I’m in the other camp. Reading unpopular books has been much more valuable to me than reading popular books. If the classics are good, you’ll understand them by osmosis even without having read them.
Yeah, because everybody goes around reading Stendhal, Dante, and Balzac.
>you’ll understand them by osmosis
Nothing about the substance of the books can be understood without reading them. It's all in the details and the language, not the plots and the abstract description of their main points.
What about insights into human nature or how to live well? I agree that if your motivation for reading is the experience that will occur in your mind while reading, there can be no substitute; but if we're talking about value-conferring ideas contained in works, it seems likely that they would become common parts of culture given enough time and exposure.
>but if we're talking about value-conferring ideas contained in works, it seems likely that they would become common parts of culture given enough time and exposure.
Even if we constrained them in their "value-conferring ideas", the power of such ideas in those books comes from experiencing the emotions and subtleties involved in their storytelling.
Without that, a raw "takeaway" idea will have neither the required buildup, nor the emotional impact required to affect one hearing it.
Plus, a key part of literature is not about value-conferring ideas, but about experiencing others' lives and ways of thinking and looking at the world. This is totally lost in plot summaries.
Popularity isn't a metric by which to prejudge content? Also, it really doesn't get less popular than the classics. And no, you will not understand them by osmosis. Lovecraft was a big influence on Stephen King but it's not like reading a Stephen King novel magically grants you the experience of reading Lovecraft. It's fine if reading older stuff doesn't appeal to you (it doesn't appeal to hardly anyone), but you don't get to pretend like you're not missing out on anything. Just own the fact that you don't like that stuff.
I haven't gotten the impression that most people know classics well via osmosis, and often critiques and summaries of books (classics or otherwise) are rather imprecise, inaccurate, and biased...
Sometimes you can get some surrounding information about a work, but you generally cannot replace reading/viewing/playing the work, if only due to a basic law of information density.
For some it's better than others. I don't feel I gained a lot (besides some enjoyment, which isn't nothing) out of actually reading & seeing performances of Shakespeare, for example. A lot of that particular set of classics' importance is in the secondary effect of how it's impacted Anglophone culture, not so much in what you gain out of the original works (which to me fall in the category of, "they're fine, I guess"). Some other classics do admittedly have interesting or insightful stuff that you wouldn't have gathered second-hand from what's generally well-known about them, though, especially those where the secondary exposure is a bit less over-saturated.
Classics are not that popular. The most downloaded book on Project Gutenberg (Pride and Prejudice) has been downloaded only 32K times. Moby Dick has 15K downloads and at least 10 of those are mine.
I disagree that classics can be understood by osmosis. I'm not discounting the books you read or saying they wouldn't compare to the classics if they were better known. But there is an experience in reading something timeless that can only be experienced by reading it. And there are more experiences to reading them with age that makes them unique. They become richer instead of becoming banal.
Correct me if I'm wrong adamnemecek, but it sounds to me like you're referring to something like how we don't need to read Newton's Principia in order to pick up the essential ideas from Newtonian Mechanics—by participating in our culture for long enough, you're going to pick them up. Is that right?
It seems like a bunch of people are replying thinking that you meant one would pick up trivia about the classics like which Shakespearian work some quote came from, rather than some distillation of important concepts or whatever.
> you’ll understand them by osmosis even without having read them.
Depends on your goal. Reading a classic by "osmosis" may be enough to make one a dilettante, but doesn't bring about the enlightenment you would experience from reading the original book. Just like reading popular science books doesn't make one a scientist.
I'm always amused by these because it signals the information source wasn't that important. Why does it matter where the phrase came from in most contexts?
Unfortunately, I've found that even with things I have fully read, I sometimes mix them up and confuse what came from where. There's just not enough distinction sometimes and it smears into a blob.
It's not so much what from where, but if you don't know the context, how are you going to be sure that you're not unintentionally libeling your client.
I'm aware that meanings change, and culture has its own uses for expressions. But the source is there for you to examine, there's no real excuse to use it wrong. We're not (yet) at the point where we have an oral culture tradition, but we're getting damn close.
