I occasionally pick up aged best seller to get a whiff of how pop culture has changed. Correctly working through Tom Clancy, The Bear and the Dragon © 2010. That is, after the fall of the USSR, but before 9/11, before Trump made a major entree on the political scene, before proliferation of powerful cell phones, back when Google was just getting going and Amazon was mostly a book seller.
Yccch, the sexism and macho bravado. But also weird politics. The Chinese are repeatedly referred to as “Klingon” and the plot has Russia invited to join NATO to fend off a Chinese grab of gold and oil in Eastern Siberia.
It’s interesting how some popular authors age reasonably well (eg, for me at least, John le Carre, Stephen King) while others fail the test of time.
by sandgrubber