If I were to start a Substack, as my effort to build something digital, what would I write about? My blogs, which are essentially online diaries or journals, are primarily about books/reading, career thoughts, efforts to improve my fitness, and occasional musings on my relationship or my role as a man in the family. My first thought is to do something about reading and books. My dissatisfaction with contemporary books is so high I have a personal desire to explore deep into the catalogues and niches of books published decades ago. I'm almost 50 so books published before I was alive could be a fun slant. That might be too limited so maybe that would be a fun category or post/article topic. Reading the books would be a big part of the stack, but the physicality of the books could be something to explore. Older books are smaller, use different paper, more mass market books for more literary titles. The masculine in literature, a virtual black hole of nothingness in contemporary publishing, would be a strong theme. Where to find the books, how to select them (old bestseller lists, browsing used bookstores, award lists (going deep into the Booker Prize)), and maybe old marketing material could be an element of the articles. This would of course give me something to explore when I'm taking too long to read a book. It would kind of be the anti-booktok. Old books being discussed by a middle-aged white man. This topic is appealing because it aligns with things I already do or want to do. I'm not exploring something new only to find it's not appealing to me in the long run. It also takes advantage of our current tech culture, being able to find something almost instantly online, but applying that to something more analog and non-digital. Physical books, the book as a physical object, would be a big part of the content. These things don't have to be hunted down. They could be found. I wouldn't be looking for things people are familiar with either. These would be obscure books people haven't read or thought about for decades. I'm not picking books popular in college course syllabi. It's almost like finding something new in something old. Our cultural legacy is deep. How rich is the writing that was churned out and published for a culture hungrier for books 60, 70, 80 years ago? Do we no longer read because the material we have to read doesn't offer what we find in a good book? Or maybe an old book is a better place to find what we need than a social media scroll. It would be random and exploratory. There will be good books and bad books. That's kind of the point of the entire exercise.
I used ChatGPT to see how it could help identify possible reading targets. I just asked it to help me find obscure books published in 1970. It gave me some good choices. I looked for a few of them in Thriftbooks and the Amazon used market. They were kind of expensive. This makes sense. These are not common books that are all over the place. They're also not particularly popular or in demand either. Using AI kind of extends that whole idea of using the tools of now to plow into the legacy of yesterday. There is a bit of simultaneous worlds or the elasticity of time element to this. Reading books to better understand the way people in a different time engaged with their media and how the content of that media (and the medium itself as a physical object) alters in meaning as the culture and physical world transforms around it.
I've never been one to challenge the canon, but rejecting accepted ideas of which books from the past are the most worth reading has a subversive flavor. This effort implies rejecting the accepted tastes to find overlooked but still valuable perspectives. A book that didn't resonate or have a big marketing push isn't automatically inferior to the titles that got lucky and gained fame. I wouldn't stop reading the acknowledged master works. My Modern Library top 100 effort fits into this project very neatly. Those books actually offer a useful contrast to more obscure or overlooked books. One is widely read (at least in the context of the modern reading effort) while another is all but forgotten. One of the books ChatGPT suggested has virtually no activity on Goodreads. The reviews are years old.
The decline of reading is an element of this as well. The rise of the smartphone is certainly a big player in people turning away from books, but is the reading material available to people now contributing to the reading dearth? Most books that get popular on social media are just bad. People like Lonesome Dove, but that book is amazing and was written decades ago. New stuff just isn't good. Seeing what got published decades ago tells us something about what publishers were willing to support 50 or 60 years ago. The feminization of the reading space is also part of the decline. Men read different books than women, but there are virtually no books for men these days. Perhaps I can crack the code for books that men like to read and a new publishing effort can be launched? That's a long term plan and effort.
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