So I was always aware that the canon, or the classics, was a limited notion culturally. And of course, the fact that the canon is something the privileged have control over, while marginalised communities are excluded, is important to keep in mind.

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So why bother reading the classics?

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Firstly, I strongly believe in reading outside of my own culture, but also outside of my own time. It's as limiting to read only contemporary books, as it is to read only books originally published in English. In both cases, it’s a refusal to acknowledge difference: difference of languages, of ethnicities, and of ages or generations. A book that has marked a generation, that truly spoke to them, is interesting – even if we don’t agree with it, we can agree that it reflects an era, the mood of that time. It gives us an insight in a way of seeing the world that has changed.

(Obviously, it’s possible to read stories from the past which weren’t successful and canonised, but they can be harder to find. The argument that books that were celebrated at the time are the reflection of an era still stands, as some books might have been niche when they were published, while others might have spoken to their current Zeitgeist.)

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Secondly, sometimes we’re pleasantly surprised: I loved Don Quixote by Cervantes (if my dog’s name, Sancho Panza, isn’t enough of a giveaway). Its imbricated stories include cross-dressing and love stories and fights and the burlesque situations Quixote gets himself into – in a nutshell, it’s funny. Sometimes the humour is off, and reading it I realise that some stuff made to be funny isn’t quite, not any more – but most of the time it lands. Similarly, most of Alexandre Dumas is pacy, witty, and fun to read. He’s often a recommended read for teenagers or young adults in France. The first few chapters of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (before it all goes pear-shaped), are bright and sharp, and some of the one-liners are delicious.

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I strongly believe writing is a conversation, which authors keep up by answering each other’s novels. That’s another good reason to read the classics: so you’ve got the whole conversation. When I read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I’ll admit to not being impressed. I went in there knowing nothing but that it was a classic. It was skilful, the prose was good, but the end felt tagged-on to me, and some of the characters didn’t ring true. They struck me as capricious, lacking real problems, or sometimes just inconsistent. I wasn’t too sure why, exactly, it had become a piece of canon literature – it didn’t speak to me, the way it spoke to its own time.

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This being said, I enjoyed reading The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo much more because I’d read The Great Gatsby. The opening sequence in Vo’s book, which echoes nearly line for line the description written by Fitzgerald, was deeply satisfying because I could see the beautifully crafted language as it expanded on what had been done before, rephrased it, made it strange. The way Vo challenged the racist assumptions of the text, while staying in its era, felt like re-reading The Great Gatsby with a contemporary, critical companion by my side. This wouldn’t have been possible, this re-examining and reevaluating, queering and fantasying the text, without having read and engaged with the original.

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Reading stories that have answered each other is always intriguing. When I watched The Taming of the Shrew on stage (a Shakespeare I can confidently say I hate), I was surprised by a passage where Katherina – the female lead, married to an abusive husband – is forced to deny what she’s seeing. It’s played for laughs, but when she says the sun is shining, he denies it, and orders her to say it’s the moon. She complies. A few times in a row, he forces her to change her tune to agree with him, however absurd he’s being: the sun, the moon, a fair young lady, an old man, it changes at his whim.