Last Friday’s newsletter begins:

My favorite thing about reading “the classics” is that they’re almost always weirder than you think they are. For example: within 50 pages of War and Peace, a bunch of drunks tie a policeman to a bear and throw them in the river. (I try to read a big book every summer, so I figured why not read one of the biggest?)

With backup from Italo Calvino’s Why Read The Classics:

“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them…”

Read more: “The classics are weird.”