Interesting problem. At some piont all fiction is tediously predictable, all non

Interesting problem.
At some piont all fiction is tediously predictable, all non-fiction can be reduced to a 20 page paper, and you can stay roughly current reading the few worthy papers published every year in each field.
There are only so many Cormac McCarthy’s and Stanley Kubrik’s. And while I held season tickets to two top playhouses for a decade there hasn’t been anything new worth seeing in decades. Opera and Ballet are the same, tho ballet somehow retains it’s demonstration of the miracle of the human body.
Now, a number thinkers have predicted our present condition: the exhaustion of narrative permutations (See Vonnegut and others) because the present civilizational or national mythos is exhausted. There are only so many plots, archteypes, and class and culture lines to cross, before we must descend into decadence or absurity or whining.
What we have seen succeed is increases in the number characters story arcs and character transformations using serials – so this provides novelty in a complexity of interactions where novel ideas in themseavles are no longer possible.
And the postmodern mission to destroy the epic cycle, heroism and self sacrifice in the face of overwhelming adversity has made everything that remans ring shallow or hollow, trivial, or solipsistic.
Though the mass production of vicarious experience, seelling the false sense of vircarious virtue is a warm welcome to the many lost souls of urban irrelevance and alienation as the NYT best books of the year repeatedly demonstrates.
Otherwise, it’s surprising how little advancement has been made since the early 2000s outside of technology. We claim that physics stagnated since the 70s. But it wasn’t only physics. It’s everything but technology. And what hasn’t stagnated has declined. Because the only novelty is decadence, once the virtues have been exhausted.
So best books?