Awhile ago I downloaded several books including things like War & Peace, Sense & Sensibilities, Ulysses etc.
Some of them are quite thick, and I am wondering if I mostly did so to seem intelligent or smart on some subconscious level.
Have any of you gotten enjoyment or insight from any of these kinds of books? or is it just society and schooling that are telling me these are "good."?
Literature (as well as art, incidentally) mostly makes sense if you think of it as a conversation between authors. When a book is considered pivotal, a classic, or otherwise very good, it usually means that it in some way moved the conversation forward and changed the way authors think about writing (to a degree, anyway).
Classics are fascinating if you want to see some of that conversation in the past, and also give you a great way to see what's changed since then (in terms of writing skills). They're also normally fairly interesting books because they were all popular back then.
How does that work?
wouldn't you be jumping in mid conversation? @.@
Unless you want to study literature for years/decades, then yeah, that's kinda what you'd be doing. But it doesn't mean you can't learn anything useful. And it doesn't mean the conversation's boring.
I guess I just don't know how to view a work of literature as a conversation outside the confines of the novel.