Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
In non-fiction, there can be and is progress. But I'd be hard-pressed to see how someone is going to write better books than a whole bunch of nineteenth century novelists.
Fortunately, I don't really see today's novelists competing with Dickens and the Brontes. Sometimes I want to live in the nineteenth century, and sometimes I want to see how the world is going today. I will try to locate better books within an era, but I don't start asking myself, who is better, Richard Russo or Anthony Trollope, and pick a book to read on that basis.
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Your opinion only. The term "better" is entirely subjective. If I consider a book that I can connect with, that has a protagonist in the same circumstances, I'll likely consider a modern book to be "better". Or if I'm looking for a meditation on what it means to be human or what consciousnesses means, I'll likely consider a modern era book like Hyperion to be "better".
I do agree that modern authors can't have the same cultural impact as the likes of Dickens because their ideas and words haven't had the same amount of time to percolate and fester in the public imagination, but who knows what people 200 years hence will consider classics.