My vote goes to Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
I’ve read most of the books proposed in this thread and I have to say I don’t agree with any of them. Well, I liked all of them, but I can’t see any of them becoming true classics. The Lovely Bones is too schmaltzy. The Kite Runner is an otherwise wonderful book that was somewhat ruined by having such a cartoonishly evil villain that it becomes kinda funny (a hypocritically racist child molester Taliban? Really?) The Life of Pi was kinda forgettable. By which I mean, the day after I read it, I couldn’t remember what I had done the previous day. “What did I do all day yesterday? Hmmm…” <five minutes later> “Oh right! I read The Life of Pi. Right.”
I thought A Fine Balance was fantastic, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it to anyone. Or rather, I tell people “if you like books where bad things happen to good people, check out A Fine Balance.”
Now that I’ve criticized all of your choices, feel free to mock my nomination: Middlesex, by Jeffery Eugenides.
I will check out The Road.
ETA: I love The Baroque Cycle, but I bet Neal Stephenson is incredibly annoying at parties.
I guess I don’t read enough current fiction because not a damn thing jumps out at me. I tried really, really hard to like The Lovely Bones and found it just awful. I couldn’t make it more than 60 or 70 pages IIRC. Terrible writing IMO. Ditto another book that has been hailed as a modern day classic - The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Absolutely unreadable.
The Da Vinci Code will probably be well remembered as a book that got a hell of a lot of people who don’t normally read books to read a book, and for that it could have real lasting power. I wouldn’t be surprised if people referred to it as a “classic” in 50 years.
I agree with Life of Pi, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog…
I’m just now reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, I do not see it becoming a classic, but I just am finding it kind of “meh”. The only scene that really got to me so far was when
When Henry shows up at Ingrid’s on the night she kills herself
Personally, I would second English Passengers as the best example of writing from several points of view (the name of that POV escapes me).
I don’t read much fiction and have no nominees. But I did read The Da Vinci Code, and classics must at least be well written. The Da Vinci Code is enjoyable as a pot boiler/page turner, but is awfully written. Among the worst I’ve read in decades as far as quality of the writing. Nobody will be teaching this, even in classes on adapting successful books to successful films. IMHO, TDVC is dreck.
I thought The Hummingbird’s Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea, was excellent. Powerful and beautifully written. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind was absolutely amazing—a great story, well written. Finally, I’d add The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, by Erik Larson. I think they’re all destined to be well remembered.
One thing we have to keep in mind is stuff that was hailed as being “classic” in its time may not be considered so by posterity. Similarly, something that has gone completely unnoticed may be considered a classic by later generations. Look at Melville, for example, he wrote some travelogues that were well regarded at the time. Then he wrote Moby Dick, which was largely ignored until well after his death.
Given the anti-traditional attitude, for lack of a better term, that has pervaded criticism of art, architecture, and literature for much of the last 80 or so years, I can easily see some books that none of us has ever heard of wind up being considered classics in the future.
I really liked it . . . but then again, whether I liked a book or not doesn’t seem well correlated with whether it’s a “classic”.
I rarely read recent books, so I thought I wouldn’t know any of the ones recommended here. Turns out I was wrong: I know Ware’s work and I completely agree. He is a true genius of his medium and his work will be regarded as amajor literary achievement for decades. Good choice.
From what I can tell, English-class reading reflects what was popular more than what was hailed as a classic. If that’s the case it bodes well for The Da Vinci Code (which I thought was abysmal) and Stephen King and not so much for, I don’t know, David Foster Wallace.
When did the Harry Potter books start coming out? Anyway, them.
I’m not sure I agree. Yes, many books in a typical high school curriculum were recognized in their author’s lifetime. But off the top of my head, only Dickens really belongs in the mass-appeal widely-read group with King or Rowling or their ilk.
What about Mark Twain, Jules Verne, and Shakespeare?
Edit: Add Hemmingway and Longfellow. I could probably do this all day, and someone more studied in the classics could do it a lot longer I bet.
I suppose you’re right. I was kind of looking at it as the writer being considered exclusively a writer for the mass market in the way that most people view someone like Steven King.
I didn’t really get The Road either. I mean I liked it, even though ‘like’ seems like the wrong word. But I don’t understand the gushing it gets.
My nomination would have to be Atonement. It left quite the lasting impression on me.
Late 90s, which is why I didn’t list them in the OP.
The Da Vinci Code is less writing than meth-influenced typing.
I don’t think any particular Harry Potter book will be considered a classic, anyway - it’s more like the Potter-universe will be a classic.
Same way that books like *Swiss Family Robinson *or Around the World in Eighty Days are really not very good, but they’re still cultural touchstones and easily recognized.
This gives me a horrible vision of Dan Brown writing On the Road, or Kerouac writing The Da Vinci Code.
The thing’s tightly plotted and all, I wouldn’t say it’s incoherent. It’s just very stupid and the writing and characterization are awful. If people didn’t buy into Brown’s warmed-over '60s mother-goddess hype and start speculating that maybe it’s all really true, it wouldn’t be as intolerable.