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Anonymous03/14/26, 21:53No.25140418
You want to believe they'll come back some day, all those greats from the 20th century.
They won't. The circle of serious readers is now very small, and shrinking by the day. Your culture will continue to drift into hedonism and philistinism, until, in forty or fifty years, you won't even have a /lit/ to come to. You'll struggle to squeeze even the tiniest clique of fellow literature appreciators out of the entire internet. Everyone will be immersed in AI and VR and exotic drugs and ideology. You think they're going to crack open the fourth Rabbit book to read the lush thoughts of a bigot? Or chisel through Saul Bellow's dense descriptions of some bath house in Chicago? Please.
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Anon03/14/26, 21:54No.25140420
The future sounds based ngl
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Anon03/15/26, 05:13No.25141373
>/lit/ will be relegated to a cozy little forum with maybe 20 users
Hook me the fuck up, doc
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Anon03/15/26, 05:26No.25141386
>Everyone will be immersed in AI and VR and exotic drugs
Based, I want thatReading is for pleasure so I'll follow my pleasure.
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Anon03/15/26, 07:08No.25141486
>Everyone will be immersed in AI and VR
Okay well then I’ll just make my VR world one where I can speak to AI replacements of the greats, problem solved.
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Anon03/15/26, 07:13No.25141492
>The circle of serious readers is now very small, and shrinking by the day.
It is probably considerably bigger than it was in Updike's day, over 4 billion people have been born since his hay day. What has decreased is the unserious reader, reading was just something to do for them but the rise of popular culture gave them something better to do that is more suited to them. The serious reader is not swayed from reading, they are serious about it.