Moreover, older writers go about telling stories in a way that is very different from modern storytelling. Previous writers don’t get to their story quickly. They are full of asides, diversions, characters, anecdotes that are only thinly related to the main plot. The nineteenth century reader had plenty of time to kill, and reading a book was a leisurely experience. Movies today usually stick to their plots closely. Today’s reader has a short attention span. The modern mind is at odds with the nineteenth century mind.

Your real problem, as a modern reader reading older fiction, is in finding the time to read 800 page novels and enter ring into the consciousness of an older time. You must turn off the TV, pull the buds out of your ear, shut down the cell phone, unhook the computer.

Obviously this is going to take more than “brushing up on your vocabulary.” You must want to head in this new direction enough to do it.