What’s a classic book that you think is overrated?

I do not know that I would ever say a book is overrated. I would say that a lot of books struggle to find their audience, especially where the classics are concerned. Many classics are taught to middle and high school children. Depending on the teacher and the district curriculum, reading any book can go poorly. That is why so many think Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told. It is not. It is Wuthering Heights in old English.

I would say the one book that my peers struggled to see the value in and I despised reading was the Great Gatsby. It is a product of its time like most books. It is also a very difficult story to explain to children. I did a thirty page report comparing two of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books in my junior year in high school. I hated every minute of it. I had to do a lot of my own research to understand what I was reading and when I did, I could not understand why I was assigned to this author. It was not relevant to my lived experience. Or really anyone’s lived experience.

My partner read Wuthering Heights as a class in high school, in addition to Romeo and Juliet. Someone really liked their stories about obsession and out of control feelings. To this day, my partner absolutely despises the book and still does not really understand the meaning behind the story. I will say the movie that recently came out for Valentine’s Day saying that it was the greatest romance story of all time – that marketing person has never read it. I have not watched the film to know if it is accurate or not, but the marketing was absolutely nuts.

When you read a classic book, you need to have the proper interest in knowing the context of the time period it was written for. A lot of what makes it a classic is lost if you are not prepared to either do some research beforehand or do some while reading. Honestly, I enjoy researching before, during, and after. Context is important and I do think we need to teach kids how to find that context when we read. I only wish that we were not always trying to make them digest classic reads.

I also find that when teachers are given a curriculum for the classic read that it makes the book less open to interpretation by the student readers. I would prefer they give historical and social context for the book without forcing a singular interpretation on them. Encourage the students to come up with their own interpretation with evidence to back it up. Do not spoon feed them some answers for a test.

Usually in a classroom of thirty, there would be three of us actually participating in the class discussions about the books. My teachers did not like giving us specific answers. They wanted us to provide evidence and we did. We would debate the themes and meanings in the books. Occasionally, the teacher would tells us what the most common interpretations were and we would argue for and against them. It is a much more interesting way to learn the classics.