The saddest thing to me, more than seeing paperbacks getting eradicated in order to allow people to waste more of their time on TikTok is to realize how few of the recently published books I’ve find worthy to own. There are none published last year and there aren’t that many published in the last 10 or 20 years either. Which is sad.

I own a decently-sized library but it’s mostly pre-90ish. Full disclaimer: most my books dates from the 19th century or much older but I still own a decent selection of books that were printed in the 20th century up to the early 00s. After that? Barely any fiction at all, those I will own are essays and things like that, some poetry too.

Which I find sad because it’s not like one day I decided I wanted to only own old novels. It just happens that I feel very little interest in those more recent fictions. I want to own a book when I know I will want to open it over and over again. If that is not the case, why bother with owning it? I can borrow the book from the public library and forget about it after I read it.

Also, the books I do own I want them to not fall apart after a single use… which is another sad reality with too any cheap and even not that cheap contemporary editions.