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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

> Most new books aren't very good

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 :)

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> I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books.

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.

Absolutely.

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."

Plus, for whatever it's worth the classic is already guaranteed to be culturally significant. Other people will have read it and you can talk to them about it, which can be a fun exercise and may not be true for whatever random book you could otherwise read.

Exactly, anything that has survived 100 or 1000 years is most likely worth your time

The Epic of Gilgamesh is roughly 3800-years-old.

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.

I think about this all the time when it comes to archeological finds. How do we know this wasn't one of their worst works?

Many writings from the ancient world survive only because of quotes in other books. It's likely that works that were heavily quoted were among the best.

But of course, that doesn't preclude the fact that there may have been much better works that didn't make it to us.

Of course, I wouldn't doubt many excellent works died and will die in obscurity in drawers and caves.

Popularity seems almost arbitrary with elements of promotion (ads, influencers, celebrities, etc.), timeliness, and virality.

Maybe this is the case for books after all. None of our television shows or movies will make it this long.

Most new books are about people. A few good new books are about things. Very few great new books are about ideas.

The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every book is a big disappointment these days.

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