I only read the classics

>I only read the classics
What is up with people on here only reading classics? That's like being alive when those authors were still writing books and missing their masterpieces because you were too busy reading the Greeks.

I read mostly classics. I try newer stuff too, but prefer to stay in the 19th and 20th century.

but the classics are better

The thing is that hindsight is 20/20. People tend to look back with rose-colored glasses but there were just as many shit books written back then as there are now. So yeah you might pick up Crime and Punishment in a bookstore in Petersburg in 1886 or you might pick up one of the thousands of shit books that were published that year. However now the books that have survived from 1886 are guaranteed to at least have some value so if I read classics I don't really have to worry about whether or not reading them will be a valuable use of my time and if I was just buying whatever was on the NYT bestsellers list, I would.

Because people have less time, and because there's less of a filter of active intellectual circles to know what is really ground-breaking in new literature and what is just circulated for publisher profit and pseud credentialism.

If you want to justify reading something as truly essential nowadays you have to justify it as either classic or fun.

Pretty much everyone on this board got crappy modern educations so we're all catching up and trying to become familiar with works that literary people of the past would already have read by this age.

>reading anything but the greeks

If these authors were alive today we would have no way distinguishing between them and the other 200 megatons of pages published every year . time is the most ruthless critic. More has already been written than you could read if you lived 100 times your natural life span, and we produce more and more and more at an ever growing rate. 90% of everything is shit and you do not have time for the new

People here have no critical reading or thinking ability so they need academic and historical consensus to tell them what is worth consuming.

>he doens't exclusively watch OOP VHS from garage sales and head shop back rooms featuring big actors first days