Quote:
Originally Posted by Dngrsone
... and yet many books simply do not age well. It's a double-edged sword.
|
I would argue that changing currencies, etc., is hardly the sort of thing that will improve aging -- rather, the opposite. Some of what I like about older books is that view into the time of the writing. Not all still work (witness our collective dissatisfaction with The Three Musketeers when we read it for the New Leaf Book Club), but others work remarkably well. And updating them only introduces anachronisms.
In another thread here, several of us have been commenting on a tendency to re-read old favourites in times of stress. For many of us, those old favourites include some wonderful older books whose authors are long dead. My old favourites include Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Patricia Wentworth, P. G. Wodehouse, and Margery Allingham. All from a very different era than my more contemporaneous favourites.