How much time do you spend reading the classics as opposed to SF or literary fiction?
How much time out of what span of time? On a given day, I almost always read 100% of one or the other. In the past few months I've read almost nothing but science fiction and non-fiction. Through a good chunk of the middle-90s, I read almost nothing but "classics". And so on. Over the course of my life, I'd guess I've read about 50/50 (which given that I define SF in my strictest mood as pretty much 1926-current Anglo-American magazine-rooted fiction, is wildly disproportionate in favor of SF). I have 9 vaguely equal bookcases and four of them are SF though I probably get rid of more non-SF than SF, so maybe it's 40/60ish. But if we're comparing SF to strictly
non-SF fiction, then it's at least 80/20 as I have less than one case of non-SF fiction.
AND "Is there more to be gained from reading so-called literary classics than Genre fiction?
It depends on what's meant by "gain". As others indicated in the original thread, my batting average is going to be higher with SF so there's more to gain in the sense that, if I read 10 classics and like 5 and read 10 SF books and like 7, then I've gained two extra good (to me) books. But, in a qualitative sense, I don't think there's more to be gained from either, but rather different things to gain.
D Davis has already quoted Gene Wolfe maintain that "'all fiction is fantasy, some is just more honest about it."
That's akin to (but tellingly different from) Campbell's dictum (I think it was Campbell) that mainstream fiction is a subset of science fiction since it's limited to current or past mimesis with little actual science and SF can be past, current, or future, and can actually tackle science, which is a major part of current reality. (I don't mean to put words in his mouth because it wasn't explained quite like this, but it was something along those lines.)
...there's so much great writing out there that people are not aware of!
Life is too short to spend on mediocre texts.
That's kind of the thing - life is so short and there's so much great stuff to read that the whole idea of a world canon sort of breaks down - it may be that there can't really be a common cultural language and so it might be kind of pointless to try to read every great thing - might as well find what floats your boat and find a clan who shares that interest. It's hard enough to read just the great surviving Greek literature or just the great SF. Reading "classics" can be a superficial thing where one becomes a jerk of all literature and a master of none.
I think that is a marvellous list to work from. I would have about 95% of what is on that list...I tend to collect mainly literary works with elements of the fantastic in them...and I have a particular interest in magic realism
Of the Fadiman/Major list, of the 97 numbered items in the first four sections (some of which contain multiple works, so it's hard to say), I've read and liked 32, read and disliked 17, and have 6 waiting to be read. Almost exactly half. The percentage goes down (to about a quarter) on part 5. I find 20th century non-SF/F prose fiction to be ridiculously overrated, overemphasized, and generally quite boring - SF is the literature of the 20th century and, if not reading that, there's always poetry, philosophy, history, and non-fiction that is generally much more "amusing and edifying" than mainstream fiction. (Also, my interests are decidedly Western and classical/modern, so I tend to read Greek->Roman->German->English->American stuff in my wanderings through historical time and space and not so much, e.g., Chinese or medieval stuff. The significant minority of non-Western works in that list lowers my reading average.)
