Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Trouble is, though, that only time is the judge of who is or is not a "significant author". You can't really do it for current authors.
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That was my mistake dragging "significance" into this. The blogger was using his immediate reaction to books to rank them. A book can be significant in terms of personal reaction and cultural influence. I muddled the two together, confusing the issue. Everyone pointing out that it's too soon to tell the cultural significance of new books is right, and I was confused and wrong to imply that.
However, on a personal scale, one can judge a book's importance to one's self immediately. It may not be understood, but there is certainly that feeling that a book is influential in one's world view. And I don't think it's wrong to consider whether there were more such books in one time period than another, and why if that's the case. It may be, as Elfwreck points out, that the "Golden Age" system was shaped to produce books important to a certain type of white male (which includes me), and it's a good point. But my point wasn't that things were definitely better back then, it was that, unless you can prove the blogger wrong by rhyming off a list of current authors that are important to yourself in the way he described, you can't say that his point is incorrect. Just brushing it off with "All old fogeys think things were better before" isn't good enough. How do you know they weren't? How do you know they aren't better now? It bears thinking through, and my comment was aimed at encouraging that.