My Response to “What’s a classic book that you think is overrated?”
I realise this is the sort of answer that gets you quietly removed from village fêtes, but the classic I’ve always thought a bit overrated is the Bible. Not the people who read it, not the traditions around it, just the book itself as a literary object that gets treated like it descended fully formed from the clouds which simply isn’t true.
It isn’t even one book. It’s a whole library of them, sixty six in most Protestant editions, written over centuries in moments of joy, despair, war, peace and the occasional bout of someone having a very bad day.
You get everything from sublime poetry to passages that make you want to put the kettle on and have a little lie down. The King James Version gives us some of the most beautiful English ever written, but it also preserves some lines that make you wince so hard you can feel it in your spine.
Then there’s the awkward bit. For all the inspiration people find in it, the text has also been used to justify things that really should’ve been left in the dustbin of history. You can find material that’s been read as homophobic, misogynistic or as intellectual framework to justify slavery. None of that’s the fault of modern readers, of course, but it does make the book feel like a slightly unpredictable house guest.
One minute the books are offering you a psalm that could move a stone to tears, the next they’re reminding you why you keep a stiff drink in the cupboard.
So yes, for me it’s overrated. Not useless, not without beauty, just treated with a level of reverence that doesn’t quite match the messy, contradictory, occasionally alarming thing on the page. I admire the influence, I admire the language, but I can’t pretend it hasn’t been the source of a fair bit of misery along the way.
Still, I’ll probably get struck by lightning for saying so, which would at least give me something dramatic to blog about tomorrow.