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’ve been recently getting into some older writers from the 70s. It is funny, but it feels refreshing to read voices from a different era. I’m a Gen Z guy, I wasn’t around in the 70s, so I never knew what it was like apart from movies/TV. Movies and TV from that era feel dated, its obvious from the visuals, you can’t get around film grain and visual noise.
But writing doesn’t age, it remains pristine. It makes it easy to forget that the books are old, except for the fact that the voices of the authors are so different - about 40 years out of touch or so.
I’ve been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and absolutely loving it. I read Adventures in the Screentrade by William Goldman and absolutely loved that.
If you’re interested, I have a resource that you might find interesting.
When I first started writing book recommendations on Reddit, I realized that I was repeating myself pretty often. So I created an online document to store recommendations as I wrote them. Not only did that save me time, but it allowed me to polish and improve them over the years. It’s up to nearly 1,000 books now.
Eventually someone asked me to publish it to the web, so I did.
It’s a bit rough and not final-formatted - it’s a working document, after all - but I’ve enjoyed every book on that list, and I add to it pretty frequently. The document includes sections for lots of different genres, although the largest ones are science fiction, fantasy, and children’s books (with a lot of humor sprinkled throughout). There’s also an eBook section with non-Amazon sources for free and pay ebooks. Oh, I should say that I DON’T like advertising, so there’s none of that in my document - nor in anything else I post online.
My God! That’s quite a list. I’ll browse through it a little. Such a resource to have!
Wow, what a nice resource! Thank you for posting this.
My book club votes every month on one person’s nominees, and last month I nominated these choices from my Dad’s old fantasy shelf:
Nine princes in amber, Chronicles of Amber series, Roger Zelazny
Midnight at the well of souls, Well world series, Jack L Chalker
Guardians of time, time patrol series, Poul Anderson
Sorcerer’s son, book of elementals series, Phyllis Eisenstein
It turned out that all of them were out of print and unavailable except for Amber… which the library didn’t have! Really frustrating, as I read them as a kid and they’re all amazing. There is a huge stock of interesting and subversive 60’s and 70’s fantasy out there that does seem to be in danger of being forgotten.
On the bright side, I feel like Goodreads is helping people rediscover old stuff. I don’t have a Goodreads account, but I do appreciate their lists. For example, here is a list of classic 60s sci-fi: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/5158.Classic_Science_Fiction_1960_1969
There’s another list for the 70’s, and more for fantasy. So that does make me feel better; you could spend years down the 70’s subversive sci-fi rabbit hole.
Anyways, check out the Chronicles of Amber, it’ll blow your mind.
*Sorry for my poor formatting, mobile is hard.
Roger Zelazny is one of my favorite authors. He turned me on to the poetry of A.E. Housman, too.
I must admit that I hated Jack Chalker for what he did in so many of his books: create sympathetic characters and then abuse them in unimaginably horrible ways. I was so angry that I almost walked up to him and told him off when he was the guest of honor at a local convention.
Almost.
If you haven’t read Zelazny’s Lord of Light, you should really check it out. It’s generally considered his magnum opus. The only caveat is that there’s a flashback that starts with the second chapter that lasts for more than half the book. Some people get confused by that!
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.
Octavia E. Butler’s books. I read Kindred just yesterday and loved it. I know it’s not that old, but still - it’s not Brian Sanderson :)