This Enlightened Modern Age

I do a LOT of book recommending over on Reddit.

It took me a while to realize that being an older reader, a voracious one with an excellent memory, gave me something valuable I could share with younger readers. In part, I think, because Amazon in particular has effectively suppressed most older books. They're not as profitable, apparently. And bookstores tend to focus on new books, too.

But I love those old books. I don't want them to be forgotten. My feelings about them are pretty much encapsulated by Lord Dunsany's very short piece "The Raft-Builders".

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.

When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.

They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.

See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.

See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.

After seeing the umpteenth post which amounted to "I've read TLOTR, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Game of Thrones so I guess there's no good fantasy left", well, I started recommending old books. Not just science fiction and fantasy, mind you; older books from lots of different genres. Almost nobody else was doing it.

I soon noticed that I was basically rewriting the same recommendations pretty often. So I started saving them in a document online for re-use. That allowed me to polish and improve them. The document got longer and longer. Eventually someone asked me to publish it, so I did. One thing I started doing over the years was include links to free ebooks in the public domain. I want to make the document as valuable to readers as possible.

I tried to read some newer books as well, but so far most of them have been pretty disappointing. Publishing standards have gone WAY down, as has writing quality. It's a sad situation.

But recently I was told that I'm out of date. Books from the 1980s and earlier don't live up to the standards of modern, enlightened readers. The characters don't have cell phones. They don't use pronouns. Most of them aren't trans, or gay, or gender-neutral. They just don't reflect the world we live in today.

Fuck that.

Nothing against pronouns, or LGBTQ++ people, or anything else - but I don't accept that great books from prior decades aren't great any more because they don't include the latest and most fashionable views of western society. If anything, I'm quite sure that the "enlightened" books of the past twenty years will age MORE poorly than the works of great authors like Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Cordwainer Smith, Lord Dunsany, or many others.

But even if I'm wrong about that, I won't be shamed into giving up the books I love - or intimidated into not recommending them to new readers.