I have a difficult time finding fiction that I appreciate these days. I could make a long list of things I have enjoyed, but I haven’t been able to do much to add to it.
It sounds like you have a developed taste. Once you have that, the "Search Problem" of finding new fiction is a bit easier.
Try finding interviews of - or reviews/letters written by - the authors you admire. They'll usually reference some influential authors you can expand into. If a publisher/editor is sufficiently focused, you can recurse in that direction, too.
You can recursively apply this algorithm, adjusting priority by how much you enjoy the authors you've found so far.
This requires a little bit more up-front work, and you have to be willing to tolerate/toss out the occasional dud. But it's worked well for me so far.
The same trick works for movies, and art more generally.
---
For example, see this interview of Karl Ove Knausgaard [1]. From there, you see some names you might recognize (Rene Girard, Rilke, Ibsen, Proust, Borges, Ferrante).
But you also find Paul Celan [2], Sigrid Undset [3], Knut Hamsun [4], Peter Handke [5]
This method has worked wonders for me in the past. I picked up the Three Body Problem when I heard George RR Martin praise it in an interview - "It’s a strong book, an AMBITIOUS book, a worthy winner [of the Hugo award].". The series was nothing short of extraordinary. If anything, he undersold it.
If you consider all English fiction books published in , say, the last 75 years, there are beautiful opportunities that you may be foregoing. Don’t just think of books from the last few years or even from your lifetime.
Try something from a Pulitzer Prize winner, Booker Prize for Fiction , Nobel Prize for Literature, or National Book Award.
For example, John Steinbeck has some amazing novels that are often overlooked. Hemingway. There are many such authors.
I swore off John Steinbeck when I was in high school, after having a visceral dislike for The Grapes of Wrath.
Then a few months ago, I read an interesting quote here on HN -- I traced it back to Steinbeck's East of Eden, so I decided to give it a try.
I really truly deeply enjoyed the book. I hesitate to add books to a "favorites of all time" list until at least several months after reading, but it's a definite contender.
As for the different experiences between GoW and EoE, I have to assume that the inconsistency of the reader has a lot to do with it.
So, +1 on the Steinbeck recommendation. And gratitude to the lost-attribution commenter who quoted him!
Haha, maybe, although I would suggest that it's easier to be exposed to all the good fiction than to visit all the good places. I can scan through a lot of books with everything online.
> it's easier to be exposed to all the good fiction
Exposed or actually read? If you read on average 1 book per month and are aged 50, that's at most 600 books you've read.
There are thousands upon thousands of books that have received awards and are worthwhile (obviously that is subjective but even if you consider 10% to be "worthwhile", there is still a huge corpus), so to say you've been exposed to all the good fiction is unlikely.
I think you need more influences if you are out of ideas. Or you're not trying hard enough.
Do you need to read a whole book to make a decision on whether you like it? I get ideas from various places then read a few pages to get a feel for a book, super easy with kindle samples, or if you're not in lockdown stand and read a few pages in the bookshop.
As for worthwhile, I don't find awards to be strongly correlated with my enjoyment, or reviews for that matter. Actually the best resource I've found in a while is the bestsciencefictionbooks.com website.
In any case, I constantly look for new things to read, and read many things that are just ok, but I just don't have as many strong positives anymore.
