Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? is less a tidy argument than a lively act of literary persuasion. Rather than defending canonical literature by appeal to duty or prestige, Calvino makes a subtler and more generous claim: a classic is not a relic preserved by institutions, but a work that remains unfinished in the reader’s experience. His most quoted definition captures this beautifully: “a classic is a book” that “never exhausted all it has to say.” In that single formulation, Calvino shifts authority away from scholarship and toward recurrence, rereading, and intimate encounter.

What makes the book so compelling is its tone of intelligent intimacy. Calvino writes like someone who has spent a lifetime in conversation with books and never lost his appetite for surprise. He does not treat the classics as holy objects. He treats them as living presences—works that change because readers change. This is one of the essay’s most enduring insights: a classic does not merely survive time; it actively reorganizes time, returning to us with altered meaning in altered circumstances. Calvino repeatedly suggests that to read a classic is not to master it, but to discover how much of oneself still remains unformed.

The book is also notable for its resistance to simple canon worship. Calvino acknowledges that reading the classics is often recommended in the language of obligation, but he quietly dismantles that stern moralism. His essays insist on pleasure, memory, and elective affinity. A classic matters because it becomes part of one’s inner library, because it accompanies thought, because it “never finishes” speaking. In this sense, Calvino is not arguing for the classics as a fixed list; he is arguing for a mode of reading. The classic is whatever continues to generate thought long after the first reading is complete.

Stylistically, the prose is elegant, compressed, and distinctly humane. Calvino’s sentences move with the assurance of someone who trusts intelligence but refuses pedantry. He is able to be aphoristic without becoming rigid, reflective without becoming vague. The essays often feel like intellectual miniatures, each one polishing a facet of the same central conviction: reading is a relationship, not a credential. That gives the book its enduring freshness. Even when Calvino seems to be speaking about specific authors, he is really speaking about the reader’s obligation to remain receptive, curious, and unfinished.

One of the book’s great pleasures is its balance between rigour and warmth. Calvino never reduces literature to theory, yet he also never indulges in nostalgia. The classics are not sacred because they are old; they are necessary because they remain inexhaustible. That distinction matters. It allows Calvino to defend tradition without conservatism, and renewal without novelty for its own sake. He imagines a literary culture in which rereading is not a retreat from originality but one of its highest forms.

As a whole, Why Read the Classics? is a compact masterpiece of literary advocacy. It reminds us that great books do not simply inform us about the past; they sharpen our capacity to live in the present. Calvino’s achievement is to make that claim feel both intellectually serious and deeply inviting. He does not command us to read the classics. He persuades us that we will be changed by them, and that the changes they make in us are never finally complete.

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T.A.E.’s Book Review – Why Read the Classics by Italo Calvino

(T.A.E.’s LitBites) – A modern retelling of Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare

Troilus is the kind of guy who walks like he owns the sun and texts like he’s already won the chat. He lives inside a city that’s been on edge forever — think constant sirens, power plays, and armies camping out like bad neighbours. War is the wallpaper; boredom, bravery, and rumour are the furniture.

Then Cressida shows up like a filter that actually makes everything real. She’s quick, clever, and somehow both softer and sharper than anyone Troilus has ever scrolled past. Pandarus — her uncle and the ultimate middleman (a little too into matchmaking, a little too nosy) — plays Cupid but with a running commentary. He hyped their first messages, arranged the first awkward meet-up, and kept sliding in with “suggestions” like a meddling but well-meaning group chat admin.

Troilus falls hard. Not theatre-hard — it’s more like gravity. He imagines her laugh on repeat, rewrites his future like a playlist where every song leads back to her. Their chats are late-night confessions, their stolen kisses feel like secret emojis. It’s young love with stadium acoustics: loud, dizzy, and convinced it can fix everything.

But the world outside their bubble is loud and stupid. The city they live in is under siege — ego and strategy mixed up like a bad cocktail. Deals are made like trade posts, and people are bargaining with lives like they’re swapping baseball cards. One day, Cressida is sent across enemy lines as part of a diplomatic exchange. It’s supposed to be practical, a move to keep peace. In reality, it’s a knife disguised as a courtesy.

Troilus is told she’ll come back. He believes it because belief is a muscle he’s been flexing since he met her. He promises himself loyalty like it’s armour. His friends call him naive. The soldiers call him romantic (as if that’s an insult). He writes letters that smell like hope, waits on the battlements at dawn, and narrates her absence like a slow-burning playlist of melancholy.

Meanwhile, the camp on the other side is not the villain in a movie — it’s messy humans doing messy things. Cressida exists there, bored and isolated, under new rules and new faces. One of those faces — Diomedes — is charming in the way of someone who knows how to survive with style. He’s kind, flattering, and good at reading the room. Cressida, who was traded like a chess piece and suddenly has to navigate being both prize and prisoner, starts to lean. Not because she’s cruel, but because survival sometimes looks like compromise and comfort looks like safety.

Troilus gets the update he dreads: she’s with someone else now. The message hits like a glitch in the feed that won’t fix itself. He becomes a storm — anger, humiliation, and a grief so loud it rewrites his voice. Friends try to talk sense into him, but his heart has already chosen the hard route: dramatic loyalty.

The whole saga peels back the masks everyone wears. Soldiers who used to recite heroics now trade insults with poets; love letters become bargaining chips; promises that sounded golden in private suddenly look cheap in daylight. Nobody here is a pure saint or a pure villain — just people in a broken broadcast, trying to make meaning.

Pandarus, who once staged the romance, begins to look less like a helper and more like the reason things unravel. His meddling slides from cute to catastrophic; good intentions are exposed as selfishness. He wanted the story to be epic. Instead, his scripting turns lives into scenes.

In the end, the war gives no tidy moral. Troilus meets his fate outside the frame — a sudden, senseless cut, like a livestream dropped mid-sentence. Cressida’s choices are left hanging between betrayal and belonging. The city keeps grinding, soldiers keep swapping stories to make sense of loss, and the people left behind have to rewrite their versions of what loyalty even means.

This version doesn’t hand you answers. It hands you the mess: love that’s fierce and fragile, people who fail each other because survival sometimes outspeeds honesty, and a world where “right” gets blurred by fear and desire. It asks: when everything around you is bargaining, can fidelity stay pure? Or does it transform into something else — a strategy, a defence, a mistake?

If you scroll away thinking “classic tragedy,” cool — but remember the rest: this is less about blame and more about how humans keep trying to be noble in a place that’s built to make nobility impossible. The ending isn’t neat because life rarely is. It’s raw, it’s unfair, and it’ll make you want to text someone you’re weirdly fond of — or delete their number forever.

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Young man in Shakespearean costume with smartphone, quill pen, and iced coffee

Seems not everyone appreciates the truth. And when people are unappreciative of the truth you tell them, you begin to wonder if you need to revise your approach, or perhaps you’re not in touch with the times if you’re still honest.

I have recently decided to fake my identity, and so far, so good.

When I honestly share my feelings and intentions, girls reject me. But since I’ve been acting in love when I find my victim very annoying and so self-centered, we’ve been making a lot of progress. She proved stubborn in the beginning, but like a rock in the heat for so long, she has expanded a little with the lies I feed her, and is slowly cracking.

But I don’t know how long I can do this. Still trying to master the art of pretense, and I have been very terrible at it. Don’t know why something in me feels proud that I can’t master faking an identity.

While I am in the middle of this fake romance, I have term papers to submit in a couple of weeks. The first of four is incomplete and the countdown to the deadline gives me nightmares, I spend an entire day writing a page. So much effort, so little progress. And every page drafted seems like a blood donation. I am even beginning to wonder if being in school is good for my immune system.

The lecturers make it sound so easy in class. And there is a lot more orientation they could have done. But this was no time to decorate people with blame badges. They want term papers, term papers they shall get!

Suddenly, an idea occur to me. I could dedicate long hours to my term paper and during the breaks, chat with potential dates to release stress. Almost all of them were far away, but the WhatsApp chats will do, for now.

Many of my coursemates are struggling with their term papers too, so occasionally they show up in the lecture room where we all meet and encourage one another to write more nonsense. God save the readers of our papers!

As students struggling to complete our term papers, we think of AI. Every now and then someone is suggesting a new AI tool than can sneeze volumes of academic writing in seconds. We weigh the options.

The major hurdle was how to reliably bypass the detectors. Not necessarily the apps, but the human detectors too.

The old lecturers were not particularly bothered about what went into a piece of writing, whether blood and bones or micro chips so far as the finished work smelt of academia. But the young lecturers, they were the Problem. We sometimes fear they could see through a smile and know if it were human or AI-assisted. Imagine a whole term paper!

Sometimes we wondered if the lecturers ever actually read submitted works because our grades and our efforts do not tally. It’s looking more like a lottery these days : you put in very little effort and bam! You hit an A. Other days you let you colleagues strain you of every fibre of sanity and blood, blended into ink and letters printed on A4 and …you get a C, like the inverted C-shape of sadness on your lips when you check your grades and wonder who sent you to go back to school.

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