alt Hacker NewsLol I always laugh when I see people talk up Dostoevsky and any 19th century writer. It's 2025 now and literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.
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You’re nuts. I read “Crime and Punishment” a couple years ago, and went in knowing literally nothing about it except that it was famous.
It was astonishingly good. It felt fresh, modern, and claustrophobically suspenseful in a way I wouldn’t have believed possible for a book that age.
If you don’t like it, fine. Preferences are a thing and we don’t all have to enjoy the same stuff. But to dismiss it as obsolete or out of touch is madness. It’s a classic for a reason.
Along those lines, I read “Moby Dick” last year for the first time. Now I’m annoyed with everyone who led me to imagine it as some dusty tome to slog through. It’s hilarious. Ishmael’s a sarcastic smartass with a lot to say.
Some of the classic are classics for a reason, ya know?
What's a good novel from the last 20 years? Genuine question. Looking back at everything I've read, it all has been older than that. I don't really pay attention to novel news so it's more like I only read stuff I've heard about in the past.
>literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.
It hasn't.
1. Many fields experiencing development over the past century or two are much newer than literature, which might as well be a synonym for thought. During that time, those newer fields were, or currently are, in their early rapid-growth phase.
2. Literature is deeply on the subjective side of "fields", so it's a lot easier to argue that it has changed, rather than that it has improved.
Weird take - how exactly could literature improve "in depth and characterization"? What new "technology" has been made available to authors that enables them to create deeper characters?
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I don't like Dostoevsky but this is an insane take. Art doesn't just "get better" over time and depth and characterisation isn't everything either. Homer's Odyssey is still an incredible and fulfilling read. Literature is not some kind of engineering discipline though a lot of new writers seem to be almost like analytic philosophers in that they think newer = better while having some kind of sterile and formalistic understanding of art