On Reading a ‘New Release’ Book

You may have noticed from my discussions that I don’t read much modern literature. I think Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Choke might be the only works of narrative prose (i.e. – fiction or creative nonfiction) published within the last 25 years on my bookshelf at home. (Correction: I also have Nick Horby’s novel High Fidelity, Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction work Into The Wild, Tao Lin’s short story collection Bed, and one or two others.) There are a few reasons for this. First, I’ve been trying to catch up on many of the “classics” that I missed out on while skirting the reading requirements in high school English classes. More often than not, I managed to patch together a project without reading the entire book — and N64’s “Goldeneye” seemed much more important at the time.

The second reason is more complex, but it relates to my skepticism over the value of contemporary publishing. I’m sure there’s a long catalog of works that try to explain the reasons for the degraded efficacy of modern literature: people watch too much TV and movies, play too many video games, aren’t educated enough, or are tasteless, unrefined cretins. That’s without even mentioning the publishing industry’s concerns over lagging profits. Of course, the assumption there is that the publishers deserved whatever success they had enjoyed up until recent times.