Over the past 15 years, I have witnessed university students’ shrinking patience for reading – especially for reading “long” books. Increasingly, students also opt for audiobooks. While speeding up the reading experience, these fundamentally change what is noticed.

The neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf suggests many students no longer have the “cognitive patience” to read long books due to the complexities of thought and sustained attention required.

One explanation for this shift is the dominance of digital technology in our daily lives, which has rewired our brains for surface-level scanning and multitasking, weakening our capability for prolonged attention. Another is our culture of instant gratification.

Some studies into the “screen inferiority effect” suggest when we read on paper (rather than on screens such as smartphones) the brain often processes more deeply and comprehension is better. Memory and information recall are also stronger.

So where does this leave the classics?

Millions of Australians, both children and adults, struggle with literacy.

In this series, we explore the challenges of reading in an age of smartphones and social media – and ask experts how we can become better readers.

Many books considered “classics” are long. Masterpieces such as Middlemarch or Les Misérables might seem intimidating because in physical form they resemble door stops and they often have complex, demanding language and long, convoluted sentences.

But reading the classics can deliver cognitive, social, emotional and even ethical benefits, helping us strengthen habits of thoughtful attention and develop the skills to communicate with clarity and empathy.

Extending our attention spans increases our ability to connect thoughts and ideas, challenges memory and recall and perhaps helps us attend more patiently to our own lives and the lives of others. In reading Robinson Crusoe, for instance, we share in the patience of the title character, stranded on a desert island. We, too, pay careful heed to details and signs in the world around him.

The complex language of classics can help us discern meaning amid a multitude of voices. When working through multiple sentence clauses and the layered sentences of a meaningful paragraph we need to suspend judgement until we have the fuller picture. Following complex and interwoven narratives also helps us to understand human complexity in real life.

Here are some tips for reading the classics – and some shorter ones to start with.

1. Follow your instincts

Find out which classic novels influenced the development of your favourite genre and you might find a natural fit. My brilliant English teacher at school, Mr Taylor, knew I loved detective fiction, so he kept recommending Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone as an early example of crime mystery. Eventually taking his advice, I loved it and followed it with Collins’s other classic, The Woman in White.

2. Remove distractions

It can help to set aside dedicated reading time, such as 20–30 minutes a day in which phones, smartwatches and other devices are out of the way. There is an added benefit: research by Mindlab International has shown reading for only six minutes reduces stress levels by 68%.

3. Make a note of memorable sentences

You don’t need a teacher to notice powerful moments or startling language. For example, Charles Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”) famously captures the coexistence of extremes in the world – of hope and despair, of wisdom and foolishness. Dickens has crafted an enduring truth of human experience.

4. Ask yourself questions

Why is this considered a classic? Why do I dislike this particular character? Why does this scene make me feel uncomfortable? Usually, the author wants you to consider why things were written the way they were (rather than, for example, with a different vocabulary or narrative voice). Asking questions deepens comprehension.

5. Embrace the unknown

If longer sentences or old-fashioned language trip you up, go over them again and then keep going. Kindles offer instant definitions at the touch of the screen but sometimes looking up every word in the dictionary can interfere with the opportunity to deduce meaning from context.

6. Be ready to laugh

Some classic novels are downright funny. I am currently reading Anthony Trollope’s The Warden. The sentences may be long, but they are almost always punctuated with hilarious insights into the hypocrisies of human beings and the naming rights the author deploys are childishly funny.

7. Read aloud

Classic novels were often serialised and read aloud in instalments in families or community groups. As a teenager, some of my most memorable early forays into the classics were shared with a dear cousin while staying with our grandparents in the Blue Mountains, when we would read aloud to each other on wintry, windy nights by the fireplace. Here, I first encountered Daphne Du Maurier’s evocative West Country mystery Rebecca and Dodie Smith’s eccentric and funny I Capture the Castle. Begin your adventure into the classics by reading aloud with a friend or in a book club.

8. Don’t feel too daunted

Remember that getting started with the story, getting to know the writer’s style, gradually piecing together the world of the novel can be the hardest stage. Take your time, be patient and persist. The further you get into a novel like War and Peace, the easier it is to continue because you simply want to know what happens.

Here are three short classics worth the journey.

George Eliot’s Silas Marner

A heartwarming study of the “inward life” of Silas, the weaver, exiled from his fellowship of narrow religious sectarians. He finds purpose in life, first in money and then in the fatherly love he develops for Eppie, the child who wanders into his home. Silas Marner is an accessible taster of Eliot’s longer experiments exploring emotion and “fellow feeling”.

James Joyce’s Dubliners

This book is, strictly speaking, a collection of 12 short stories. Together they form a masterpiece of brutal Anglo-Irish realism interrupted by moments of epiphany. The book contends with questions of action and inaction, betrayal, political idealism and pragmatism. The story of Eveline, who is on the cusp of eloping with the “very kind, manly, and open-hearted” Frank on a night-boat to Buenos Aires to escape the ill-treatment of her ageing, abusive father, leaves the reader astonished by the sudden departure in the final lines from her earlier rational self-analysis.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

An experimental novel set on one summer’s day in London, 1923. The socialite Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party but the absence of any chapter breaks in the book creates for the reader a sense of the stifling impact of war that still lingers over British family, social and political life. In the trauma of returned soldier Septimus Smith we read an early fictional exploration of shell shock.

Johanna Harris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.