>>55377976Ok I was writing a long rant that wasn't worth it, no one was going to read it. This is already long enough.
The tldr is yes, classics are generally good books, with a very important caveat.
Classics, be it books or any other piece of media, are classics because they have been studied over and over. This means that they are good for an >intellectual< experience. But this says nothing them as >visceral< experience nor as >emotional< experiences. The canon built by academia (or any other community) isn't about how good the titles in it are, but how much they are referenced by the community.
By this I mean that classics tend to be good if you read them to study them, but can be boring to awful if you want to sit down and read a specific book for the sake of reading that specific book.
This said, there are some classics I loved.
The tale of genji, and even more so the pillow book of sei shonagon were fantastic.
This reminds me I should completely erase my book backlog and rebuild it.
