I just posted this in Facebook:
There was an elegance to writing that I feel we are missing today. And I apologize to my writer friends, I mean nothing bad against your books which I enjoy. It is simply different styles or evolution in writing? No idea how else to say it.
My list of books to buy is about 5 pages long and comprising a lot of recent books, but the funny part is that the copyright of my actual stack of books to-read-next span 4 decades or more. Have we become less elegant and more direct? Probably, but I don’t think that is it either.
Maybe is just me reminiscing as I engage in old-farting.
And by the way, get off my lawn.
Too funny.. amazing the odd looks you get when you tell people you read books
That too!
These days I read mostly stuff off gutenberg.org, which means that it’s mostly from 1920 or before. Sometimes quite a long time before. I read “Tom Jones” last year, after having tried and given up 3 decades ago. And Ivanhoe. And lots of other stuff mostly by quite obscure authors. Queen of the Dawn by H. Rider Haggard was a lot of fun. And The Island of Sheep by John Buchan.
Your point about “elegant prose” is very visible. Also, in many of them, a fluency of description. My wife points out that when you don’t have TV or movies, your entertainment has to do the painting solely with words, and those writers learned how to do so.