On Reading New Books

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t dawned on me recently that I’d said now a number of times something along the lines of, “I don’t usually like new fiction {and is new literature even written at all anymore?}, but I was surprised to find myself liking…” Insert name of book that made the list of exceptions.

I think I can only say this so many times before I have to admit that I like a number of new books. I liked The Thirteenth Tale. I adored Ella Minnow Pea. Most recently, I declared my approval for The Charlatan’s Boy.

Does anyone else see a pattern here? The new books I all remind me of something good about the old books I’ve loved. Whether it be the Brontë overtones of The Thirteenth Tale, the clever, Austenian way with words in Ella Minnow Pea, or the tinge of Lewis here and Tolkien there in The Charlatan’s Boy, I find that there is something to be said for contemporary books, after all.

Some of them, anyway.

And I think that perhaps that’s the point.

The old books have already been tested. The sieve of time has sifted out the dull, the uninteresting, and the hopelessly-lost-in-their-own-period, while preserving the gems that are beautifully written and timeless.

Surely Shakespeare had his peer playwrights, but we see that the sieve proved him while discarding most of the others.

My issue with modern books, then, is that the sieve has yet to be applied. I approach them with a sense of wariness. Will they prove to be worth the time and energy it takes in reading them? A good book can add depth to the mind and wisdom and virtue to the soul, but how hard it is to find good ones in the midst of the cluttered shelves of New Releases.

It dawns on me that perhaps it is simply not my calling to be a sieve.