I’ve seen a few posts or comments lately where people have criticised books merely because they’re written in the style of their time (and no, i’m not including the wild post about the Odyssey!) So my question is, is this a false snapshot of current reading tolerance due to just a giving too much importance to a few recent posts, or are people genuinely finding it hard to read books from certain time periods nowadays? Or have i just made this all up in my own head and need to go lie down for a bit and shush…
by your_name_22
5 Comments
You always have to take into account bias when reading things on reddit. The number of people who take time out of their day to make posts and comment on things about books is extremely small compared to people who simply read books.
That said there probably are people who have become less tolerant of older writing. There are also people who just say they have become less tolerant of older writing to feel morally superior or get imaginary internet points.
Without hard data done through a proper study no one can really say one way or another how people’s attitudes have shifted.
Literature is dying 😭
I find some old books hard to read (not only because of how they’re written, but also the topics they touch on), but I would never call them “bad” because of it. On the other hand, some classics are still relevant and are a great read to a modern audience.
It might be a false snapshot. Could be that someone wrote a post, another read it and wrote similar post for more visibility or because they just kept thinking about it.
>Or are people genuinely finding it hard to read books from certain time periods nowadays?
Reading comprehension is indeed way, way down to the point that even Ivy League students struggle with “classic” literature. There was a really interesting article sometime last year in the New Yorker iirc, where a professor at Harvard was quoted something like ‘last time I taught the Scarlet Letter my students struggled to even parse the work on the basis of its sentence structure’ lol
Quite the contrary. I’ve been invested in older books recently (Dorian Gray, Agatha Christie, Poe and now Henry James) and enjoyed them a lot. The older writing style adds something, but I don’t think these examples have gone out of fashion at all and find it quite fascinating to read what the world looked like back then.
Frankly, do you care what people on Reddit have to say about books? Isn’t your own opinion more important?