Degringolade

Edo period (1603–1867) / Hiroshige/ First Cuckoo of the Year at Tsukudajima

Needing a good reason to read a new novel lately.  I have tried on quite a few new ones and interest has petered out after reading long enough to get an idea of how the writer writes and the characters get introduced.  There are more books out there than you can shake a stick at.  But there only appears to be a couple of themes.  Now themes are tried and true, and one could offer the idea that there is no new plot in the world.  But like fine cooking, the person putting the same old ingredients together is as important as the ingredients.

Of course, maybe books are like music.  Every once in a while there are periods where an incredible number of good things are created all at once.  In music, while there is still a lot of new music happening and quite a bit of it is good, it kinda withers out when put in the shade of older stuff.  Us boomers are a royal pain in the ass and supped too frequently at the table, but as a generation we had some damn fine music we still own Motown and rock and roll.  

Maybe the problem is the attention span needed for books.  One can do a pretty decent survey to pick out new music in the current music catalog with a period of munching gummi bears and cleaning the house with a set of headphones.  So even though the ore isn’t all that rich you can find good stuff.  

Books are harder.  The advent of the common uses and physical skill set required for word processing has a bunch of folks making books, and changes to the printing industry and the advent of the ebook has allowed a flood of new books out in the wild.  But books aren’t like music, you can’t tell if a book is going to work for you while you are washing dishes.  Mining thin ore is easy for music, the time commitment is minimal.  Mining for good novels is a damn sight harder, the time commitment is in weeks.

The one advantage of the old publishing industry is that, for the most part, they kept the mediocre down.  When typewriters and paper and printing presses were the physical bars to mediocrity, the level of published mediocrity was significantly lower.

I can’t say as we can go back, I just wish that I could figure out a way to sift through the flood of new so that my batting average for the new books I read could rise.

(BTW:  The last “Great” Sci Fi book that I read was “The Rememberance of Earth’s Past” by Liu Cixin”)