I’ve realized lately that I very rarely read books that were published so long ago, except possibly for some of the classics. I think writing styles and content in general has shifted quite a bit over the years, to the point where even books that were published within my lifespan often seem dated. It may have been a bit less noticeable to me at first since I was mostly reading children’s books and some YA in the 90s, but from the year 2000 on, there’s definitely been a shift. I remember reading a lot of “issues books” from the library in the early 2000s, especially those Beatrice Sparks fake diaries like Go Ask Alice or It Happened to Nancy. I also read practically anything that involved animals, and lots of series like The Boxcar Children, The Babysitter’s Club, Bailey School Kids, and of course, Junie B. Jones! I also remember reading quite a few YA mystery/thrillers, especially Caroline B. Cooney’s Losing Christina series, before transitioning over to adult books like Nicholas Sparks and Mary Higgins Clark, although that was already getting into the early 2000s. Even looking back at the majority of the adult books that I read which were published before the 2000s, I realized that most of them were books that I only read much later. It made me curious to see how many books I still have on my Goodreads TBR list that were published so long ago since they are generally not books that I actively seek out at this point. I very quickly realized that the majority were older classics that I consider my “long-term TBR” since I’m not currently that interested in reading them but would like to at some point. I discovered I have somewhere around 100 classics on my list, and around the same number of books published just in the 1990s that I’d marked as something I might like to read. Most of these are books by authors that I’ve already read and enjoyed and was trying to keep track of their backlist, although the further away we get from the publication date, the less likely it seems that I’ll end up picking them up. For this week’s prompt, I decided to show a few of the books published before the 2000s that I still have at least some interest in trying, and hopefully it will motivate me to finally knock a few off my list.
Top 5 Wednesday is a meme created by Gingerreadslainey on Youtube, and is now hosted by Sam at ThoughtsOnTomes. The official GoodReads group with the weekly topics can be found here.
Abyssal Librarian 