Old vs. New - Which era of literature is better?

I’ve seen people write blog posts not reviewing books, but instead things like the book vs. the movie adaption. While I’ve been hesitant to do this style of blog, as I’ve been comfortable sticking to book reviews, I saw now as a good opportunity to deviate from what I’m used to. Some reasons being that I want to explain why I basically only write about older, pre twenty-first century books for my blog, and that I’m working towards a pretty interesting blog for next time (for anyone who cares, it’s a pretty old book).

If you’ve read the title, you’ll see that I’m going to be talking about which era of literature is better (fiction books). The problem though is that I’m biased to older books, so I’ll have to approach this topic in a non-biased way. My solution is using a table, with general categories that will be given to either the new or the old:

But before I continue I want to make it clear that these eras of books are kind of loose, so books from the 1980’s can still be part of the twenty first century books. 

(Also I know a table doesn’t really fix the bias problem, but does it really matter?)

	Pre twenty first century fiction books	Twenty first century fiction books
Creativity	X
Legibility		X
Engagement (does the book engage the reader?)	X	X
Compelling Plot	X
Interesting Characters	X	X
Interesting setting	X	X
Deeper meaning (if the book has a message, does it show the message in a good and creative way?)	X
Relatability		X
Final Score:	6	5

If you’re confused about these choices, I’ll explain them to you now. A warning though: I wrote a lot, so you can skip to certain sections or to the end if you want. Also, the way I decided on the categories is I thought about what I want when I read a book. I’ve probably forgotten some things, so you can write a comment to remind me.

The first category is creativity, and what I mean by that is the book is unique and offers something new for the reader that they haven’t seen yet. I think a lot of people can agree with me on this choice, as back then, there were more unique ideas because less of them were taken. But nowadays, a lot of good ideas have already been written and oversaturated (like time traveling or alien invasions). This category is probably one of the main reasons I read older books, as I want something new and fresh to read that I haven’t before (which I know sounds contradicting, as older things are not “new”, but I hope you know what I mean).

The second category is legibility, which makes sense because you want to be able to understand what you read. I’m pretty sure most people can agree on my choice with modern books being more “reader-friendly”, as they use less complicated words (which that in itself could be its own blog, as I feel annoyed that all the sophisticated words and the more professional type of writing has almost completely vanished, with instead a lot more simple style of writing). In my opinion, I like books that are worded in a more complicated way, but the truth is I can’t understand older books as well without a dictionary, so reluctantly I give the point to twenty first century books. 

The third category is engagement, and I think this is a debatable category, unlike the previous two. This one is a lot more opinionated, as people can understand books differently. The problem that older books have faced in the previous categories is that most people nowadays have a hard time understanding the wording, and that can make the reader like the book less and not be interested in it. In my opinion, if we all had a larger vocabulary, older books would easily be better for anyone. Anyway, I gave them both engagement, as people have different tastes.  But in my opinion, I find older books more engaging even with the more complicated vocabulary (I use a dictionary, which helps).

The fourth category is compelling plot, and the reason I gave it to pre twenty first century books is related to creativity. They had more ideas to use that were unique, and that created a compelling plot. 

The fifth category is interesting characters, and I was being nice to the modern books on this one. I will say that a decent amount of books back then were more focused on the world rather than individual characters (which I have grown to like), but books nowadays focus more on the characters and their own developments. But because characters nowadays are cliche and cringy most of the time, I tied them with characters from older books (there are some notable characters from pre twenty first century books, like Bilbo Baggins, Watson and Holmes, and other characters like Ishmael).

The sixth category is an interesting setting. Like most of the other categories, this is connected to core fundamentals like creativity. But the reason I gave both eras points is they each have their own appeal. Books in the modern times are usually set in more unrealistic settings, like post apocalyptic or in space, while books of the past were set in the “modern” world with only one crazy thing happening (like in War of the Worlds, the setting is London, but the only difference is aliens are invading). I find both settings interesting, but slightly prefer the older setting more. There’s something about seeing the world in the past that’s cool for me.

The penultimate category (seventh category) is deeper meaning, which I know sounds weird, but is actually in most books you read. Most books try to convey a message through the story, and the way the author tries to push the message is interesting for me, if done well. For example, the book The War of the Worlds (which I know I keep mentioning, but it’s such a good book, which I should probably write a blog on) on the surface is a simple book about alien invasion. But if you read between the lines and know a little bit about the author (he studied biology, including evolution), you’ll realize that the book is a warning for what we could evolve into if we keep improving our technology. Books nowadays don’t have messages that are implemented so well like older books, which is why I give the point to older books.

Finally, the eighth category is relatability, which I gave to modern books because for example, no one nowadays has lived during the nineteenth century. More people can relate to books set in the twenty-first century. 

If you’ve made it this far, I’m impressed and confused why you would do that. I appreciate that you’ve read through my rant, and I hope I have said some things that made sense. Hopefully, my next blog is shorter than this one.

-Mahdi