I'll Read You When You're Dead

I can’t bring myself to read books by writers who are still alive. It’s not simply that dead authors should be read first in order to understand the living authors they’ve influenced, although proper chronology has seemed important to me ever since I watched the third season of The Sopranos before the first two and had no idea what was going on. On a more visceral level, books by living authors, no matter how complete, just don’t feel like they’re done yet.

To be fair, I have no doubt that works of great genius and profound historical importance are being written right now, maybe even by people in Brooklyn. I am very happy these authors exist and I wish them many productive years.

The dead author is simply a better companion. They are great listeners. Eternally silent, they bequeath their laboriously crafted work to us across the abyss of time. Their work acquires the knowing muteness of great holy texts. And we’re much less likely to hear the dead author on Terri Gross, talking about how the ending of their book was actually “the publisher’s idea.”

Ideally, you want an author to die “at the right time," to invoke the phrase used by Friedrich Nietzsche. Their best work completed, the author dies before they live long enough to lose all connection to the social context in which it was made. Not to mention that authors with tragic, curtailed lives always seem the coolest. Albert Camus died in a car wreck—a way of death he had pronounced as the most absurd way to die. Could the ultimate hipster have had it any other way?

On another level, when we lack a foundational understanding of the intellectual achievements of the distant past, living authors seem much more impressive and original than they actually are. To a reader unfamiliar with 18th and 19th Century philosophy, the current pop culture trend of “new atheism”—which I am now encountering through the work of Christopher Hitchens (who I sincerely wish was still alive so I’d have a solid excuse to not read his books)—may seem to be an engaged and timely discussion on “reason vs. faith,” when in fact it is just a watered-down throwback to the arguments of past centuries.

But paradoxes arise. The most obvious being that I myself am a living writer, and have read my own work once or twice, since I could hardly proofread otherwise. I did not enjoy it. I found it contrived. The bathos was more like that of a Family Guy episode than Tropic of Cancer, the latter of which seems to be what the author was going for.

More embarrassingly, I am a curator of a prose reading series, and am responsible for selecting living writers to participate. I’m aware that in writing this, I will no doubt be accused of snobbery. It’s nothing personal—some of my best friends are living writers. I do sincerely hope to someday get around to reading them. Maybe I’ll run out dead authors entirely and be forced to move on, although there seem to be new ones cropping up almost every day. Or, better yet, the living authors I want to read could always just die and make things easier.