I read Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird years after I finished school. I'm by no means a literary snob and read all sorts of fict

I read Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird years after I finished school. I'm by no means a literary snob and read all sorts of fiction (except I haven't gotten around to Harry Potter yet), but there's a reason why these books are taught in school over say Dan Brown... they're damn good. Especially without the burden of school assessment. I think back to the books that I did read at school, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, and I can instantly see the quality in those works. Same goes for "classics" I've read in recent years, like Marquez, Camus, Frank Herbert, Huxley, etc. That said, there have been some classics I've found tiresome. I've never been able to finish a Dostoyevsky book, and Kafka was hard going without being very fulfilling. But in general, the classics are really fucking good.