Most of my experience with classics is pretty normal. I read them for school and didn’t hate it, but if I didn’t have to read one, I wouldn’t make the active choice to.

That is, until last year, my sister joined a club and because she’s my ride home, I more or less joined the club, too. Classic Literature Club. I like to read, and I’d have to be at all the other meetings anyway, so I figured why not just join the club and read the book?

At first, I kind of regretted my decision. The first book I was given to read was “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is this big, dense book that is deeply uncomfortable to read and absolutely not what I would recommend to anyone looking to get into classic literature.

I would be reading the book (very, very slowly) and tell myself that, “Today was the day I’m going to put this book down and forget about it.” My friends started joking about how I carried the book around and never seemed to make any progress in it, which, to their credit, wasn’t a complete lie.

But I’m stubborn, and by that point, determined to finish it — and that’s what I did.

It was an exhausting read. It was exhilarating. It was horrible. It was beautifully written, yet I didn’t enjoy reading most of it. It was the only thing I could think of for the next few weeks after I finished it.

I’m sure this isn’t doing much to convince anyone to read it, but it was everything you could want from a book. More than anything, it was a story, a full view into a world created by the author’s mind that I got to experience.

Obviously not all good books are classics, and plenty of classics are not necessarily good books. And there’s little I can personally say about classics that I can’t say about books in general. One thing I can say though, is that reading these books has a way of connecting people that most books can’t.

Millions of people have read classics, so reading one of them yourself establishes a connection with them. Even if you never meet them, you all met the same characters, felt the same emotions and followed the same story, which is a connection that’s both impossible to really measure and impossible to deny.

For me, reading old books that I can only understand if I’m giving it my full attention is a much more involved experience than reading a book I don’t really have to think about because reading classics requires my full attention. I get invested and wrapped up in a way that I rarely experience with the other books because personally, reading classics just takes so much effort. And it’s all that effort that makes it so engaging and so ultimately satisfying.

I’m definitely not the best person to speak on classics — I haven’t read nearly enough for that — but I can speak on being scared by classic literature and learning not to be.

Classics had this reputation to me of being some epic tales that take advanced minds to fully understand and that those advanced minds would reach enlightenment upon reading them.

But these books are better than that because they’re stories, worlds, lives and ideas that are written by, read by and connecting people.