The Importance of Reading Old Books

Why I do and why you should too

It was early June 2020, still amid COVID lockdowns, and I was less than a month away from completing grade eleven. I had read many things in my sixteen years of life, yet most of these books shared one thing: they were written in the 21st century. The books from previous centuries I had read numbered a derisory amount, and it was at this moment I realized this fact. While watching a video about classic book recommendations, my mind churned with thoughts. Why had I neglected reading old books for so long? Had I wasted years of my life? What did this say about my values and priorities? Which old books should I read first? And most importantly, how did I get to this point?

I have loved reading for as long as I could. My memories from early childhood are scarce, but one thing that stands out is my love for books. As a child with an advanced reading level for my age, I read almost anything I could get my hands on. Given that I did not specifically search out old books to read, most things I read were published within or shortly before my lifetime. There were, of course, some exceptions, but even those were not particularly “old,” generally having been written sometime in the latter half of the 20th century.

Upon reaching grade six, I discovered some of the more popular middle-grade fantasy series which were generally quite new. Such things became the majority of my reading, and I never really thought about reading older books, instead preferring to remain with familiar tropes and writing styles. If you had asked me back then what I thought about old books, I probably would have described them as “boring,” “confusing,” and “outdated” simply because I had such limited experience with them. I was influenced by the current cultural perceptions of newer as better, and since the extent of human knowledge is greater now than it ever has been, why would I concern myself with the writings of my ignorant predecessors?

One of the main reasons I avoided old books was because of a fear that I would not understand them. Despite being a voracious reader, I never excelled in English class. Things like grammar, spelling, and even reading comprehension tests were easy enough, but the thought of writing a literary analysis essay was emetic to me. Frequently, I had no idea where to start or what exactly I was expected to write. I wanted to enjoy the book for what it was, not struggle to extract some hidden meaning from within its pages.

Given my experiences, I thought old books were reserved for those more knowledgeable than me. Surely they would be dry and boring, full of complex words and concepts and complete with an outdated view of the world that someone with my level of education could ever dream of comprehending. Surely I did not possess the background information required to access the author’s true intent. Surely someone as foolish and childish as me was better off sticking to books from the children's section, leaving the classics to stuffy old professors in suits.

It took me a while to realize this flaw in thinking. My early teenage years were spent reading multitudinous new books and looking forward to the next releases. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with doing so, but I put so much focus on trendy new books with shiny covers at the expense of anything with yellowed pages and a deceased author.

A quotation that echoes a similar sentiment is contained within C. S. Lewis’s introduction to On the Incarnation, which I read last month. It is about old books and how often we as modern people ignore them. What he wrote there is still relevant in the way it describes the attitude most people have toward books from previous times.

There is a strange idea that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.¹

Finally, in early 2020, I discovered the community known as “booktube” - people who make YouTube videos all about books. This began what I can only define as a monumental shift in my reading. Not only did I find myself reading an increased quantity of books, I had a greater passion for them and began reading from a wider variety of genres than what I had previously done. It was at this point that my Goodreads want-to-read list exploded. One of my favourite types of videos to watch were book recommendation videos, as I previously had an extremely short list of books I wanted to read.

A certain type of book recommendation video that I found myself increasingly drawn to was that of classics - something that seemed so foreign and mysterious to me due to my continuous neglect of them for far too long. I truly had no idea where to start with such books and was overwhelmed by just how many I was being recommended. Yet I was increasingly curious about old books, and in late October, I began by reading Pride and Prejudice. The book quickly became my new all-time favourite, proving my past self completely and utterly wrong about classics; one could even say I had a long-standing prejudice against them.

However, I still had a very long way to go. The first classics I read were only 19th and 20th-century books, and while I ended up loving most of them, books from that time cover only a very small portion of literary history. It was only last year that I began incorporating ancient, medieval, and early modern literature into my reading. Though books from such times that I have read number extremely few, I am quite glad to have finally started reading them and plan on doing many more in the years to come.

The truth is, old books are an invaluable resource, allowing us to pull back the curtains of time and see the world as it was long before any of us ever set foot on it. They demonstrate that the people of the past were not all that much different from us as we sometimes imagine them to be. In places where they are similar, they give us the chance to relate with individuals no longer living as a part of our common human experience; where they differ from our cultural norms, they offer us the chance to reflect upon why things are the way they are and what such people would think of the world today.

I hope that this post gives you the motivation to read something out of your comfort zone. Doing so can be hard, but it can also be incredibly rewarding, and you might be amazed at what you can discover. There is something so special about reading things written long ago and finding timeless wisdom or a story of great significance that you never could have imagined.

1. Lewis, C. S. “Introduction to On the Incarnation,” 4.