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Every time I see this variety of argument, I think it's notable that people still point to fairly contemporary novels instead of, say, The Cantebury Tales and the Epic of Beowulf. Despite explicitly calling for reaching backwards in time, your recommendations are still influence by a massive recency bias. Without even realizing it, you argue for reading novels that had currency and applicability to the era of your life that you read them in, and yet are completely out of touch about how changes to culture, technology, and in general the state of the world make those novels more and more irrelevant to the experience of children growing up now.
That era of my life was the 2000s bro, I just grew up in a well-educated household in a backwards country (England). Facebook and I believe the iPhone existed before I picked up my first Bond novel. The reality is that the slop of the past is immeasurably better than the slop of the present, it's a fact, indisputable. The problem that you mean by recency bias is that as you get further into the past it takes a lot more friction to overcome the cultural and linguistic difference, such that it's worth it to read Chaucer (because it's a great work, not comparable to the kids'/adolescents' books I suggest), but not worth it to read medieval mystery plays unless that's for your PhD. 20th-Century works are still perfectly accessible for young people. Relevant? I guess "relevant to the kids today" is always the phrase, but, if you compare mid-century books to what you're going to find on display in your local library, put there by the nice spherical woman with her degree in Library Science, I think I know which one will suit a young man better.
Yes, this is kind of my point. Meanwhile, young women have a endless quantity of "feminist retellings" that not only manage to give them a solid chunk of the timeless core of the old books, but also infuse them with all the new junk-candy ideologies.
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Maybe someone should write a Gen Z translation.
How about a modern James Bond who defeats crime syndicates that are using LLM's to hack people's crypto in order to use the money to fund bioweapons, while having to navigate modern norms regarding sex?
This is literally just Kingsmen, though.
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Did you play that IO Interactive James Bond games that came out a couple months ago?
Because it is essentially James Bond vs LLMs.
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To be fair to @GBRK, while I grew up in the same place reading the same stuff and I agree it still holds up (reread Swallows and Amazons last night, still good), the 2000s were already 20+ years ago. We’re old, man. And I agree with him that it would be nice to have good new books to go along with the good classic books.
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Buchan's most famous novel is over a hundred years old, which is right about halfway into the period where novels exist in their "modern" readable form. Literature obviously existed prior to then, but it's really only about the beginning of the 19th-century that stories start getting presented in the form we now basically expect as a baseline.
Modern readers will struggle to relate to the characters of Chaucer or Shakespeare or whoever, but I think that's mainly a problem of the form of those works being foreign. But starting with about Austen, that problem mostly goes away, leaving you with about two centuries of readable old books to pull from.
And because the number of titles increases ~monotonically year-over-year, the time-weighted average "old book" is probably from about the mid-20th-century. (And really, I'd guess including all the pre-19th-century books only drags the average back to about the early-20th-century.)
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