For a while I tried to do the opposite and only read very contemporary books (harder than you'd think). I had three reasons:
-I felt (still feel) a lot of pity towards new authors. It's hard enough to break through in any field, imagine having to compete with millennia worth of people. Man that has to suck and the easiest way I had to give them a leg up is to give them priority.
-I'm lazy and hope contemporary authors will digest all of those classics for me, even if only through the culture, and give me an easier to assimilate message. There's an ease to reading someone from your generation that really helps with comprehension.
-This sentiment is as old as the hills and I'm a contrarian. Can't deny that particular emotion rules over my decisions now and again.
I think the classic styles handle contemporary subjects well and there are many good authors today that write better than the classics, it is worth it being able to recongize a 3000 year old way of story telling. Contemporary styles is a different subject, seeing styles change through the decades is more interesting than how TV-shows have developed. For me that means reading a lot and knowing that even if a style hasn't been my cup of tea, that might easily change.
I have for the last decade nurtured a love for shorter novels because you can read so many of them and get such a large span of styles, through time as well. For reference a classic Kallocain at is a bit too long, but managable at 200 pages.
For the last couple of years, I've been increasingly doing that for Science Fiction and Fantasy: Reading primarily recently published books, often Hugo nominees published the year before.
This is another genre where lots of connaisseurs insist on a canon that one absolutely has to have read, but (a) the field has considerably expanded its range of perspectives in recent years and (b) many of the "canon" writers just cannot measure up to the literary quality of contemporary authors (doubtlessly in part due to the audience to which they catered, and the industrial writing process many of them were forced into).
-I felt (still feel) a lot of pity towards new authors. It's hard enough to break through in any field, imagine having to compete with millennia worth of people. Man that has to suck and the easiest way I had to give them a leg up is to give them priority.
-I'm lazy and hope contemporary authors will digest all of those classics for me, even if only through the culture, and give me an easier to assimilate message. There's an ease to reading someone from your generation that really helps with comprehension.
-This sentiment is as old as the hills and I'm a contrarian. Can't deny that particular emotion rules over my decisions now and again.