New books aren't worth reading?

When it comes to Roman history, and for those that can read French, I heartedly recommend Histoire romaine - Tome 1 - de origines à Auguste, by François Hinard, beats the Mary Beard slop by a very long mile. I only knew the most general facts about the Romans going into this book, but after reading it I can say I'm way better informed on who the Romans were and how and thought.

Also, I was literally thinking about these very lines just before clicking on this link:

> The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat. And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions.

not specifically about historians (even though I mostly had them in mind). Not sure if there's an easy solution for that, at least not when it comes to "soft" sciences. For what it's worth it looks like the scientific departments the less influenced by the Anglo worldview are the least affected by that, but they're getting very few and far between.

[1] https://www.fayard.fr/livre/histoire-romaine-tome-1-97828185...

> But your great grandfather was reading Cicero in Latin.

My great-grandfathers certainly were not.

> Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge. She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian.

One can read old books to get a perspective on what "great" old writers think, and one can read Mary Beard to get the perspective of a "great" Cambridge don. You can even read writers that you don't agree with!

The "new books aren't worth reading" title is click-bait as is the rest of the article.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the conclusion, but from a different perspective. One of the interesting things I've found about literature is that it's hard to fully appreciate the nuances in the decade it's written.

It's a bit like nose blindness; you don't appreciate the subtle way that your house smells until you've been away from it for a while. Books have a similar "smell" in the sense that it becomes easier to see what aspects are tethered to a particular era and what aspects are more universal when some time has passed. Even "fun" works like Snow Crash have aspects of this; there are parts of the book that stand out as pretty timeless and others that feel early 90s-west coast ways of viewing the world and people. When I read it for the first time years ago, none of that really stood out.

Same thing applies to film though. Ignoring pacing, My Dinner with Andre is IMHO way more fascinating to watch today than it was 45 years ago, because what's wheat and what's chaff is clearer in retrospect.

> Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. You do not live in a log cabin on the prairie. You have Netflix, you have video games, you have TikTok, you have Twitter (you really spend too much time on Twitter anon). No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform.

I see that this has already been criticised here, but to add my two cents, I believe that reading books has become one of the very last widely available (perhaps free?) entertainment media that is not anxiety inducing and mentally draining. 10 years ago reading books may have been a kind of a snobbish activity, but now it is one of very few things to engage in before you go to bed that will help you relax and get good sleep.