Reading old books beats reading new ones

A book that survived fifty years has been pre-filtered by fifty years of readers.

Most new books haven't earned that.

This is not a snobbery argument. It's a probability one. The hit rate of new books is low. The hit rate of fifty-year-old books that are still in print is high, by definition. Selection bias works in your favor.

Most contemporary book recommendations are noise. The author is on a podcast tour. The publisher is paying for placement. The book is written to be marketed, which is a different discipline from being written to last.

The fifty-year-old book is in print because someone, somewhere, kept finding it useful enough to recommend, generation after generation. That's a much harder bar.

Three rules I follow:

For every new book I read, I read three old ones. The ratio is rough but the pattern is the constraint.

The older the book, the more carefully I read it. Old books survived for a reason. The reason is usually in the parts that look obvious or quaint to a modern eye.

I revisit books I loved ten years ago. The book hasn't changed; I have. What I notice in the second reading is information about how I've changed.

The books that get recommended on Twitter this week are mostly forgotten by next year. The books your favorite writer recommends were published before you were born for a reason.