How to Read Great Literature Properly
Everyone reads but not everyone reads well.
You can tell who reads well and who does not based on the quality of their thoughts, their writing, and their ability to articulate the experiences of their lives and understand other people. People who do not read well have a shallowness to them because they experience life in a shallow way.
Books have not existed forever, I understand, but in the past, people who did not read experienced life more deeply because they were busy with their work, which was all real, and their minds were undistracted from constant reflection and introspection that this monotonous work usually brought.
The majority of people do not live like this and if they do not actively make it a priority to protect their minds from the endless prattle of modernity filling it with nonsense, they end up just a part of that nonsense. I bet if you look closely even their eyes will seem bloated with it.
It is difficult enough as it is to read great literature. It deals with complex themes, ideas, characters and is usually set in another time period that requires you to learn a bit of history. If you are here, the question of why you should even expend your energy trying to tackle these kinds of books, is likely something you’ve already answered.
I didn’t really begin reading great literature until I was 20 years old. The first reason I started was that I was curious. Why were these books so beloved and revered? The second reason was that I had read quotes from a lot of classic books and these quotes really struck me with not only their clarity and honesty, but with their beauty. How could a mere human being, who lived hundreds of years ago, describe something that I had always felt but could never put into words? It was like magic to me and I wanted more of it.
How do you get the most out of great literature? How do you ensure that the hours, days, or months you spend reading these challenging books is not wasted? Everyone has experienced that feeling of having read an entire page and understood nothing. Perhaps you even finish the book, but have no idea how to make sense of what you read. There are a few things you can do to address these problems.