemplifies this is her most famous poem, “The Summer Day.” It tells a story in which Oliver encounters a grasshopper, then questions her place in the world and the expectations placed on her.

Indeed, Oliver lived much outside of norms and expectations placed on her. She seemed to prefer spending time with the natural world over spending time with people, aside from her partner, Molly Malone Cook, who she lived with for forty years until Cook’s death.

Therefore, still others of her poems ruminate on actions she takes that seem absurd or odd, but remind us that there is much that we do not understand. My favorites of these are “Angels” and “Watering the Stones,” both of which challenge our perceptions of what is true, and provide meaning by doing so. 

Mary Oliver’s poetry is consistently beautiful, rich, and meaningful, and many of her poems have comforted me in hard times. The accessibility of meaning in her poems make her a great place to start for someone new to poetry, or a great next read for a longtime poetry fan. 

I will leave you with advice from Oliver’s poem “The Gift:” “Be slow if you must, but let / The heart still play its true part.” Like many of Oliver’s poems, it’s a lesson we can all learn from the world around us.