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I'm not sure how I avoided the classics in school. I did have to read Dickens' Great Expectations, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but Austen, the Bronte sisters, Stoker, Shelley, Lee and Salinger never intruded on my literary diet of Niven, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and Burroughs (Edgar Rice, not William S.). I was well into my mid-thirties before I decided to address my deficiency.

I think the first neglected classic I tackled was Pride and Prejudice. I was entranced by Austen's use of language. She painted her words onto the page with the delicate touch of a Renaissance master. Standing back from her work you can take in the whole view and be amazed at the landscape she has created; or you can lean in to fully appreciate the individual strokes of punctuation and serif. And humor! OMG I was not prepared for the dry wit that had me LOL-ing.

Could classics be more than just dusty tomes penned by dead people before the invention of real entertainment?

After PaP (which no one calls it), I devoured the rest of Jane's catalogue. They were all delightful. Yes, there was a predictability to her plots. I didn't care. Her dialogue kept me turning pages. Whether or not [insert heroine name] found true love with [insert hero name] was immaterial to the enjoyment of the story.

After Austen I worked my way up through the usual high school reading lists, trying to make up for lost time. My biggest surprise was a newly found respect for Charles Dickens. Up to this point in my life I had only read his one novel, and hated it. I gritted my teeth and dove into Oliver Twist. You could have knocked me over with a feather from the crow I had to eat. It was GOOD!

I don't know if I lacked the maturity to appreciate these classics in high school, or if I was too stubborn to let anything distract me from my beloved science fiction. Either way, I'm reading them now and loving almost every title (I don't think I will ever be able to say I liked Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but I can say I've read them!).

Now, whenever I see a "Top XX Books You Must read Before You Die" list, I like to count how many I haven't read yet.