When so many old ones go unread...

...Why read new books?

In fact what becomes suspicious in a new novel is when it merely pastiches the effects of past novels, when it takes us back to a past the author doesn’t know except through books, so as to be able to repeat the pleasures of the books of the time. Which never are quite repeated. The pleasure of reading Nievo has to do with the fact that he really was in the fray of the Risorgimento and seeking to establish a position that made sense in the changed world he lived in. That gives the book its immediacy. To read Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, written in the 1950s, is to read a charming and effective pastiche. It seems to spring mainly from the author’s determination to write a stylish and sophisticated novel, imagining the upheavals of the Risorgimento safe in the knowledge of hindsight, safe in the knowledge of how good traditional novels are written.

I dont think that's a fair assessment of the writer's imagination, or skill.