I’m an old reader who loved older books even when I was young. As such, I was horrified to discover that older books are almost totally unknown to younger readers. As best I understand it, Amazon and the remaining booksellers of the world focus mainly on new books; perhaps they don’t make as much money on older literature.
But there are so many great older books out there. And I love those books. So I started recommending them over on Reddit. In the field of fantasy, for example, there are a million people recommending Brian Sanderson and nobody recommending the works of Lord Dunsany, Michael Moorcock, or Barry Hughart - among many other wonderful older fantasy authors.
Lord Dunsany in particular wrote a short piece that touches on this point:
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.
The way I see it, recommending an older book to a new reader is helping a raft to float a little longer. What great old books do you like to recommend?
I’m very much a fan of Dunsany - though I’m in my '50s so certainly don’t count as a younger reader. I clearly recall reading The Hoard of the Gibbelins as a teen (probably in de Camp’s The Spell of Seven) and being smitten from then on.
Moving further afield than fantasy, I don’t know if anyone reads M. R. James these days. His ghost stories are still adapted for seasonal TV shorts by the BBC as well as cropping up on Radio 4, but whether he is actually read…?
Another that is underappreciated is George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, which to my mind is easily on a par with Three Men in a Boat, but gets nothing like as much appreciation. But, then how many people read Three Men… nowadays?
I recently discovered M.R. James and have his Collected Ghost Stories on my to-read list.
I would advise not reading them all together. They were published separately and are best read that way IMHO - just dipped into between other reads. James had particular settings and themes that his did extremely well and returned to often. I love love his tales, but I must admit that reading them them all consecutively does them no favours.
I discovered Dunsany through Larry Niven’s short story “Transfer of Power”, which was inspired by Dunsany’s stories set at the Edge of the World (it’s available in his Convergent Series collection, which is well worth reading).
Back then nobody knew about Dunsany, it seemed. His books simply weren’t available. The web didn’t exist yet; I was on usenet as an early adopter, but online book searches were a decade or more in the future. I found some of his books in my college library, lovely soft green leather-covered books, but the circulation slips in the back showed that none of them had been taken out for more than twenty years.
I hadn’t heard of M.R. James or Diary of a Nobody! But I’m going to look them up. As for Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), that’s a favorite recommendation of mine!
One thing I’m really going to miss about Reddit is the book-suggestion subs. I really love telling people about great books. Unfortunately there aren’t any equivalent communities on Lemmy, at least not yet. And even if there were, they wouldn’t have all the traffic that there was on Reddit.