My Rating System for Judging Classic Literature

Published on March 12, 2026

Introduction: My Love for the Classics

I love reading classic literature. It's fascinating—these are masterpieces that have survived through time, and for a reason: if they were terrible, they would have been forgotten.

They're piercing, you're immersed in them, you discover a world, a historical period, characters, everything is full of life lessons. I know it sounds very clichéd to say this, but until you've read a classic, you can't understand.

When Classics Disappoint

But I've also read a few classic books that were surprisingly absolute garbage.

I questioned myself: why are they still admired when nothing happens in the book, when there's no developed moral, no action, nothing? Zero reason to read it. If it had been written today, it would have gone unnoticed.

The Reputation Effect

I don't have a clear answer to this question. I suppose the author must have been someone popular in high society at the time. People approved of their work, then over time no one dared criticize it for fear of being ostracized by high society. The more time passes, the more the author becomes a "legend" and the more impossible it becomes to criticize them for fear of appearing uncultured and incapable of appreciating the "depth" of their work.

This is the case with Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. The book is extremely poorly written, incomprehensible to read. You don't know who's speaking in the text, to whom they're speaking. There are flashbacks without warning and you understand nothing. It jumps from one moment to another, from one person to another without specifying. It's a narrative nightmare. If this novel were submitted to a publisher today, it would be rejected immediately—it wouldn't pass any editorial filter, it's so poorly constructed. But there, the guy was already famous, so we admire his work.

Yet I'm convinced that if it had been well written, the subject would be super interesting. But the author must have already been known at the time (maybe his other books are better written) and it was impossible to criticize his novel, which allowed it to endure over time. When you look online, they explain that it's his writing style, his charm, his way of differentiating himself from authors of the era. But that has nothing to do with it: Jack London appeared a few years later and wrote novels of the same type, except he wrote well.

My Classics: Favorites and Disappointments

Works That Transformed Me

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Martin Eden by Jack London, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati... and surely many others I'm forgetting.

Works I Hated

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

I even ended up abandoning some because nothing was happening.

An Interesting Observation

As you can see, there's variety in both categories: different authors, different periods, different types, etc. And disappointments are still extremely rare. I think I've listed all of them in the examples, whereas in the positive works I must be forgetting a good third.

At first, I thought it was mainly works from a particular period that were the problem. This is partly true—a period when the bourgeoisie reigned and lived off income and idleness, which is reflected in their works. But yet Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Brontë, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are contemporaries, and I enjoyed some and not others. And in Hugo's case, it's even more special: I loved Les Misérables and hated The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (although it's the least hated on my list and the only one I managed to finish).

The Trap of Abandonment

The problem is that sometimes the story takes time to start, it takes time to appreciate the characters, so you don't dare abandon it right away for fear of missing something. So you persist in reading and all you gain is time wasted reading useless pages.

My Rating System: Adventure AND/OR Work

After a lot of reflection, here's the rating system for knowing whether a work is garbage or not.

It needs to check at least one of these two boxes.

First Box: Adventure and Action

The story must have adventure, action. In The Count of Monte Cristo , Edmond Dantès is captured and imprisoned, then he escapes, then plans his revenge. In The Grapes of Wrath , the family flees Oklahoma in the early cars of the era to go to California. In Les Misérables , Jean Valjean escapes, Marius goes to the Barricade. And with Jack London, it's even more extreme: crazy adventures at the other end of the world, in the Great North, by boat across the oceans, in wild and hostile lands.

Second Box: Work (The Key I Took Time to Identify)

Adventure is not mandatory. Just because there's no action doesn't mean the novel is bad. Sometimes it can be someone's everyday life, and it's not necessarily worse for it. What will be interesting is often the depth of the characters and their development.

But for the story to be interesting—and this is the point I had trouble noticing between good books and bad ones—is that the characters must work .

The key is really work. Because in bad books like Anna Karenina , the characters officially "work": they're officers, civil servants. But in reality, they never work, they're just parasites living at society's expense—making them uninteresting—bourgeois who do nothing.

Real Work: Office and Employees

It takes more than a job, they need to have an office or employees (or both at once).

This is what differentiates The Hunchback of Notre-Dame from Les Misérables . Not only is the story wacky, empty of lessons and not very interesting, but in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , no one really works. They all live in Paris, but we don't really know how. Even Quasimodo, we don't really know what he does, he "rings bells." It doesn't make sense. Parisians at the time must have worked hard to survive. Life couldn't have been easy. We realize how out of touch high society was and saw the plebs as another planet.

The office and/or employees/colleagues is what makes detecting real work different. For example, in Dickens' novels, people work, and all of them do, from the coachman to the lawyer. But even the typically "fictional"/"parasitic" professions as in other novels work. They have an office. They get up in the morning and go to the office to work. They have clerks at work to take care of small tasks. They have associates.

Let's take concrete examples. In David Copperfield , David starts by working in the bottle factory, then does administrative jobs at Dr Strong's, then becomes a clerk in a law firm where we see him in the office with his colleagues, then he becomes a journalist and finally a writer—we follow his entire journey, his efforts, his progress. In Great Expectations , Pip is an apprentice blacksmith at Joe's, we see the workshop, the daily work, then he leaves for London where he frequents lawyers who work in their offices. In Martin Eden by Jack London, it's even more striking: Martin is by turns a sailor, laundry worker, laborer—we see him work physically, kill himself at the task, then try to become a writer by writing dozens of articles and short stories that he sends to newspapers. His daily life is work.

Now, let's compare with The Idiot by Dostoevsky or Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. The characters have titles: officer, civil servant, landowner. But what do they actually do? Nothing. We never see them work. No office, no employees, no daily tasks. They spend their time in salons, at receptions, at dinners. In Anna Karenina , Vronsky is an officer, but we never see him at his regiment doing anything military. Karenin is a high-ranking civil servant, but we don't know what he does—he just comes home "from the ministry." They're idle parasites living off income, and you can feel it in the emptiness of the plot.

Why Work Changes Everything

Because when a guy works, stuff happens. Sometimes business goes well, sometimes not at all. He encounters problems, his career progresses or regresses conversely, he meets people, etc. He has to adapt, question himself.

Whereas when characters don't have work, nothing happens. It goes from one dinner to a salon to a reception to an opera, etc. People do nothing, move from one passive thing to another.

But above all, it's important for the reader. We need to identify with the characters, progress with them, feel that they're contributing something to society. No one dreams of being rich and idle and doing nothing with their days. We dream of being an astronaut, footballer, veterinarian, adventurer or what have you. No one dreams of being rich and alternating between theater and trendy salon. It's decadent for the soul. Characters who work inspire us, we follow their progression, their efforts, their victories and their failures. This is what makes a novel alive and allows us to grow with it.

A Cultural Observation: Anglo-Saxon Liberalism

Then a reflection I had from my reading experience is that in all novels written by English or American authors, people work. These are liberal countries unlike the rest of Europe, and I felt this different mentality that doesn't exist in continental Europe.

This cultural difference is perfectly seen in the contrast between Dickens and Russian authors like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. All write in the same era, all talk about their society. But in Dickens, the characters work—really. David Copperfield climbs the social ladder through work, Pip learns a trade. We see their offices, their colleagues, their bosses. In Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the characters are supposed to be officers or civil servants, but we never see them work. They spend their lives in salons philosophizing about their tormented souls. It's revealing of a society where the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie lived completely disconnected from the world of work. Among Anglo-Saxons, even the bourgeois work—it's a liberal mentality where work is valued, regardless of social class.

That doesn't mean European authors are bad. I loved Les Misérables , The Count of Monte Cristo and several novels by Dino Buzzati. But continental Europe has a real culture of idle and uninteresting aristocracy. It still exists in France, in Paris, with the political, media world, artists, still very strong.

This should be taken with a grain of salt because I haven't read Balzac, Flaubert or Proust, but I think there's the same problem in their works: petty quarrels between idle characters of Parisian high society. That seems to be the theme of Proust's In Search of Lost Time .

Conclusion: My Technique for You

There you go, that was my little technique for knowing whether you should continue reading a novel when you find it tedious: is there adventure and/or do the characters have real work?

Next time you hesitate to abandon a classic, ask yourself these questions. If the characters only go from one salon to a dinner without ever working, and there's no adventure, you have your answer.

Fortunately, bad classics remain rare. The vast majority are fascinating masterpieces that have survived time for good reasons. Don't let a few disappointments discourage you from discovering these treasures.