Contemporary literature is valuable for its insights in the present. I love classics, and much of what I read was published before this century, but I would be missing out if I stuck just with tried and proven titles and authors.
Can you give an example of a book published after, say, 2000 that is really valuable for insights we would not be able to get from either older books (if related to the human condition) or news articles (if more to do with some bare fact)?
I read mostly books written before the World Wars and I’m doubtful there’s much after that period of any real and lasting value. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy some of it, of course, mostly the fiction. The exception might be really niche works of local history, which is probably <0.001% of all such books, or a few really good scientific/mathematical compendiums.
It's not that any specific particular work of fiction will provide really valuable insights — what is insightful to one reader may be obvious to another — but that the whole field changes and absorbs societal change and extrapolates and interprets society from there.
It means books get written now which explore perspectives and voices unheard before, which in turn can help us readers expand our frame of reference.
The collective works of fiction written before 1900 tend to reflect the societal viewpoints of well-off white men (even when written by women or specifically dealing with societal ills). Go a few decades beyond that and you see authors from a working class background join the chorus, then more women, a broadening of sexual themes reflecting society's change (feminism, sexual liberation, homosexuality, etc.), more open criticism of religion too. Digital technology changed society significantly, and this is of course reflected in writing from the more recent decades, and coming up towards today you see more and more diversity amongst authors, adding — through the characters and narratives they create — yet more perspectives and insights. Sometimes pushing the envelope of a specific field, sometimes getting rid of tropes which no longer convince. Fiction changes constantly and will always be rooted in the year it was written.
Unique perspectives are not made by sex or skin color, but by life experiences.
Two Americans today, whatever their sex and race, have virtually everything in common with each other compared to anybody from 1800, let alone 800. The extreme, excessive focus on race and sex in contemporary writing is exactly what makes it boring and irrelevant. This comment is a great example - you've been taught by contemporary writing that such a tendency existed, when it in fact excludes the objective reality of the tons of works that could not have been said to be "written" or "about" such people even by modern framing, but also the fact that "well-off white man" is a completely meaningless and inapplicable phrase if you go back more than a couple centuries.
The sort of work you're describing is the stuff we're taught to acculturate us to the world we already live in. There's no point browbeating me with even more material that I am already steeped in.
> Two Americans today, whatever their sex and race, have virtually everything in common with each other compared to anybody from 1800, let alone 800.
Define "virtually everything"?
The rich, white, and men have had massively different resources and societal privileges in each of those eras.
Even today it seems obvious to me that to be rich or white or male each brings benefits at every stage of life which can drastically change ones life experience: food security, personal safety, education, job prospects, and romantic opportunities.
I mean that if you put a random 2024 white man and black woman in a room with Charlemagne and the ability to communicate, the former two would have 99% overlap in their worldviews and perspectives while Charlemagne would be an alien to them both. “Privilege”, as the ancients noted, is fleeting and superficial.
“White” is a modern social abstraction that rapidly breaks down the further back you try to apply it. It also carries with it loaded assumptions that do not really hold even at a population level in different places. This is exactly what I mean: immersing yourself in modern culture blinds you to the reality people did not and could not apply such categories because they did not even exist. People often repeat that race is a social construct but rarely think about what that really means.
People in past cultures were totally alien. There’s some substrate of common humanity but trying to say, apply modern racial privilege politics to Xenophon’s encounter with the very pale Paphlagonians, or the widespread trafficking of European slaves even into modernity in Northern Africa and Anatolia, or even into parts of colonial America is just nonsensical.
I mean, take this quote from Benjamin Franklin for example, which would have been early in the conception of modern race:
> Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.
This is a completely bizarre Martian take to any of us alive today. The past was a foreign country. If you just stamp your feet and repeat “all old books is just rich white men” you’re not only completely wrong but missing genuinely different perspectives.
As an aside, what does it mean to not have a reasonably good understanding, as a man, of a woman’s perspective in 2024? Did you have mother, sisters, or cousins? No friends or girlfriend or wife? No empathy? As a last resort never read mumsnet or 2X? Ignoring the fact that once again highlighting the sex differences ignores the fact there are literally four billion women and they all have different perspectives, they’re not a hive mind, if you have to read a book to figure out the common differences in perspective…hasn’t something really gone wrong in society for that to even be possible? And could a book by some woman you don’t know and had some kind of connections or very unique experience - she got published after all - really tell you more than having long and deep empathetic conversations with people you actually know?
Books are great because they’re a window into that we can never see for ourselves. Literally 50% of the people on Earth right now are a different sex. You can find out what they think right now with no effort. We don’t need the nth book on “what it’s like to be an X in America”, we all know, everyone is shouting it from the rooftops. I’d trade it all for more Sappho, and I’m a member of a minority group that could write my own What It’s Like to Be An X in America book.
Sex and skin color most definitely influence unique experience (not exclusively of course). I guess you didn’t catch this in your readings of Shakespeare.
I don't think it's as bad as <0.001%. There's a larger volume of books published these days than ever before the 2nd world war, so there's a lot more crap to wade through, the nice thing about old books is that time has done the job of pruning out a lot of the crap.
I think people still write good books which can provide good insights into the human condition, it's just hard to find them in the present.
The proposition that no one has written a worthwhile book or had a new insight in the past 24 years is so laughably indefensible that it stuns me to see someone put it forth in earnest. To engage with it risks dignifying it beyond its stature. Rather than post my own list of books, I will link to this democratically determined list of "books that changed your thinking, changed your mind, enlightened you, helped you move ahead, helped you heal, in short, made a difference.":
I don’t guess we’ll ever come to an understanding then, because I find that list totally laughable and a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I like Bill Bryson and I own the book but if his a Short History of Nearly Everything (#1 on the list) is the strongest example of what “changed your thinking, changed your mind, enlightened you, helped you move ahead” etc., well, things are very grim indeed. Scrolling down the list mostly gets much worse. The world would be no worse off if most of those books had never existed, and many of them don’t offer anything new at all. I scrolled down to 100, against my better instincts and encountering such luminaries as Tina Fey.
People have had interesting insights in that period - of course - but very few of them require anything longer than a sentence, and they are few and far between.
By the way, 2000 was chosen semi-arbitrarily, I would probably put the line much farther back.
Obviously it's a bit of a cop out but analysis of events. Books on the invasion of Iraq, or the gulf war. Books on the financial crisis. You might say this is a small portion of what's worth reading, but these are things with undoubtedly huge relevance to what is happening today in the short term future, as well as giving insight into the people and systems that govern us very specifically
I could be wrong, but I think almost everything in those examples exists in news articles, although to be fair, those articles are often long-form, and some are sourced with reporting from the books you mention. I've never read a book on either subject, but I maybe presumptuously think myself well-informed. ;)
I do think, as time goes on, and things are declassified, we'll learn more about e.g., the Iraq War than we know now. To a point, things become clearer with distance, which often renders books written on contemporary subjects outdated. But a book published today could be a decent summary of events for people who didn't live through them, or were too young to pay attention at the time. Unfortunately, one recent why I don't pay them too much mind is that most of the genre is hopelessly partisan, one way or another, and I don't know that there are any really great historians to write something timeless. But either way, I would say the insights you can glean from those books are still readily available if you're watching events critically today. Not much has changed, and if it has, it was usually for the worst. Maybe the most interesting part for many people would be the reminder that many of the same people directly responsible for those disasters are still considered respectable people today and help drive policy. E.g., Bill Kristol didn't go into some kind of exile - he's still considered a very serious person and has a lot of influence and is out there shilling the same type of thinking in a different context.
> I could be wrong, but I think almost everything in those examples exists in news articles, although to be fair, those articles are often long-form, and some are sourced with reporting from the books you mention. I've never read a book on either subject, but I maybe presumptuously think myself well-informed. ;)
Crashed, by Adam Tooze was a very very good retelling of the GFC, and I did read all the newspapers at the time and still found lots of interesting stuff.
More generally, I'd argue that modern historians probably have the highest chance of producing useful new insights recently.
If you accept fiction (and like fantasy fiction), I'd argue that the Malazan books of the fallen and/or the Nine Worlds series are serious works that are going to endure. Ask me again in a century, though ;)
I recently read a blog that argued exactly the opposite: that there was no point in reading old books because if they contained good ideas, somebody had written a newer book that better summarized those and combined them with new ideas, and that old books were liable to be wrong. Both arguments are wrong. The point is to read good books, not (usually) to just pick books before or after a certain date. I see elsewhere you argue that people at the time can’t evaluate the facts because they don’t have perspective. It is usually argued that people writing history lack understanding (and facts) about periods they didn’t live through. Short vs long form is also missing the point: short articles can be error ridden, misguided and even boring. At best they will waste less of your time, but there are great, long books that provide texture and insight that cannot be summarized.
I would say that contemporary literature can't provide any insights, by definition. Because it's a slave to its zeitgeist. Anything touching politics, history, economy and especially society will be tainted.
The difference is that the books we still read are the ones that have proven to be more universally true than the rest. We only know about old books that have remained relevant in one way or another. We've long forgotten the tripe.
With modern things, we don't yet know what will remain relevant and what will fade into obscurity or lose its relevance.
Of course all literature is a product of its time but when you are reading an old book most of the time you are distanced from the events or then-new ideas presented and it's much easier to think objectively about them. As an example I'll give Marx works on communism. If I was XIX century working man I would be ecstatic about the idea, with the hindsight how communism actually works in practice I would have second thoughts. But the difference between the theory and the practice would be the actual insight. And in case of the contemporary events the actual insight would be in how they were presented and perceived when they were happening compared to how they are seen now
“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.
“First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. [...] And in time there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality.”
