Silly but fun: The UK's Telegraph, not a serious newspaper, has published The top 100 books of the last 25 years. Most of them are novels, and I'm amazed to see how few of them I've read...and I've liked even fewer of them. Just for examples:
1983: The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett. Very funny, but Discworld stopped being funny after the 50th or 60th book in the series.
The Name of Rose, Umberto Eco. Entertaining intellectual mystery. I swiped Eco's idea of a lost book by Aristotle on comedy, and mentioned it in my time-travel thriller Rogue Emperor...a small hommage.
1984: Neuromancer, William Gibson. The book that gave us cyberspace, the word for this medium. Gibson is a wonderful writer but I stopped reading him a few books ago. Not sure I'd enjoy re-reading this book, however prescient it may have been.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera. Great title, dull story.
1985: Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez. Brilliant. Any aspiring writer who doesn't read the master is stumbling around in a dark blind alley.
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood. Pretty good SF for a literary writer.
1987: Knots and Crosses, Ian Rankin. The Scottish crime writer went on to greatness—but again, I've stopped reading him. Probably my loss.
Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. Awful, pretentious, and self-indulgent.
1989: Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. I know I read it, but I can recall nothing about it.
1990: LA Confidential, James Ellroy. Entertaining to read about the real police and politicos of 1950s Los Angeles, when I lived there, but I didn't believe it as fact or as fiction.
1992: Fatherland, Robert Harris. I'm a sucker for alternate history, but this one assumed its readers had never thought for a moment about what the world would have been like if Hitler had won. Another literary slummer.
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. A case study in preciously "fine" writing destroying a good story.
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Peter Hoeg. All I recall is the kid going off the roof of the apartment building.
1993: The Shipping News, Annie Proulx. Fun to read, easy to forget. Newfoundland deserves better. Still, it has one of the funniest jokes in recent North American literature.
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks. Pretty good novel about World War I, though the last part, about the tunnels dug under no man's land, doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the story.
1994: A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth. Never finished it, but enjoyed what I did read. My wife's read it two or three times.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami. Very odd, but it held my attention through a long and complex story. It's a vision of modern Japan no one else has offered.
1997: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J. K. Rowling. This was the first one, right? I got about a quarter of the way through it, put it down, and never picked it up again. Or the rest of the series.
2004: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susannah Clarke. Note the long gap. Obviously my attention was elsewhere. This fantasy was entertainingly different from all the Tolkien clones, but fierce editing would have made it far better.
Bear in mind that this is my personal take on a list created by others. My tastes don't usually run to mainstream literary fiction, mostly because it seems to me to address very transient anxieties rather than the big issues. I suspect if you tracked down a list of the top fiction best-sellers of each of the last 25 years, you'd find mostly forgotten novels.
As Northrop Frye once observed, a classic is a novel that refuses to go away. I'd be interested to know what novels refuse to go away from you.
The Harry Potter stuff gets better as it goes along (although at the same time, J,K. Rowlings really needs an editor). If you can slog through the first two books, the ones that follow will reward that effort.
Posted by: Don Hosek | April 14, 2007 at 11:23 PM
Some novels go straight to the solar plexus and take our breath away. SHIBUMI was that for me, albeit MORE than 25 yrs ago. Nicolai Helm was a paid assasin who never was caught, because he had learned SHIBUMI through the board game GO. The plot? SHIBUMI is the ability to underestimate everything, then turn it into an art. 100 tulips are beautiful, but so is a single one in a raked gravel garden. It became an ache in my heart to learn this and I did. It changed my being, and the end result was that I beat the computer at the game of GO. The screen showed 'RESIGNED", and I've never been the same since.
Posted by: Grandy Shea | April 23, 2007 at 07:29 PM
I've come to this a bit late but I just wanted to let you know that the Telegraph is in fact a serious broadsheet newspaper.
Posted by: Indy | May 28, 2007 at 03:49 AM
I'm soliciting short fiction on the topic of gambling. Interested parties see
http://www.lauriechampion.com/2007/08/13/seeking-short-stories-about-gambling/
for full details.
Posted by: Laurie Champion | September 01, 2007 at 07:44 PM