My contention is that ebooks are bringing us into an era in which we have to again decide what constitutes a classic. Think about it. In the mid-1800s, what are now Classics were pop fiction (with some exceptions, naturally). Charles Dickens published books in magazines for crying out loud. Imagine today's intelligentsia hailing a work of serialized fiction as a classic of the 21st century.
Are you done laughing? If not, go back and read it again. Get it out of your system.
Okay. Let's keep going.
The reason ebooks could be to blame is the new ease of publication. You wrote an original rich-boy-meets-poor-girl-in-a-retro-Victorian-England novel? There's a platform for that. You wrote an original vampires-get-erotic-somehow novel? There's a platform for that? You wrote some Firefly fanfic? Yeah, I'm sure there's even a platform for that.
That platform is the ebook. After all, why bother asking someone to kill trees for your novel, when you could ask them to flood other people's iPads? It's win-win.
If you've stopped reading, and instead are trying not to tuck yourself in a corner and murmur about the fall of Western Civilization, despair not! There is an advantage to this mass proliferation of literary Miracle Whip: We will be forced to think for ourselves. Instead of communist professors deciding which Maya Angelou poem gets the nod of excellence, we can decide. That can be a bit scary, yes, but I believe it's the only way literature can survive.
Come to think of it, C. S. Lewis wrote an entire book about my conclusion. If you haven't read his Experiment in Criticism, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, if we won't recognize we can choose the best literature of today, if we refuse to find which books inspire the greatest literary experiences, then we're stuck. Stuck with the intellectual elite telling us what is meaningful. Whatever that means.
Go read something. It might be good...it might be as bad as an 1890s fluff piece. It might be a Classic.
(Inspiration for Article)
