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by dTal 896 days ago
The proposition that no one has written a worthwhile book or had a new insight in the past 24 years is so laughably indefensible that it stuns me to see someone put it forth in earnest. To engage with it risks dignifying it beyond its stature. Rather than post my own list of books, I will link to this democratically determined list of "books that changed your thinking, changed your mind, enlightened you, helped you move ahead, helped you heal, in short, made a difference.":

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/21995.Best_21st_Century_...

1 comments

I don’t guess we’ll ever come to an understanding then, because I find that list totally laughable and a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I like Bill Bryson and I own the book but if his a Short History of Nearly Everything (#1 on the list) is the strongest example of what “changed your thinking, changed your mind, enlightened you, helped you move ahead” etc., well, things are very grim indeed. Scrolling down the list mostly gets much worse. The world would be no worse off if most of those books had never existed, and many of them don’t offer anything new at all. I scrolled down to 100, against my better instincts and encountering such luminaries as Tina Fey.

People have had interesting insights in that period - of course - but very few of them require anything longer than a sentence, and they are few and far between.

By the way, 2000 was chosen semi-arbitrarily, I would probably put the line much farther back.