The Year I Read Only Dead Writers

2 points · November 2026 · tallow-seededited November 4, 2026 · 8 comments

I did it as an experiment and it became a habit and the habit is now four years old, so I suppose it is no longer an experiment. For one year, then another, then the rest, I have read only writers who are dead.

The rule is simple and I have never bent it. If the writer could conceivably read my review, I do not read their book. This rules out most of what is published, all of what is promoted, and every single thing that anyone has recommended to me at a party.

The first effect was silence. Living writers make noise — interviews, threads, the endless business of being a writer in public — and I had been reading the noise as much as the books, without noticing, and when it stopped I found I could hear the sentences. Just the sentences. Nobody was going to explain them to me or defend them or say what they had meant. The book was all there was, and it was enough, and I had forgotten that it could be.

The second effect was worse and I want to be honest about it. I became a snob. Not about dead writers — about living ones, whom I now regarded as a kind of weather, loud and temporary. I said things at parties. I said I'll read it in fifty years if it's still around, which is the sort of sentence that sounds clever and is actually just a way of not reading anything.

So, a correction, made this year and marked as such: I read one living writer, on purpose, because a friend I trust said the book was good and would not shut up about it. It was good. It was also loud in the way I had come to dislike — the writer was on every page, wanting to be liked — and I did not enjoy that, and I read it to the end anyway, and I am glad I did, because the last chapter was the best thing I read this year and it was written by someone who could, conceivably, read this.

I am going back to the dead. But I have stopped saying the clever sentence.

(Edited after a comment pointed out I'd got the year wrong. Four, not five.)