That’s something that struck me as well when I read it. “Wow, D’artagnan’s…pretty sure he’d be prosecuted for rape nowadays. Don’t see that in the Mickey Mouse version.”

Like, Dumas’ prose is still wonderful, but I definitely have to put a lot of product of its time filter on when reading.

One can think of it by analogy to STEM subjects.

Lots of people love jet planes and robots and rockets and fancy chemical reactions.

Lots fewer people love figuring out why their computational fluid dynamics simulation doesn’t converge, how to program a visual learning system to tell a ripe apple from an unripe one, how thick the combustion chamber wall needs to be, or fucking titration.

Similarly, there’s probably lots of people who love the idea of magic and even the practical parts of it, but writing essays about the uses of dragon blood, not so much.

Dostoevsky. I’m convinced that the whole ‘fake execution’ thing he went through in the Katorga broke his mind, a la ‘Room 101’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s why he went from a somewhat progressive writer before that point to the slavering theocratic imperialist he was after—confronted with his greatest fear, he learned to love Tsar Daddy.

“War and Peace.”

Honestly, I enjoyed it. Disagree hard with Tolstoy’s conclusion about Free Will, but I enjoyed Pierre’s characterization and how Tolstoy skewers his self-importance.

And now I get to brag about reading War and Peace.

Been trying to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish. Making slow progress–figured diving into the pool at the deep end is a good way to learn.

It is not a timeless masterpiece of literature that can be read at any time and any country and still resonate with readers. But when we say “Books can change the world”, the first book we can point to is Heart of Darkness.

I mostly agree. There’s a lot of books whose significance is more in their status as artifacts, a window into a certain time and place–I’d go so far as to say that I find these more rewarding than many of the “timeless” ones, since you have to put more work into understanding a different worldview and time, and reap a different understanding as a result.

But I think there’s also a specific personal context that ought to be applied as well. Conrad tried to use basic analogies to make his (white) readers sympathize with the plight of the Congolese–especially that one line about how, if a gang of armed blacks showed up in England to rape and pillage, he’d expect the villages there to become deserted quite fast too. But this was what had happened to his own people when he was a child–their language and religion persecuted, his own family dragged into slavery in a distant land, and the colonizers had the audacity to claim they were uplifting them. If there is one lesson we should take away from “Heart of Darkness” at any time, it is to never take at face value any claim from an imperialist that he does what he does out of altruism. Because there are still Kurtzes among us, who will write their pamphlet about bringing civilization to the natives, and then end it with “exterminate all the brutes!” in deed if not in word.

A lot of biographers pore over their subjects’ correspondence, and lots of people, at least until recently, saved every letter they ever got (this made business sense, since letters could be used as legal documents). So you could often get a good day-to-day record of their lives that way.

Now multiply that by all the people who corresponded with them, and the amount of data goes up rapidly.

Stephen Baxter is a great author for this. He’s written lots and lots of books with premises like this. One, Raft, is set in an alternate universe where Newton’s Constant is much higher than in our reality–so much that gravity is the dominant forces in chemical reactions, and even humans have significant gravity fields. Another, Manifold: Time, has its protagonist wander through a succession of universes with different physical laws, all hostile to life–until he finds that physics itself is subject to evolution, and that the complex universe in which we find ourselves is very conducive to spawning daughter-universes. A third book, Manifold: Origin, has a dimension-jumping moon leap between different universes with different versions of Earth, shuffling human and human-related populations between them (it’s suggested that it was created by humanity’s distant descendants to give us an appreciation for human diversity; not sure how well that works, since the smartest hominids kidnapped end up creating slave-driving societies, abusing their distant cousins).

On a more human scale, Voyage is a book he wrote where JFK survives his assassination and the US goes to Mars in the 1980s. Extremely technically well-researched.

You can get a taste of his writing style in this short-story, which also deals with universe-jumping:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/moon6.htm

I wonder sometimes about the impact that books make as a function of age. I read LotR in my 20s, and while I recognize Tolkien’s qualities as a scholar and as a storyteller (I adore his archaic usages of certain words–one that stands out is right after the Council of Elrond, when the Fellowship is assembled and listed off, and the book says something like, “so ends the Tale of the fellowship,”, and I was confused until I thought about it, and realized he meant “tale” as in “count” or “tally.” The book has such a flavor in its writing that I have encountered very rarely elsewhere), I can’t say it’s life-changing for me the way it is for others. Aragorn, Frodo, etc. are fine heroes, the philosophical discussions are elegant, the style is unique, but for some reason it never clicked for me the way it does for others. Maybe it’s because I had passed the age where a book can make that kind of impact on me–there are others I read around 12 that shaped my personality profoundly.

A short story in a collection, but it counts: “Mother’s People,” by Stephen Baxter, in the collection “Evolution.”

This story is about the first human to invent religion, an early human with, as the omniscient narrator describes, a touch of schizophrenia that leads her to ascribe human motivations to inanimate objects. Her village is going through a drought and her son dies of illness; she concludes that the sky is angry at her neighbor (who just happens to not like her), and she kills her. After one more murder, the blood seeps into the ground and the rain starts falling. Her neighbors are astounded, and immediately follow her logic. The unifying power of the tribe’s religion gives them more success than their neighbors–they fear death less once they start believing in an afterlife.

But what really got me is the narrator’s meditation on how the same impulse that lead to this animistic religion ties into human complex tool use. If things are people, they can be reasoned with, bargained with, made to do what you want–our complex tool use comes from applying our brains’ natural social capabilities to non-human entities. But the story goes on to give a dark side to it–if things are people, people are things; other people can be abused to do what you want as well.

Now, you might laugh at this point, but growing up autistic, I always struggled to understand social interactions, why I should abide by social norms, the like, and wasn’t interested in making the effort to do so. But reading this story in my adolescence, it finally hit me.

People are things, and can be manipulated. They can be learned. I don’t need that empathy stuff that just comes naturally to other people, and I don’t have to despair because I lack it–I can learn it the same way I learn any other subject! And this was an epiphany for me!

I radically changed my behavior, becoming much more civil, polite, emotionally-restrained, better-dressed, closely watching how others acted to learn, and after a while I actually started, for the first time in my life, to enjoy the company of other people.

And it’s all thanks to this one somewhat-grimdark tale of a cavewoman inventing human sacrifice.

Of course, some people wouldn’t say the changes were entirely positive. I’ve got, overall, a fairly cynical view of human relations as a result of reading this book in my adolescence, and others in the same spirit I read later. I can’t help but view so much of normal human behavior as a well-dressed version of chimpanzee dominance games.

“By His Bootstraps,” by Robert Heinlein, is up there. Heinlein really liked to play with temporal paradoxes, and this is one of the best examples of a closed time loop. “All You Zombies,” from the same author, is similar in time loop, but edgier (since it involves a guy getting himself pregnant).

Stephen Baxter’s “Exultant” is another, since he really plays with the “faster than light travel = time travel” concept. I won’t pretend I understand how that works, but physicists assure me it’s true, so Baxter turning it into an unwinnable war scenario where each side can send intel back in time works.

There have been a fairly large number of similar stories, though they are largely confined to the SF/Military Fiction/Historical Fiction/Alternate History sphere (and there’s a heck of a lot of overlap between those fandoms). Off the top of my head, the following are similar in premise:

“Lest Darkness Fall,” by L. Sprague de Camp, wherein an archaeologist is sent back to Italy in the 6th century;

“The Man who Came Early,” by Poul Anderson–a deconstruction of these, since the engineer who goes back to viking times in Iceland is unable to actually make any of his stories a reality;

The 163x series, by the late Eric Flint, wherein a whole town is sent back;

The entire “popadanyets” genre in Eastern Europe, primarily Muscovy but to a lesser extent known in other Slavic countries. There are lots and lots of books in this genre, but the general gist of most of them is “modern or Soviet military formation is sent back in time to a famous historical event (literally any time is possible–I’ve seen book covers with tanks rolling against Egyptian chariots), kicks lots of ass.” Also has a fantasy variant where “modern or Soviet military formation goes to world of elves and magic, kicks lots of ass.”

“The Brothers Karamazov.”

I read it in school first, dismissed it, and then revisited it years later on the recommendation of my co-religionists (the book is, for reasons not fully understood even by Dostoevsky’s compatriots, well-loved by English-speaking Catholics).

I actually found it even worse on the second reading, because, after reading, in the intervening years, about all the Tsarist crimes against religious minorities that they conquered (the Old Believers, Ukrainian Catholics, Polish Catholics, Circassian Muslims, pogroms against Jews, etc.), the entire “Grand Inquisitor” sequence, which is so famous and oft-cited for this book…just comes off as hypocritical tripe. I prefer Gogol–at least he wears his bigotry on his sleeve and doesn’t cloak it in nonsense about “universal love”.

And, frankly, I don’t find Dostoevsky’s psychological “insights” particularly groundbreaking. Ivan, who is so often mentioned as a Christian believer’s attempt to steel-man atheism, is just laughable to me–‘if God, why bad thing?!’ is the most coherent argument he can come up with, and it’s just sentimentalism, not actual philosophy.

On the plus side, the lifelong hatred of Dostoevsky I gained turned me on to other writers who also hated Dostoevsky. Like Joseph Conrad. And one of these days I’ll read Lolita for the same reason. And I tried Tolstoy because someone told me that people who hate Dostoevsky tend to like him, and I did enjoy War and Peace.

Dishonorable mentions:

Ethan Frome. Yes, I get it, the pickle-and-donut meal is innuendo. That doesn’t make it appealing.

Cat’s Cradle. I just don’t like Vonnegut’s sense of humor, or his nihilistic tendencies. He was basically an early-2010s Redditor.