by Patience Virtue

Created on: January 10, 2008

It's funny, but I feel like I was raised on the classics. I have memories of lying on my parents' bed listening to The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Ben Hur, and other classics. I also remember entire summers of reading book after book of classic literature. That was my dad's idea of a productive summer: as long as we read at least x number of classic books we had the rest of the summer to ourselves. I finished my quota early and went into extra credit before the summer was out.

And then I started collecting the classics for myself. It began with an author who is probably my favorite author of all time, the unforgettable Jane Austen. I quickly moved on to Lewis, Tolkein, Dickens, Dumas, and another obsessive favorite of mine, Agatha Christie. My book collection has steadily grown, and continues to grow as I continue to enjoy the classics of Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George MacDonald, Charlotte Bronte, and more.

The classics have taught me much, much more than many newer books that seem to be written with little value beyond that of entertainment. Jane Austen has taught me much about love, relationships, and manners (yes, my manners may be a little old fashioned). Not only that, but reading the classics greatly increases one's range as a writer, not only because it increase's ones vocabulary, but also because it increases the range of style and sentence structures that one employs in writing. After all, the new books we are reading are probably using similar sentence structures to the ones we already employ in our day-to-day conversations.

The classics have a feel to them, a supernatural feel, and that is probably because of the history. There is something about a good book that takes you back until you are walking down the halls of great mansions with Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet, or in the streets of London with Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. There is something universal in these themes despite the fact that they were written in another country, in another time, and it sometimes feels like they are in a whole other world. Somehow there is something about the history and the humanity that connects us with our past and with those authors and their characters.

I think there is something about this that is so profound, so beautiful, so deep and I am glad that there are still people in the world like me who love the classics and pass on that love to others in their lives.

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