Said Samer: "Personally, I don't see any strong correlation between the "quality" of a work, however you care to define it, and its popularity at the time. Some works that were hailed on their release are considered garbage today, and vice versa. So for me to judge what is and is not literature is, IMO, no more or less arbitrary than letting the writers do it." I didn't mean to start an argument regarding the validity of the inclusion of "popular" fiction in packets/English distributions. As it happens, I largely agree with you on the subject of the validity of various forms of modern fiction; there is plenty of "popular" fiction out there which is of more merit than some would argue (I speak here specifically of science fiction, as it's one of the things I know), there's plenty of crap praised by critics, and so on and so on. Speaking personally, I'm content to just apply Sturgeon's Law and wait for time to tell on modern literature. Allowing 3 of 12 questions on various forms of "popular" modern fiction, though? As far as I can tell, that's about the percentage of the distribution that should be allocated to the entire 20th century. Having 3 questions of this sort here, and adding to them questions on the entire first half of the 20th century, as well as those works published in the second half which don't qualify as "popular", leads to this sort of skewing... I think 56% after 1900 is well more than anyone would support... I know it's over twice what I'd support. The impossibility of getting a critical consensus on contemporary work doesn't seem to me a reason to increase the number of contemporary works being asked... rather, it seems more a reason to ask _fewer_ questions on modern literature. I wouldn't mind at all if tournaments imposed, say, a cap of 1 question/pack on post-1950 works (maybe 2/pack for Penn Bowl, but those are 36/36 packs...) The problem is that there _is_ so much out there, and while some of it is of merit, some of it is... er... of less merit. There is no general consensus, as there is with older works; therefore, it's difficult to expect players to have read or even heard of any given work, with a few notable exceptions. (By contrast, it's relatively easy to determine who's important and who isn't among, say, 18th-century British novelists.) It's not so much a question of merit (which is a difficult matter) as it is a question of authors being known, and of teams being rewarded or penalized for knowing or not knowing them; it's difficult to know who's canonical when there's no canon to draw from.
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