Most new books aren't very good, and there's so much noise that only reading old books is a perfectly good strategy.
The only recent stuff I buy and read is technology related, if I'm going to read a narrative book it's going to be > 1 year old
The only recent stuff I buy and read is technology related, if I'm going to read a narrative book it's going to be > 1 year old
I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books.
The choice is often "Do I take a chance with this thing published last year? Or do I just pick up one of the 'classics' that I haven't read yet?"
I usually end up going with the latter simply because I don't want to spend many hours reading something that ends up being "meh" and I assume that going with something considered a "classic" is safer. Though they do occasionally end up disappointing :)
Sturgeons law definitely applies.
Reading (or watching, or whatever) only older stuff is basically using survivor-ship as a curation filter. It's a viable approach, although will definitely miss good stuff.
If you don't do this, you need some other way to discard most of the crap.
Popularity and taste rarely coincide because most people have no taste.
(Me covets a The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell first edition.)
The other thing is to read books that are important, not just ones that are preferred or pleasant for a wider perspective:
- Mein Kampf
- Capital (Das Kapital)
- Technological Slavery
- The International Jew
- A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. 1-6.
- (ones by ideological opposites)
- America: The Farewell Tour
- Sorrows of Empire
Also, people who don't own any books, paper or Kindle... that's a big "nope."
One has to wonder though if something has survived as an artifact only because there were a zillion copies of the then "Steven King's" latest, or if it truly was great and preserved with care by those with taste.
You have to wonder if the then Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs down compared to other contemporary works.
But of course, that doesn't preclude the fact that there may have been much better works that didn't make it to us.
Popularity seems almost arbitrary with elements of promotion (ads, influencers, celebrities, etc.), timeliness, and virality.
The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every book is a big disappointment these days.