"Classic" literature might not be the best term here. A lot of people probably struggle with true classic literature because they lack the necessary background and education. The present educational system getting ever more "lightweight" doesn't help either. But if you do invest the effort to decode the writing style and history behind the classics you will be rewarded with an unbelievably rich experience.

Classics are called that way for a reason, and not just because some old bespectacled ivory tower scholar decided so. They're that timeless source of human experience and knowledge that no Oprah Show 5-minutes-of-fame paperback bestsellers will ever come close to. Reading Chanson de Roland and Saxo the Dane and the Nibelungenlied might seem difficult at first. Once you digest them though, you'll laugh when somebody tries to sell you Tolkien (who was incidentally pilfering from those very same works, though couldn't quite match the talent of their authors). And that's just on example of many.

But it's not a matter of classic (old) vs. modern literature at all. It's just good vs. badly written literature. When I mentioned James Jones, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, they are modern/20th c. authors, writing about human experience many of us could easily relate to. I think any of their books would be a far better read than some amateurish survivalist fiction. At least those guys knew how to write and didn't struggle with grammar. BTW, if a writer has problems with something as basic as grammar I wonder just how competent he could be about EMP - being practically semi-literate?