Despite the outcry earlier this year about the uselessness of Twitter after the Library of Congress announced it would be archiving every tweet, Twitter is still around and kicking, and users are finding new uses for it almost every day. Want to use it to find a job? Forbes will tell you how. Want to join a book club? Picador has one for you. Want to find new books to hopefully replace those your child is obsessed with so that you can read a new bedtime story for once? Well, you’ll have to talk to Susan Orlean for that one.

Last week New Yorker author Susan Orlean turned to Twitter in search of books to replace her son’s cherished “Magic Treehouse” books, asking her 65,000+ followers to suggest books for her five-and-a-half-year old using the hashtag #booksthatchangekidsworlds. She then posted a few hundred of these suggestions in an article on the New Yorker website. Not all the books on there are age appropriate, or readily inspire the image of a mother-son pair curled up in bed enjoying a quick story (I don’t know about you but the dictionary was never on my bedtime reading list). Still, looking through the titles brought me back a bit to my own childhood. Frog and Toad, anyone? Or perhaps The Boxcar Children. There’s a copy of The Little Prince on my bookshelf right now.

The National Book Critics Circle Finalists were announced over the weekend, and I’m ashamed to admit that, while I did purchase one book on the list as a Christmas gift, I’ve heard of only a minority of these titles and have read exactly zero.

I’ve never been all that interested in new releases; if it’s still in hard cover at the bookstore, I’m probably not going to even look at it. I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to buy books online even, because I like to pick them up, hold them, before I make a final decision. And hard covers just never feel right.

But still, none of that seems to give me, a literary person, an excuse to have read none of these books and therefore be in no position to comment upon their worthiness (or otherwise). And I wonder: Is this a symptom of having spent too many years with English curriculums that seem to set an inverse ratio between date of publication and quality? That seem to ignore a book until there is a body of literature surrounding and cushioning it?

It isn’t until college, I suspect, that most people start to receive a more balanced canon, but while most universities have courses on Shakespeare or American Literature of the 1800s or Modernism, it can be difficult to find classes devoted entirely to, say, literature of the past five or ten years. So why is it that, as a system, we turn the readers of today and tomorrow away from the writers of today and tomorrow? There is value, to be sure, in understanding which authors and trends, which pieces of history, got us to where we are today. It is important to understand how books and authors speak to one another across the years. But without the link to contemporary writing–and I don’t mean contemporary as thirty or forty years ago but rather as two, as three–we’re creating readers who only know how to look backward.