Generally, when I pick books to read for fun, I prefer older books. I have nothing wrong with newer titles-I do not find them puerile and immature, or anything silly like that-but I find, by and large, that I gravitate towards the tried and true in literature. Especially books from the 20s and 30s-Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf, those sort of people.
At the same time, I do have a cutoff. Generally, books that are older than, say, 200 years, I usually find tedious. Going further back, even Shakespeare (and I am aware I am committing a minor blasphemy here) grates a little bit to my modern mind. So the question arises: do books have an expiration date?
The age of a book shouldn't matter, necessarily. Just because a book is old doesn't mean it shouldn't carry as much weight as it did when it was first published, nor does it mean a book is inherently less enjoyable because it is older. At the same time, however, there is a sort of challenge and difficulty underlying older books.
The trouble stems from language: languages constantly evolve. Words rise and fall out of favor, or emerge from the ether to explain something particular (what was "telephone" before Alexander Graham Bell appropriated it?). In any culture, slang is ubiquitous. We flush (and if you ask our grandparents, clog) our conversations with all sorts of shortcuts and turns of phrase that make us feel very special for taking language and making it into our own little code. By and large this is a beautiful process.
But as someone who is living in the present, there is a disconnect between the books of the past (and the culture from which they emerged) and my mind. Maybe I can't wrap my mind around the phrasing, or I can't place all the references and allusions. But at any rate, with older books, their age can become distracting.
Sometimes I wish this wasn't the case for me, though on rare occasions it is not: I enjoyed "Don Quixote" when I read it in 11th grade, and Charles Dickens and Henry James certainly don't belong in a reliquary quite yet. Poetry, too, is less susceptible to aging. Nonetheless, there is the feeling that in not liking older books, I'm missing out on whole swaths of history, distancing myself from a past I could learn from.
The greatest trouble with this trend is all books are susceptible. Even the books I love, from authors in the 20s and 30s, may someday be regarded as too old to enjoy. Inevitably, people won't connect with "The Sun Also Rises" or "Dubliners" the same way they did when they were published, or now, or afterwards. As someone who loves writing and the written language, this is a little disturbing. But there is a solution.
One of my favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has a quote on the matter: "An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards." By and large, I think this is true. As a book ages, it becomes less a fresh, living testament of the present world (discounting historical fiction) and more and more a piece of history. For instance, Dante's "Inferno" is great if you ever want to learn about famous Italians Dante hated, rather than just a poem about bumming through Hell.
To keep them from going sour, that is how old books should be read-in the interpretive (read: schoolmaster's) domain. They may not be flush with the same vitality and contemporary relevance, they may take on the weight of time, but a truly good book can still wow and impress a reader, no matter how old.
Does "A Midsummer Night's Dream" put you in a state too close to its title? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
