I’m in the other camp. Reading unpopular books has been much more valuable to me than reading popular books. If the classics are good, you’ll understand them by osmosis even without having read them.
>you’ll understand them by osmosis
Nothing about the substance of the books can be understood without reading them. It's all in the details and the language, not the plots and the abstract description of their main points.
Even if we constrained them in their "value-conferring ideas", the power of such ideas in those books comes from experiencing the emotions and subtleties involved in their storytelling.
Without that, a raw "takeaway" idea will have neither the required buildup, nor the emotional impact required to affect one hearing it.
Plus, a key part of literature is not about value-conferring ideas, but about experiencing others' lives and ways of thinking and looking at the world. This is totally lost in plot summaries.
Sometimes you can get some surrounding information about a work, but you generally cannot replace reading/viewing/playing the work, if only due to a basic law of information density.
I disagree that classics can be understood by osmosis. I'm not discounting the books you read or saying they wouldn't compare to the classics if they were better known. But there is an experience in reading something timeless that can only be experienced by reading it. And there are more experiences to reading them with age that makes them unique. They become richer instead of becoming banal.
It seems like a bunch of people are replying thinking that you meant one would pick up trivia about the classics like which Shakespearian work some quote came from, rather than some distillation of important concepts or whatever.
Depends on your goal. Reading a classic by "osmosis" may be enough to make one a dilettante, but doesn't bring about the enlightenment you would experience from reading the original book. Just like reading popular science books doesn't make one a scientist.
“”” They want their pound of flesh. That’s from Shakespeare or something. Macbeth I think.
Me: headdesk. Merchant of Venice. “””
Unfortunately, I've found that even with things I have fully read, I sometimes mix them up and confuse what came from where. There's just not enough distinction sometimes and it smears into a blob.
I'm aware that meanings change, and culture has its own uses for expressions. But the source is there for you to examine, there's no real excuse to use it wrong. We're not (yet) at the point where we have an oral culture tradition, but we're getting damn close.