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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Sunday, May 1, 2011

What books of the past 60 years will people still read a century from now?

500th consecutive daily post on this blog! Thought I'd celebrate by sharing some or thoughts on what novels published in my lifetime (lets say roughly past 60 years, since 1950) will be read a century from now? Not as easy a question as you might think: what books from 100-150 years ago do we still read? Very few of the ones that were popular in their day I think. I'm excluding from my thinking the genre fiction - I have no sense of which crime, scifi, fantasy, or YA fiction will still be on sale a century from now, in whatever forms books as we know them might actually be on sale, let alone read. But here are some thoughts:
First, yes, following from recent posts, which got me thinking about this, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a true classic that will endure.
Second, though the verge on YA fiction these days, the three most-assigned high-school novels of the 20th century will probably still be around in the 22nd: Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies.
What else? I would say Camus's The Stranger and, though not one of my personal faves, Toni Morrison's Beloved. Possibly, because of its unique stature, Things Fall Apart.
I wish I could say that something by Roth or Updike will be read, but I'm not so certain: No single book by either author seems to me to be the landmark, but I would hope readers for all time will turn to their works, particularly to the Rabbit novels and to Updike's stories.
Many other novels, so important to understanding life as we live it today, will probably someday be curiosities or fodder for scholars. Can you imagine what 22nd-century readers would make of Lolita, Gravity's Rainbow, Midnight's Children, Infinite Jest? They may study these books, but I doubt many outside of the academy will read them.

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