"Old" Books

Recently someone commented that I read a lot of "old" books, so I looked at my reviews and realized that most of my reading has been TBSL, especially those that have been sitting around the shelves, unread.

I don't read a lot of "new" books, though there are a few authors writing currently that I have discovered through LT.

What is it about those TBSL that draws us to read them? Why do we savor the foxed and yellowed pages over something new and shiny?

I'd love to get everyone's thoughts. :)

Handling old things that have weathered the test of time, to me, are soothing and comforting after a day of coping with contemporary chaos. (In a very similar key, on Sundays, I dearly miss singing the hymns my mom used to hum while she was sewing. We sing off a screen now.)

I think, also, the writing style from years gone by causes us to slow down the pace of our thoughts. Modern stories written in terse present tense make me nuts. I live presently tense. When I read, I want to un-tense, thank you.

I think I read a pretty good mix, although, most of my current books are in the fantasy/scifi genre. I have enjoyed a few of the current fictions out there, but so many have a dissatisfied tone to them. As >2 gmathis: says, I have enough angst and troubles to deal with, my reading is for pleasure and escape. If I can learn a thing or two along the way, all the better.

Also, most of the books on my shelves were inherited and are thus older. Free. I don't have a lot of money to spend on new books.

>2 gmathis: I like our church, as we use good ol'fashioned hymnals. The pastor has a microphone on the pulpit, but he doesn't really need it. Some of the so-called "old" stuff is better, imo.

>3 MrsLee: even the SciFi I am reading are from the 80s and 90s, lol. I have started reading some more current stuff that others have recommended. I wish some authors didn't feel it was necessary to get graphic.

Free is good. Used book stores at $1 a book are good. Library discards at 25 cents each are good. My most recent acquisition was a collection of Punch cartoons, published in 1952...I paid a whopping $3.70 including shipping. That was good!

New and shiny is lovely. There is something very exciting about cracking the spine of a copy no one has read before you have, especially if it is newly released. It's a trip into unknown territory.

The old lovelies appeal for different reasons. For me one is that the writing in these takes its time. I can sink into the prose in a leisurely way, and there is a comfort in the pretty covers and the well worn pulpy pages that I associate with library books from my childhood. (I read "old" even then.) There is also a lot in these older books which is inferred but not made specific, (both sex and violence) and while there is sometimes moral ambiguity, there is usually an understood set of social norms that provide a framework for the action of the characters, and that is sometimes very appealing.

I find the writing styles so very different with books written before the 1950s. I am generally more interested in books written before the 1940s and from the 19th century. The descriptions are much more interesting, the characters have a very different sensibility and focus is on the topics of the era, which are generally very different from what interests us today.

I believe that aviddiva says it best:
>5 aviddiva: : "There is also a lot in these older books which is inferred but not made specific, (both sex and violence) and while there is sometimes moral ambiguity, there is usually an understood set of social norms that provide a framework for the action of the characters, and that is sometimes very appealing."

I read a pretty good mix of old and new. I love reading older books, especially by relatively obscure authors and/or about relatively obscure or unknown (at least to me) periods and places in history, because I feel like I am sharing something with the person or people who have owned the book before me, and filling in one or two of the many blanks in my knowledge. It's especially fun to find an old book I've never heard of and do a little research only to find that the book was a big deal for one reason or another when first published.

>7 rocketjk: that's an interesting thought, sharing the old book with a previous owner/reader.

Pardon my ignorance, but please what is TBSL?

See the name of the group. The group description will explain more.

Thanks