In the past couple of months I have started rereading books I read last in the 1990s and liked a lot then. The surprise and excitement of discovering a new world is less, of course, for I am already familiar with the worlds in those books. What surprised me the most, is that some books still hold up while others have become boring, bland, or otherwise uninteresting.
For example, I was unable to even get into Williams’ Otherland series. And I devoured Feist’s Magician almost like I did when I was in my teens.
How do you experience rereads from your youth? What writing characteristics makes a book eternally fresh or almost immediately dated?
That’s a really good question.
There’s so many books that age incredibly badly, and I’ve always been adamant that I won’t get marooned in an increasingly outdated past. Just because I enjoyed something decades ago, doesn’t mean it’s good now.
For now the best I’ve got is Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crud.
A combination of perspective, experience, and no longer relying on the discount tables at secondhand bookshops makes it a lot easier to pick the raisins out of the oatmeal of mediocrity that we once had to plough through longhand. Those other books were always kind of ehh, but we just read them anyway.
Or perhaps better-aging books pick more-universal themes and anxieties to work with, rather than more novel, topical approaches that are flashy at the time but quickly lose their relevance.
Perhaps people could find some examples from each pile, and we can try to draw out some commonalities.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have aged INCREDIBLY well. Like, scarily well.
(Fair warning: I didn’t actually read Lois McMaster Bujold in the 80s and 90s. But she DID publish then.)
She had a hermaphrodite character which, aside from the unfortunate pronoun choice of “it”, very much anticipates non-binary and trans people. There’s also a character who does a FTM transition, going from an aristocrat lady to an artistocrat lord…although that’s been written more recently. Still, it’s in a series that was started in the 80s, and the herm character was there from the very start.
She delves into many mental disorders with perspectives that are still mostly accurate–and when they aren’t, you can see that her then-depiction WAS following the medical understanding at the time the book was written instead of something entirely made up.
And even when they aren’t totally accurate, she always treats the subjects with some level of compassion. She writes more out of compassionate curiosity it seems on such subjects, and has some level of scorn or displeasure for treating people like spectacles. She even lampshades it when her character Miles is musing on his relationship with Taura…Miles is quite aware if the relationship got out people would treat it as a spectacle. (Which is exactly what would happen IRL if someone as short as him was seen with a woman like her.)
Bujold doesn’t get everything right, though. I suspect the character of Bothari–who was a schizophrenic rapist–was killed off early in the series probably because she realized she’d goofed up with him. We know now that schizophrenia and rape are not connected, and that schizophrenic people are more likely to be the target of violence than the one being violent.
Even so, his character is given respect as a person by the Vorkosigans, instead of mocked and belittled or made fun of. He’s seen as a tragic broken person who was used cruely by a different sadistic character as a weapon against others. He’s allowed to redeem himself in the service of the Vorkosigans as an armsman–he’s allowed to get as better as his condition will allowed him, which does not happen in all series. He’s even made the main armsman guarding the main character…despite his condition and past, he’s trusted THAT much. And his daughter, instead of being written as tainted or rejected due to who her father is as many authors might, goes on to live a fulfilling life and is even an object of the crush of the main character.
(You could also suspect that one of Bujold’s characters in another series, Penric, is an attempt to make up for the horrible depiction of Bothari, because in modern terms Penric would very much be considered schizophrenic given he has a voice in his head talking to him.)
All in all, Bujold does pretty good with her books, and I think it’s because she did her research on biology and sociology and correctly predicted where the trends of the 80s would end up if things continued. I also think her believing in humanity in an optimistic way, and her habit of showing “odd” or “different” characters compassion at every turn has helped a great deal with making her series age well.