It is a privilege to be surrounded by books. My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville. The only difference between my old man and an old Etonian was the drudgery of employment. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: work is the bane of the reading class.

As for my own reading life, my mum wore me down, shouting “Read a book!” any time I dared say I was bored. I soon capitulated. I was nudged towards the classics, defined by Italo Calvino as books people say they should “reread” because they’ve either read them or do not want to admit they have not. In my late teens and 20s, I worked my way through the greats. I fell in love with a woman called George and thought Middlemarch was magic. I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.

My appetite for classics receded along with my hairline. My early 30s gave way to the contemporary, to favourites such as Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, Roddy Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the Guardian’s new list of the 100 best novels. I nearly collapsed with smugness. I’d read 68 of the books and decided on the spot to read the remaining 32. Imagine how unbearable I’d be at dinner parties, I thought. Most of the remaining books were old, chunky Victorians, the sort I had once loved. I felt close to excited.

Then I opened the first book. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is not about life, nor is it about Tristram Shandy. The novel deals largely in opinion. Laurence Sterne threatens the reader in the opening pages, suggesting a few possible digressions, and spends the rest of the novel making good on that threat. FR Leavis in The Great Tradition dismisses Sterne for “irresponsible (and nasty) trifling”, a critique that feels too generous. I found Tristram Shandy inexcusable. The language was verbose, the plot indecipherable, the detours infuriating.

I turned to something more contemporary. Dracula felt fun for the first 150 pages and I appreciated the vampire’s general campness. But I struggled with the glaring absurdity of the epistolary format. Every journal entry was written in the exact style of a rambling Victorian novel. And Van Helsing did my head in, with all that moralising, all that dithering. I was not rooting for Count Dracula, not exactly, but I’d have liked to see sweetcorn lodged in Van Helsing’s teeth.

In my 20s, I used to take Charles Dickens on holiday. I read David Copperfield by the pool. I had a hard time with Hard Times, but Great Expectations lived up to the hype. So now I turned to Our Mutual Friend. Dickens divides writers. George Orwell criticised his politics, Ford Madox Ford hated his form, EM Forster despised his characters. But I loved the pacing, the subtle and not-so-subtle humour. The characters veer into caricature, but I often adored the caricature. Dickens may not possess Eliot’s intelligence, or her complexity, but it was hard to deny the bloke was fun.

But again, reading Our Mutual Friend, I found my concentration lagging. I kept checking the football scores and I don’t really care about football. Even with Dickens, a writer I once loved, I found the narrative complicated, the prose as heavy as the 900-page book. I put the novel down after 60-odd pages. Despise one classic and you can blame the book. Despise three on the trot and the problem seems larger. So what had changed? Have we all changed? Or was it just me?

The page makes few demands. It is linear and monologic, allowing us to focus on a single task. The page has no pop-ups, no calls to action, no ads clamouring for attention. But screens, according to research by psychologist Gloria Mark, compel us to switch attention, push us towards new shiny things. We focus on interfaces, ads, dialogic elements, rather than the content. Online, according to research by Chartbeat, one in three readers spend less than 15 seconds on any given article. Many who started reading this piece will have not made it this far. Good riddance.

Screens have altered the way we read. They promote a shallower reading experience, encourage skimming and scanning. Reading on screen has undermined reading in general. And our dependence on screens has led to a form of text fatigue. Kate McLoughlin, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, says that we read more than ever, just not books. “There’s a huge amount of reading going on: social media posts, blogs, below-the-line comments, text messages, emails and the utterances of AI.”

Work exacerbates the problem. More of us now occupy managerial rather than manual roles, according to the National Readership Survey. We spend days staring at screens, drowning in instant messages, emails and work slop. People do not want to spend their leisure time reading Victorian classics, after all that bad reading.

My parents serve as a good example. My dad was a middle manager, spending days with reports and emails. He struggled to pick up a book during the evenings and weekends, cramming classics into two-week summer holidays. But my mum worked as a childminder, essentially a manual job, and she managed to read novels every evening.

But the biggest problem with classics is the absence of practice. Nancy Yousef, a professor of English at Yale, explains the issue with reading 18th- and 19th-century novels. “The main challenge has to do with the length and complexity of sentences that we’re no longer used to,” Yousef says. “Following a thought or an image through multiple subordinate clauses, through thickets of syntax that might involve conditionals and conjectures, and shifts in register that might take you from concrete to abstract and back again – that’s difficult.” Helen Hackett, from University College London, echoes the point. “Older books are often quite chunky and the sentences are quite chunky, too,” she says. “Even as a professor of English literature, at the end of a tiring working day, I more often turn on the television than open a book.”

As a teenager, I’d had no trouble reading authors similar to Sterne, Bram Stoker and Dickens, but now, they felt absurdly challenging. In less than a decade, I’d lost the ability to read some of the best books ever written. I had no idea how that had happened. The experts I spoke to told me, over and over again, that classics require patience and practice. A good reader needs to learn or relearn how to read them. So how do I practise the classics?

The most common bit of advice: start small. Katie Garner, a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, advocates the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: “Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.” Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and plenty of others initially appeared in that format. Self-serialising slows us down, lets us linger on the text, and creates suspense. “Read one chapter per session and you’ll be better placed to appreciate the detail of these Victorian worlds – and their cliffhangers.”

You can break a book into chunks, or simply pick smaller books. Anton Chekhov once wrote to a friend: “I have a mania for shortness. Whenever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.” I used to fetishise big books. I tweeted about them. I steered conversations towards the big books that I’d read– it was reading as performance. But concise novels now seem more impressive. I enjoy watching a writer achieve more with less. A fine line exists between the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina and the Tolstoy of War and Peace. For readers returning to the classics, perhaps start with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or The Metamorphosis.

“The world depicted in classic novels can seem distant and alien to our own,” McLoughlin says. “In Britain, the rise of the novel has long been linked to the rise of an entrepreneurial class, and what entertained white, male Victorian capitalists may not appeal to audiences today.”

More recent classics tend to ease the reader into reading. They speak to our present, with all its complications. Start with Catch-22 or anything by James Baldwin, books that feel more contemporary than most contemporary novels. To read our world, to understand our world, few people come close to Toni Morrison. Writers such as Philip Roth and JG Ballard questioned whether fiction could change the world, enjoying the burden of false humility. A few pages of Morrison relieves them of that burden.

Or perhaps read old books that continue to define our world, old books that feel profoundly new. Frankenstein resonates with those of us concerned by the inflated egos of any given tech bro. Critics tend to focus on the philosophy of the novel, the vitalism, the social contract of it all, but Mary Shelley writes with prose that feels sharp enough to perform surgery. Or turn to Wuthering Heights, a novel that reinvented the novel several times over, a book that speaks to contemporary narratives of class and race. Or find one of those pesky dystopians, novels that seem perpetually relevant to people of all political persuasions, convinced of the tyranny of their opposition. Calling anything Orwellian is now Orwellian, but Orwell is still worth reading.

“Once you’ve listened to Alan Rickman read The Return of the Native,” Garner says, “you’ll be hooked on Thomas Hardy.” I frown upon people who frown upon audiobooks. Such people are not, despite their best efforts, better than the rest of us. Audiobooks improve accessibility and we should welcome anything that helps people read. The only problem with classic audiobooks is that, because the texts belong to the public domain, hundreds of versions have been recorded by any amateur with a microphone. So you’ll need to look out for favourite actors, to find your Rickman. Or seek recommendations. I fell in love with audiobooks after listening to Stephen Fry narrate The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The next audiobook on my list is Their Eyes Were Watching God, recited by the actor and civil rights activist Ruby Dee, as recommended in the Guardian by Afua Hirsch.

Supplementary materials improve accessibility. The best are found inside books. Editions such as Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics aim to improve access and understanding, with introductions, timelines, glossaries, maybe even a map or two. The best have explanatory notes that guide readers, telling us exactly when authors are throwing shade. The classics are in constant conversation: satirising, parodying, contradicting, seeking vengeance. Explanatory notes provide insight into the pettiness of authors. And they slow us down, help us to appreciate the writing.

Good reading begets better reading. In The Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading. You’ll start to appreciate how novels speak to each other. Connections will often appear obvious, as Wide Sargasso Sea responds to Jane Eyre. Some of the connections may feel corrective – for instance, how Things Fall Apart challenges eurocentric portrayals of Africa in Heart of Darkness. And occasionally the connections simply boost our enjoyment. To take one example: knowledge of Henry James enhances the reading experience of one of my favourites, The Line of Beauty.

I started putting tips into practice. I bought the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Our Mutual Friend and started again. The introduction shows how Dickens’s life informs the text: the marriage breakup, the death of friends, visits to a poverty-stricken East End. And the explanatory notes develop my appreciation of the writing. Page 10 alone requires four notes: the description of an intriguing metaphor, references to leading naturalists and chemists, an allusion to a Thomas Moore poem. I tend to check any note that piques my interest and the curiosities usually prove charming.

I’ve adopted the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: I cover only a few chapters at a time and put the book down, with a thud, even if I want to continue. I am taking Our Mutual Friend slowly, without rushing towards a self-inflicted finish line. The digressions still bore me, but I’m learning to appreciate the arguments, the flurries (at least the good ones). I’m slowly getting used to the longer sentences, the shifts in register, the complicated syntax. My love of classics is creeping back.

Books open our minds and keep them open. They improve our communication, critical thought and intelligence. But, most importantly, novels boost our empathy. They help us to navigate the world with kindness, with compassion. Putting away screens and spending time with a classic, lingering a little on human nature, feels like a valuable pursuit, even if you have to employ a few tricks.

There is no wrong way to read the right book. In literature, as in life, you should ignore all the purists and map out your own routes to success. Start at the end, if you must. Rip the book in two. Maybe read aloud in a Glaswegian accent. Do whatever you need to do to get reading.

It is perhaps best to end with some words of wisdom from Virginia Woolf, the one writer to appear on the Guardian’s list five times: “The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”

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