Literary hot takes are on my feed, so here’s a thread of mine. Not all books are the same or serve the same purpose. Some things are pointless fun and some force you to think about difficult, complex things. Both of those are good, but they are not the same.

There’s a fair bit of science now that indicates the lore traditional “literary” texts are MUCH better at teaching empathy. So yes, it’s important to read those. But they can be contemporary. You don’t have to read stuff from a million years ago.

If we’re taking about kids, my experience is that what the books they like the most are those with clear lines between the characters you cheer for and those you cheer against. These are the books that tell you the least about how people really are.

Real people are deeply complex and rarely clearly good or evil at all times. Literature is honest about that. Also, everyone - EVERYONE - needs to read books from different perspectives. If you are a white dude and mostly only read white dudes, you’ve got some work to do.

Oh, and a last one - genre divisions exist only for marketing purposes. 90% of every genre is garbage. 10% is great. It’s very good to jump around in different genres, but not as important as reading books by different people from different cultures/places/etc.