"Treasure Island", "Swiss Family Robinson", and "Robinson Crusoe" were written before television was invented. With the coming of television and movies, there also came a natural faster pace to things. Think about what we have now - murder mysteries being solved in an hour (CSI, NCIS, etc), 700-800 page novels being condensed into 2.5 to 3 hour movies while skipping much of the plot and removing entire characters important to the forwarding of the plot, story lines in sitcoms finishing in half an hour, etc. People simply want the ending to come quickly, so the novels written now have evolved, so to speak, to this generation's impatience.

The growth of the impatience came slowly. As television and movies has become more a part of our lives (how many of us can really say that we do not watch any television or movies), life around adapts to adjust to it. People are spending less time outside, less time exercising, and more time sitting in front of the television - we sit more now, simply because as time has passed, we see the difference in our culture.

I think it is most prominent in our youth. The time spent in front of video games and on computers is an insane amount - the same amount that many, as youth, used to spend reading. I used to spend hours reading every day, but today's youth (the majority) spend hours in front of the television or video games. I was so proud, today, when I caught my daughter reading in bed! What a wonderful thing to catch her doing! But I am not sure how many do that anymore.

Also, life is simply much more fast paced. There has always been hard work, but now there's a different sort of hard work. We simply have little time to sit back and read, unless we set aside the time to do so. If we allow our lives to, our lives can take over completely and leave us with no relaxation time whatsoever.

I am afraid that people are simply not... patient enough to write those sorts of classics anymore, and I think that even if someone did - it might not be published, because the publishers would see the pace as too slow and that the novel would not sell.

This generation's classics are so different from those of the past... but there are still jewels in the rough and quite lovely new authors. What I am overjoyed about is that we can still get ahold of those rich and detail-filled classics, and that no matter how much our culture and pace of life change, we will always be able to sit back with those classics and enjoy them.