If you're going to say that old books are better than new ones

[conuly]

because you think that all the books in the past were classics, do yourself a favor - go take some time and read some bestsellers of whenever that have largely been forgotten today, and never quite made it to hallowed "classic" status. I'll wait.

Note: Do this whether you're talking in general or only about some specific subset of books.

*****

Stunning Aerial Photographs Find The “Hidden City” Inside New York City

Scientists Create a Buzz With the First Ever Global Map of Bee Species

1st drug for rare rapid-aging disease extends kids' lives

If museums want to diversify, they’ll have to change. A lot.

I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week

IBM Apologizes For Firing Computer Pioneer For Being Transgender...52 Years Later

A new lawsuit alleges Trump’s effort to overturn Michigan’s election results disenfranchises Black voters

The US social safety net has been ripped to shreds -- and women are paying the price

UK sourced PPE from factories secretly using North Korean slave labour

The Final Pandemic Surge Is Crashing Over America

She fled Ethiopia's fighting. Now she warns of 'catastrophe'

Comments

[shadowkat]

Or just look at the best seller lists from times past...and ask yourself if you've heard of those novels?

Most probably haven't. Jane Austen wasn't really the best seller back then. Most of the books people read in English Lit weren't that popular at the time the writer was alive and they didn't make that much money off of them.

[dhampyresa]

I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week
many of us realize that if something really bad happened, we wouldn’t know the first thing about surviving for a week on the ingredients lying around in our pantry.
I feel like this deserves way more than just being an afterthought.

[thewayne]

There are some greats from classic literature, but I agree, you are missing out if you don't read modern literature. Some classics hold up, like The Three Musketeers. Lots do not.

I receive an ebook sale email every day (used to get two, don't know what happened to the other one) and liked the description of a book completely against type for what I read, and picked up an utterly charming book called Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. It's about an older British gentleman widower who falls in love with a Pakistani widow who runs a shop in town, much to the scandal of his son and daughter. Very amusing book. Is it a classic? Dunno, only time can tell that. But I loved it, and I expanded my horizons a bit.

[ioplokon]

Yes! And then there's the ones that survive by virtue of early MST3K treatments. So like, Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (which I love but which is also a deeply weird book) was received sincerely initially but like, a few decades later was reprinted with an "Index to Tears" so that people could read those bits out loud at parties and laugh at them.

[chelseagirl]

When I was an undergraduate English major it was still pretty much Great Books (except "hmm, maybe we should check out some more women and people of color"). Ten years later when I went back to grad school, after doing Other Things for a decade, there were lots and lots of reclaimed neglected texts. Which . . . some of them were definitely worth reclaiming, and particularly again if they were by women and people of color, but some of them had been rightfully neglected for certain.

[bitterlawngnome]

I've been thinking this a lot today! scanning a literary magazine from the 1920/30s, and the breathless YOU MUST READ THIS and FINEST BOOK OF THE MODERN ERA etc etc ... and most of them have been utterly forgotten.

[dorchadas]

Also a great exercise with music--checking the chart-toppers from decades past is a lovely way to be confused how anyone could ever have thought [Song X] was that good.