We live in a world of fast-paced media, short-form content, and endless new releases. Classic literature can feel outdated or intimidating. “Just give me the bullet points” is what we hear. “The elevator speech.” Why read books written hundreds of years ago when modern stories feel more relatable? Why read at all when you can listen?
Here is the answer: classical literature is all around you right now, and you don’t yet know how to see it. I have a saying—the more you look, the more you see. And the more you see, the better you know where to look. That is exactly what Reading with Jimmy teaches you to do.
1. Classics Explore Timeless Human Experiences
Classic literature endures because it deals with the things that never change: love, power, fear, ambition, injustice, identity, morality. When you think you are experiencing something for the first time, think again. Great literature has you covered.
Take Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales, written over 600 years ago. Two knights fall in love with the same woman. Like that has never happened before. The settings are historical. The emotions are not. When you read classics, you realize that people centuries ago struggled with the same questions we do today, and this connection across time builds empathy and perspective.
2. They Strengthen Critical Thinking Skills
Do you think for yourself, or do you think what others tell you to think? John Locke said we are born with blank blackboards, and people start writing on them. Classical literature gives you the chance to erase yours and form your own impressions.
Consider Marcus Aurelius in Meditation IX: “He who does wrong does wrong against himself. He who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself, because he makes himself bad.” Do you believe that? Classical literature doesn’t hand you the answer. It asks you to test the idea against your own experience. That is what sharpens critical thinking—not finding the right answer, but learning to ask the right question.
3. Classics Shaped Modern Stories and Culture
There is nothing new under the sun. King Solomon said it in Ecclesiastes, and he was right. Many modern books, films, and television series are inspired by or directly lifted from classical literature. Understanding the originals gives you a richer appreciation of everything that came after.
Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game is a short story about a hunter who hunts the most dangerous game of all: another man. If you’ve seen Rambo, Hard Target, or The Running Man, you’ve seen this plot. Reading the original changes how you watch everything that borrowed from it. Ideas, character types, and story structures that feel “new” almost always trace back to a classic.
4. They Improve Language and Communication
Before you say no one talks like that anymore, consider this: all communication depends on the sender and receiver agreeing on what the words mean. If you don’t expand your vocabulary, you limit your ability to be understood—and to understand.
In Act V of Hamlet, a gravedigger hands Hamlet a skull and tells him it belonged to Yorick, the king’s jester. Hamlet holds it and says: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio…how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it.” Abhorred: extreme disgust. Gorge: the throat and stomach. Hamlet is sickened that someone he loved as a child is now a skull in his hands. That is language charged with meaning—Ezra Pound’s phrase, and the best description of what the classics do that I have ever found.
5. They Offer Historical and Cultural Insight
Classics provide a window into the social values, conflicts, and beliefs of different eras—which you will find, oddly enough, mirror our own. Through stories, we learn how history affected real people: not just dates and events, but daily life, social norms, and power structures.
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was written over 2,500 years ago about the women of ancient Greece and Sparta, who were tired of watching their men kill each other. So they organized a sex strike. If you think women’s liberation is a 1960s development, read this play. The comedy still lands. The argument still holds. The modern world did not invent any of this.
6. They Encourage Patience and Focus
Unlike quick online content, classic literature requires time and attention. Garbage in, garbage out. If you put the time in, you get something out. It is that simple.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” is a story about a preacher who shows up one Sunday wearing a black veil and refuses to remove it—even on his deathbed. On his deathbed he says: “I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!” We all hide behind something. A story like this does not deliver that insight in the first paragraph. You earn it. And what you earn, you keep.
Read With Me
Reading classic literature is not about rejecting modern books. It is about gaining a perspective modern books cannot give you. Classics connect us to the past, to ourselves, to others, and sharpen our minds along the way. They help us understand who we are, who we should be, and—more importantly—who we might become.
What I do on this website and YouTube channel is unlike anything else out there. I read with you, not to you. I show you the words, read them aloud, and then analyze them with you—word by word, every nuance. No dumbing down. You rise to the words.
So come read with me. You will not be disappointed.