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Classics and contemporary
A Sunday lunch with a friend bring me to this conversation, to choose to read books and why we choose them.
She like classics and keep buying and reading classics. I like them too but I found it even more important to buy contemporary books. Here is the reason why.
Classics, are a filtered selection of good books that survived the time, even when the writers themselves are long gone.
We read them as to learn from them and get the basic ideas on what they are like. These are the foundation of our common knowledge, a point of reference of what we want to say, without too much explanation.
But these writers do not need as much of a support from readers as contemporary writers do. I as reader as a responsibility to encourage writers to write good books, and discourage publishers to decreasing their frequency of publishing bad books.
It is not just a matter of taste. There should be some standard of what books would survive them and what would be fade out of people memory.
There are so many contemporary writers and it takes much more of a personal affords to find a good one. This finding, is also part of the interaction of finding your own taste in books.
For classics, many of the books that are pretty good already by today's standard might have lost to us already because the demand is not enough to reprint them.
For contemporary, the first screening is by the publishing houses, that we know would miss many good stuff and then allow a lot of bad stuff published.
Once it is published, it is a matter of getting to know a book by its writing. Spending hours and hours finding a good books and reading a good books and moving on to the next one.
In the process, readers share not their time, and many times their money in support of a good books.
When I saw Sam Harris new book got published and is on a top list, I'm happy for him. I too want him to continue to be a writer.
I like new books and I hope I could continue doing this for the rest of my very limited life.
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