Reading old books

It's a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

C.S. Lewis

This rule of thumb offered by C.S. Lewis in an essay called "On the Reading of Old Books," reprinted in God in the Dock, seems like good advice, but we before we let it guide our own reading habits we may want to define our terms.

Lewis, remember, was a professor of literature specializing in works from the Middle Ages and before. In other words, to him "old books" were written before the 16th century. He was thinking of writers like Plato and St. Augustine, whom he specifically mentions in his essay. Even though he was writing in the middle of the 20th century, he apparently considered the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to be "new books." You and I might want to think of these terms a little differently.

When I was writing reviews for a newspaper and receiving books from publishers regularly, I thought of "new books" as recent publications: still in bookstores and certainly still in print. In just a few months time they became "old books," and publishers were probably no longer interested in reviews. My job required me to read mostly new books or sometimes old books recently reprinted. I can recall reading and reviewing all of J.P. Marquand's Mr. Moto books after they came out in new editions. They were old books that qualified as new and something of a treat for me.

Since I retired I have changed my definitions of old and new books. A new book is anything published within the last few years, keeping that term purposely ambiguous. Old books are everything else. In recent months I have read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (1970), Jesse Stuart's Trees of Heaven (1940), D.E. Stevenson's Young Clementina (1938), Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838), Georges Simenon's Maigret in New York (1947), Richard Armour's Drug Store Days (1959) and a variety of other books I would consider old. I enjoyed them all and benefited from them all.

You may define your terms differently. However we may define them, I think there is value in the advice C.S. Lewis gave about reading "old books," even if a one-for-one ratio hardly seems necessary. Here are some reasons for reading old books.

1. Books are not like bread. They need not be fresh to be good.

2. No period of history holds all the wisdom, all the truth or all the beauty. Reading older books reminds us of this.

3. Time has a way of filtering out unworthy books. This is probably even more true of the "old books" Lewis was talking about that those I mentioned. Readers are less likely to keep and publishers are less likely to reprint bad books. The 19th century books or the early 20th century books you can still find in a Barnes and Noble are likely to be a pretty good books, well worth reading. Otherwise they would not have survived the competition with newer books. Of course, there are countless old books of value you will never find at Barnes and Noble.

4. Lewis argues that we "need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period." Writers, however different they may seem from their contemporaries, actually have a worldview similar to those contemporaries. Reading old books helps us see the mistakes of earlier periods as well as the mistakes of our own.

One argument Lewis makes strikes me as foolish. "The new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in position to judge it." OK, I'll buy the first part of that statement. New books are still on trial, but the same is true of old books. People continue to debate the merits of works by Dickens, Twain and even St. Augustine. As for the second part of his statement, everyone who reads a book is in a position to judge it. An amateur's opinion may or may not be as valuable as that of a literary scholar or literary critic, but amateur readers are the ones who determine best seller lists, book club agendas and even which books make it as far as second editions. Simply by buying a book one expresses a judgment, and that judgment has value, too.