What do we mean when we say “The Classics”?

Confession time: I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye. I figure it’s been read so many times by so many people, that it doesn’t really need to be read by me. It’s nothing personal, Holden. I’m sure it would be a pleasure to finally meet you in person, so to speak, after hearing so much about you over the years. One day, I might pick up Catcher and read it. I read Slaughterhouse Five on a whim a few months ago, so there is always hope.

I probably escaped Catcher, or it eluded me, because I was homeschooled, and my parents and their educational philosophy never happened to lead to it. I read some weird stuff in the coming-of-age stage when other people read Catcher, everything from a random Civil War diary I found on my history-loving grandfather’s shelf to all of Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries.

I definitely read some of “The Classics,” too, whatever that means. It’s a bit like the famous Supreme Court case and the pornography: you know it when you see it. And see it again and again, on bookshelves and on lists of what everyone should read or does read or has read. If you get a point for it because you’ve read it on an list on the Internet, it just might be a classic. Or not. It might be a new popular book, like The Hunger Games (which I haven’t read) or Beloved (which I have). It might be a more obscure book, quite possibly one included on the list to add “diversity.”

So let’s end with this: here are three must-read, readily available 19th century American books. Two that aren’t “classics,” or maybe they are, depending on how you look at it, and one that is definitely “a classic,” but somehow instead of reading it, everyone was reading Catcher in the Rye:

1. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

2. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account if Her Call to Preach the Gospel

3. Uncle Tom’s Cabin