I said METH-influenced, not WEED-influenced. And that was purposeful, as I originally wrote “weed” and then thought of Kerouac?
Are you me?
I am willing to concede that DVC has a plot in the most generous sense of the word. I would not call that plot “tight.”
I thought Kerouac was whacked out on bennies or some other kind of speed when he hammered out that book, but I could be wrong.
I just mean it moves from point A to B to C in fairly short order. Not that it’s a brilliant plot.
I don’t want to sound like I’m sticking up for The Da Vinci Code, because I’m not a fan, but the thing is practically all plot. What are you talking about?
I’m not sure it was weed Jack was on either. But I’m sure it WASN’T meth, and, as I said, I wanted to avoid any hint that I was comparing Kerouac’s beautiful prose-poetry with Brown’s clumsy, clanking, caliginous pseudo-prose.
I was mocking the idiocy of the plot.
I don’t think anything really touches Harry Potter for cultural significance, does it?
I’d also add Susannah Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I think it’s the best fantasy novel since LOTR.
Kerouac was fond of speed and alcohol. He dabbled in weed but mostly stuck to alcohol and turned to speed when he needed to get some things done or was tired of being drunk.
The Sherlock Holmes books were also massively popular. Sherlock Homes was the Harry Potter of his era.
The Road is pretty good, but I don’t think it’s McCarthy’s best work. Blood Meridian knocked my head off.
The Savage Detectives doesn’t quite count, unless you consider its translation into English as its date.
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is another candidate.
As much as I liked Middlesex, I’m not sure it will age all that well. Same thing with Cavalier and Klay. Atonement is a good choice.
of the titles I see listed, only **The Road **has the reviews and cred to make the “long-term literature” cut, near as I can tell…
however, if Oct 31, 2000 as a publishing date counts then without question, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (Amazon link) is clearly on the shortest of short lists. Nobel Prize-winning author, his best, signature book that comments on the plight of his country (South Africa) with insight and wisdom. And it is truly freaking brilliant - should be the basis for classes on writing technique…
This book will be taught for the ages.
I’d nominate Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Just bloody amazing, somewhat reminicent of Italo Calvino. Clearly a work of genius.
I think “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon will become one of those “classic works of literature” that no one has ever read.
Written in 1974.
Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, for use of the first-person plural in depiction of corporate life.
Whoops, sorry … wrong turn of the century.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and/or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and/or You Shall Know Our Velocity!.
I prefer the latter book by both authors, though I think the former works drew more praise. As for Alice Sebold, I cannot recommend her memoir Lucky enough. Classic or not, it should be required reading in high schools.
From Wiki, here’s a list of popular novels published from 1900 to 1910. It’s not comprehensive – I arbitrarily deleted titles I’d never heard of, and there were a lot of those. I’ve put a * next to titles that (I believe) are still widely read today and qualify as classics.
*Lord Jim
*Sister Carrie
*The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Autobiography of a Flea
*Buddenbrooks
The First Men in the Moon
*Kim
My Brilliant Career
The Purple Cloud
Springtime and Harvest
Brewster’s Millions
The Four Feathers
*Heart of Darkness
*The Hound of the Baskervilles
Lavender and Old Lace
*The Tale of Peter Rabbit
*The Virginian
*The Wings of the Dove
*The Ambassadors
*The Call of the Wild
The Jewel of Seven Stars
*Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
*The Way of All Flesh
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth
*The Gold Bat
*The Golden Bowl
*Green Mansions
*The Marvelous Land of Oz
Master of the World
Nostromo
*The Sea-Wolf
*The House of Mirth
The Lighthouse at the End of the World
A Little Princess
*The Scarlet Pimpernel
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Annabel
*The Jungle
*The Railway Children
*White Fang
Wings
The Hill of Dreams
*The Man Who Was Thursday
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
*Ozma of Oz
*The Secret Agent
The Shepherd of the Hills
The Tangled Skein
The White Feather
*Anne of Green Gables
The Blue Lagoon
*Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
*The House on the Borderland
The Old Wives’ Tale
*Room With A View
*The Wind in the Willows
*Anne of Avonlea
A Girl of the Limberlost
Martin Eden
*The Road to Oz
*The Secret Garden
If we can accept that most of these books are classics, we should be able to come up with more titles from 2001-2008 that will be considered classic. If we can’t, I don’t know what that means. That we need more time to tell if a book will hold up? That today’s writers aren’t as good as writers from 100 years ago?
Literature is not as important now as it was then. They didn’t have movies or television.
That’s a good point. But it’s balanced by the numbers. Wiki lists only 15 novels published in 1900. In 2000, they list 379. So the field to choose from is larger.
But I don’t know what criteria Wiki is using. I know there were more than 379 novels published in 2000. Maybe they’re listing just the novels that made a best seller list or sold more than X number of copies.