Why do people read contemporary books is something I can’t really get my head around. There’re so many classics to keep people busy for life - and are 100% guaranteed to be insightful and pleasurable.
Should people stop telling new stories? A century from now the best books of today will be classics. Books can act as a time capsule of a certain time and place and mode of life. And that has value.
There’s a distinct demographic in the contemporary-fiction-reading community, as can be seen in corners of Goodreads or Instagram, that demands new fiction to tell the stories of groups not covered, or supposedly unfairly covered, in that classic literature: LGBT, BIPOC, the working class, etc. In fact, they might even deny that the classics are “insightful and pleasurable” due to these social concerns.
That’s really weird. People are making all kinds of books and stories. And stories are relevant to their time. The matrix wouldn’t be written in 1900, a tale of two cities wouldn’t be written in 1200, …
It is true though that if you have a culturally diverse set of friends and are open to their experiences and opinions, a lot of “the classics” start to smell bad. Imagine being black and reading Grapes of Wrath. You might think the situation of the main characters as humorous or infantile, considering how relatively fortunate they are.
Yes, and there's been a drop in quality since then too. The 1800-1940s really saw literature as the high water mark for quality media and it shows.
Finding deeply valuable and high quality books is much rarer in today's crop of authors. The best minds are rarely making the medium of literature their highest good, but are instead chasing dollars and relations with the rich and famous.
One of the best books I read last year was the story of the rescue of the football team that was trapped in a flooded cave in 2018 – written by cave diver Rick Stanton, who found the team and led the rescue. How would that account have been written into a book before it happened?
