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?
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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’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.