Classics can't be bad, but they can be boring

Special Sunday WRWB where we talk about the boring classics and the fun ones

Like everyone else on literature Substack, we read that crazy list of good and bad classics this week, and we have been discussing.

Here at What Rhymes With Butch, we disagree that classics can be sorted into good and bad. Instead, we think all classics exist on a spectrum of fun and boring. All classics contain certain percentages of fun and certain percentages of boring, and together, those affective experiences are how we personally judge our favorite classics.

So, for the sake of the discourse, here is a preliminary, by-no-means-complete list that we have compiled while Lillian drank their coffee this morning. We get that the canon is fake; the list is for fun.

Xoxo,

Trillian

Category A: SLAY IN EVERY CAPACITY

100% fun, 0% boring

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Another Country - James Baldwin

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster

Where the Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls

Cuentos completos 1 y 2 - Julio Cortázar

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Lover - Marguerite Duras

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

Collected Stories - Franz Kafka

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey

Sula - Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O’Connor

Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

The Waves - Virginia Woolf

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

Night - Elie Wiesel

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee

Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski

Ordinary People - Judith Guest

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

The Seagull - Anton Chekhov

A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

A Doll’s House - Henrik Ibsen

Hedda Gabler - Henrik Ibsen

Angels in America - Tony Kushner

Animal Farm - George Orwell

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Category B: WORTH YOUR TIME

75% fun, 25% boring

Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Black Beauty - Anna Sewell

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

Doce cuentos peregrinos - Gabriel García Márquez

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

The Trial - Franz Kafka

Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Between the Acts - Virginia Woolf

Jacob’s Room - Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - Gertrude Stein

Every Day is To-Day - Gertrude Stein

The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls

The Stranger - Albert Camus

Mother Courage and Her Children - Bertolt Brecht

Long Day’s Journey Into Night - Eugene O’Neill

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

Category C: YOU’LL BE GRATEFUL BUT ONLY WHEN IT’S OVER

50% fun, 50% boring

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges

El aleph - Jorge Luis Borges

The Professor’s House - Willa Cather

Los pasos perdidos - Alejo Carpentier

Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Lady Chatterley’s Lover - D.H. Lawrence

Jazz - Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells

Earth - Émile Zola

Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller

The Crucible - Arthur Miller

Twelve Angry Men - Reginald Rose

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne

Category D: GREAT IN THEORY, BUT A SLOG

25% fun, 75% boring

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

Emma - Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

The Love of the Last Tycoon - F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Room With a View - E.M. Forster

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Orlando - Virginia Woolf

Category E: LAME ALL AROUND

0% fun, 100% boring

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

*We recognize that we did not include Shakespeare or the Ancient Greeks. We would have a MUCH more extensive list if we did so, and really, we were just aiming to save you reading time. In short, we love Sophocles and the gender-bendy Shakespeares. We are not Euripides’ biggest fans.*