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If you were to think of the novels within your book collection, how many would be considered contemporary? By that I mean, how many of them were written within the last ten years that were not children’s stories? One? Two, perhaps? Three, at a push. Four and you are a liar. But don’t worry. You’re not alone in your contribution to making the work of a modern day author so devoid of lucrativeness. I feel it, too. I don’t want to be reading about text messages, how someone sent someone a crude message on Facebook, how a certain Youtube video inspired the protagonist to go and wed his girlfriend of ten years and have their life topple along a road to misery (how they struggle to get a house, pay off their student debt etc.).

No, I don’t want to read any of that. But why? What is this innate repellence against reading something so in chime with the times? Why do we always look to the past for some satisfaction? Food isn’t like this; we don’t look for mold in bread as a prerequisite to its quality (though I am aware that this does happen for wine and cheese). Increasingly so, it doesn’t happen with music either. Though there may be some middle-aged people out there clinging desperately onto the tunes of their youth, this in itself is them holding on tenaciously to what their ‘contemporary’ was, their ‘time’.

We have, when reading a piece of literature, a somewhat romantic view of the past. It’s almost as if to open a book is to enter into a time capsule in which we can gorge on what we are presented by it. I remember when my best friend and I read through some of the Beat Generation’s work, especially that of Kerouac, and suddenly we were bitter at reality. Where had all the smoke-filled rooms oozing with drink and jazz gone? We would really dig them if we lived in that time! And oh, how we would love to just hitchhike around, not absorbed in our virtual world. If only we lived in that time, we thought.

It may be because we have, when learning literature, been conditioned into admiring these texts of the past. Shakespeare is obviously held up as a god; Virginia Woolf is a feminist icon; James Joyce a genius. This education, perhaps took its toll in a psychological way. That everything that is contemporary connotes mediocrity and cannot hold up to the past.

Or maybe it is perhaps we relish in fantasy; that these novels of old offer us something completely outside of our contemporary reality, and yet hold enough truth as to exist again. Perhaps that is all there is to it. Perhaps we read just to escape the reality of today. So fear not Zadie Smith, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy! In fifty years time a scholar, wearing Nike Huarache trainers, will pick up your tomes and transport themselves to today.

Image Credits: chriswejr.com