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Probably the best filter of all is age. Any book that is still around 50 years after is was written is probably around because it is well written. Recent books get liked for all sorts of reasons ot...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:51Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25549 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:48:01Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25549 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:48:01Z (about 5 years ago)
Probably the best filter of all is age. Any book that is still around 50 years after is was written is probably around because it is well written. Recent books get liked for all sorts of reasons other than being well written. They express a popular political or social prejudice. They ride on the coattails of a current craze. Their authors was once on a TV show. Oprah liked them. All this stuff fades away with time and you are left with the stuff that remains in circulation because it is good. There are some anomalies, of course. Kipling is the biggest one that occurs to me at the moment. He is one of the greats of English literature and an writer can learn a huge amount from reading him. But he is branded as a voice of colonialism, though anyone who bothers to read Recessional or The White Man's Burden all the way to the end should see that some nuance should be applied to that interpretation. Anyway, todays particularly harsh political filters may diminish the stature of some of the greats of the past, but even they stand out from the forgotten masses of authors of their age.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-12-16T00:21:49Z (about 8 years ago)
Original score: 2