How often do you read classics compared to contemporary?

How often do you read classics compared to contemporary?

How often do you read famous, regarded books compared to less-well-known works?

I have to say, I spend more time reading old, classic books than I'd like to admit.

Do we have a duty to read the fiction of our age, and/or less famous work?

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I have similar thoughts. Almost everything I read is old, which makes me think that I'm not giving newer authors a chance, thus contributing to the death of literature

I'm also reading through the classics. My plan was to work my way up to contemporary literature, but I don't think that's realistic. I think I'll instead try to read the canon and new works concurrently.

I have actually truly fallen for the start with the Greeks meme and I have been studying Attic Greek heavily for about 2 years. I can now read Attic and Koine Greek relatively easily with a dictionary at hand (which I need to use about once per page, on average). Other dialects are tougher, but not particulary hard once you get a sense of the sound changes.

I read in Greek and English about the same amount per week (~8 hours each), but I read Greek at perhaps 1/4 the speed. So about 20% of the content I read is classical literature in original.

I do this for mental exercise mostly, but I think reading ancient literature is important. Once I started getting very well-acquainted with classical literature, all of the rest I read made far more sense in the context of West. My day-to-day life remains the same, but I genuinely feel that it allows me to get much more out of what I read because of a better ability to understand the changes in thought and its implication throughout newer texts.

On a purely aesthetic level, Greek is massively beautiful, which often makes reading in it doubly rich, for the aesthetic beauty and the content itself. Every day I thank my former self for embarking on this project.

Anyone else here study classical languages to good effect here? I can't comprehend Latin to a useful level, but I've started to add it into the mix lately.

So how often do you read contemporary English fiction?

And of the overall fiction you read, how much of it is what you would call well-renowned, and how much is obscure?

Personally I read a ton of 19th century stuff. Novels poetry and philosophy. Theater is the exception where I read more contemporary of at least 20th century stuff or Shakespeare and a few of his contemporaries.

how did you get started with this? unless i've been rused

You've been rused.

I would say that there is not much what we call in English "fiction" in Greek. There is, I believe, only one extant novel, but the huge majority of texts are historical, poetic (including plays), or the occassional history written in verse. The prose history stuff is the easiest to read for me, so it's what i read the most in Greek (maybe 4 out of every 5 texts). The historiography in Greek is very impressionistic and subjective, but I think it is still best described as non-fiction.

In English, I also tend to read non-fiction more often than not, but I read perhaps 15-20 novels or books of English verse last year. Just about all of what I read was written by American authors from between the 1850s and 1990s. I'm not opposed to contemporary or foreign fiction, but my tastes tend to lead me to somewhat earlier texts. I would guess that about 20% of what I read is (translated) German or Russian. Most of what I read is currently or formerly held in high regard by Western academia (most recently I've read fiction by Updike, Pynchon, Kafka, and Gaddis).

Just wondering - what made you ask? And, btw, what is your relationship with classical and modern texts?

Your poo hole. I'd like to read some greek with you while I pound that boipoosi.