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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2297892" data-attributes="member: 5171">Ditto. I read it and liked it as a kid, but even then, I wasn't confusing it with a great work of art or a life-changing piece of entertainment.If it resonated very deeply with you on a personal level, that's great, but it doesn't have the literary merit to be preserved by the critical-studies folks, and it doesn't have wide enough appeal to still be read and loved 100 years from now.(My assumption, for those wishing to attack it, is that a book could still be widely read after 100 years for two reasons: either it has such literary merit or fills a particular niche in such a way that a bunch of schools start assigning it as a classic (either a simple "this is really good" classic or a "this is an excellent way of seeing how people felt about sin/women/monarchies/the nature of text in this time period"... or it is such a massive popular success that it still maintains some popularity in the later time. There aren't many of the latter. I loved reading Pride & Prejudice and several of the Shakespeare plays, and I did so on my own, but I doubt I'd have done so without having a school tell me to read 'em in the first place. The works of Poe might still be considered popular enough that people who read one Poe story in school might hunt for others on their own.  Beyond those, I can't think offhand of anything being widely read as popular fiction and not a school assignment today that was written 100 years ago. That leaves only the "works assigned in lots of colleges or universities because of the literary merit of the story", and as I said, I liked the original Chronicles, but I don't think many people in a position to judge seriously are going to argue that the Dragonlance Chronicles should be stuck next to Gawain and the Green Knight or La Morte D'Arthur or Beowulf or The Tempest as a literary powerhouse in the annals of fantasy. I can see the occasional university picking up the Chronicles and assigning it near the end of the semester, after the students have read the old literary classics and then Tolkien, as kind of a "And here's an iconic example of what it looks like today" thing -- but only as an afterthought in a class already devoted to reading fantasy, and probably not when there are works with stronger literary prowess that could be put in the same place.While my enjoyment for these books was about equal to my enjoyment of the Chronicles, I'd expect to see Mieville or Bujold or Gaiman taught in a fantasy-lit class before Weiss & Hickman. That says more about lit classes than it does about the books in question, but that's been my experience. When I took a course on Science Fiction literature, we read Neuromancer and Blade Runner (and some Stanislaw Lem and Cordwainer Smith and other people I'd never have known about beforehand); we didn't read Star Trek novelizations.And as I said, without the college-lit angle, that only leaves sheer popularity and possible book-club "You and all your friends should get together and read this book and discuss it!" stuff, and I don't see that happening, either. It just isn't that widely read beyond the gamer field.)</blockquote>

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