Entertainment Weekly, clearly nostalgic for the orgy of millenarian list-making, has come up with a list of the 100 Greatest Books of the Last 25 Years. (They have the 100 Greatest Movies, too.) Here are the top 20:
1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
Of these 20, I have read precisely half. And my favorite among those 10 would be Bridget Jones. Draw whatever conclusions you will.
It’s a provocative list, as such lists are intended to be, as the point is more to begin discussion than to conclude it. There are a few non-fiction works that somehow poked their way in there (Stephen King, Barbara Ehrenreich, Malcolm Gladwell) — they would have been better off leaving those out entirely, as there is a lot more worthy non-fiction that could easily have made the final cut, and the apples/oranges comparisons aren’t very illuminating.
Perhaps any such list that ignores Mason & Dixon but somehow finds room for The Da Vinci Code should just be dismissed out of hand. But looking over the list, or for that matter just thinking about a lot of contemporary literature, I can’t help but succumbing to the bloggy temptation to pronounce a grand theory on the basis of two minutes of thought and a teaspoonful of anecdotal evidence. To wit: if the literary spirit of our age would be summed up by a single word, it would be “passivity.”
Not all of the 100 books fit my theory, of course, not by a long shot. But when I think about today’s serious fiction and compare it to yesterday’s, there seem to be a lot more books featuring relatively helpless protagonists, swept along by the currents of fate/society/circumstance rather than heroically altering them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the novels are more inward-focused, concentrating on the personal struggle of the protagonist with their own attitudes more than on their attempts to change the external situation.
Either way, I get the feeling that the Zeitgeist views individual people as very small and the world as very big. It doesn’t seem to be much of a time for heroes, Harry Potter notwithstanding. (Or maybe I’m just reading the wrong books.)
I must have a really narrow reading field, since despite being a relatively voracious reader of books, I have read exactly one book in the entire list. It probably says something sad about me …
Of those 20, I’ve only read 3, and two of them were the two graphic novels (Maus and Watchmen).
Of the rest of the list I’ve only read another 4, though I haven’t read the whole Sandman series. I’ve been more focused on reading the great classics of the past than of the present, though, so I’m not really surprised.
The list is also a bit of a misnomer, as none of the books are non-fiction. Books like Guns, Germs & Steel or The Rise of American Democracy would easily rank in the top half of that list.
I just re-read the list and your post and realized that there are some non-fiction books on there. How America made it and the 2 I mentioned already didn’t is completely beyond me.
Not a contest to compare how many books we’ve read on the list!
I hate those contests.
Quite true. You’re welcome to excise that part of my first comment.
I’ve read precisely one. Probably because most of the time I stick to fantasy/sci-fi in my reading, and usually end up sticking to series that I find I enjoy until I’m done.
I, too, tend to stick to sci-fi/fantasy, because I’ve had precisely the same impression of our literary zeitgeist. Ever since “Underworld”, I’ve had a sense that great American novels are stories about things that happen to people, but great sci-fi and fantasy has been, and still is, comprised of stories of heroism and social revolution.
I’m not sure that most fiction can’t be wedged into the “relatively helpless protagonists, swept along by the currents of fate/society/circumstance rather than heroically altering them” category, more so if you relax the criteria of “relatively helpless”. Romeo & Juliet: teens discover lust and bad stuff procedes to happen. L’etranger: man doesn’t cry at mom’s funeral, kills a guy, all else follows. In other words, in a large fraction of stories, when done well, a critical moment leads to a subsequent series of inevitable events, leaving the feeling of people being “swept along by currents”.
With regard to the list, I was thrilled to see Maus on it, and somewhat surprised that Guns, Germs, and Steel didn’t make it.
So, over 80% of the best books were written in English, interesting…
Julianne, you may be right, as my impressions are far from scientific. But Shakespeare is the last example I would pick to disprove my point; his characters were always undertaking elaborate plans, from Macbeth and Richard III to Prospero and Iago down to the scheming cross-dressers in the comedies. It’s exactly that kind of frantic agency that I don’t expect to find in Don Delillo, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, or Jose Saramago.
Camus, of course, is an excellent example, much as I love L’etranger. If my impressions have any basis in reality, we can probably trace the origins of contemporary literary listlessness back through the existentialists to some dour set of Russians.
After my own two minutes of thought and anecdotal evidence, what you’re saying seems to make sense – the modern hero’s quest seems to be for a return to homeostasis, rather than large-scale change.
Then again, that’s what Odysseus was after.
Mystic River???! Are they kidding? At least Alice Munro and GG Marquez are in there.
“I’m not sure that most fiction can’t be wedged into the “relatively helpless protagonists, swept along by the currents of fate/society/circumstance rather than heroically altering them” category, more so if you relax the criteria of “relatively helpless”. Romeo & Juliet: teens discover lust and bad stuff procedes to happen. L’etranger: man doesn’t cry at mom’s funeral, kills a guy, all else follows. In other words, in a large fraction of stories, when done well, a critical moment leads to a subsequent series of inevitable events, leaving the feeling of people being “swept along by currents”.
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Not completely relevant, but I’d see a more interesting dichotomy as ontological vs psychological tragedy. Psychological tragedy is about things going wrong because of the flaws within a single human being; ontological tragedy is about things going wrong because of the entire structure of society.
We’ve had 500 years or so dominated by psychological tragedy; I would submit that it’s time for fiction to get over this onanism and write some deep ontological tragedy. (I could add some blather here about 9/11 and Iraq but give me a freaking break — if WW1 and WW2 didn’t kickstart such a movement, to assume that 9/11 is going to invert the artistic world is more than a little pathetic.)
If any readers are interested in this dichotomy, I cannot recommend enough this podcast of a course given by Hubert Dreyfus entitled “From Gods to God and Back” at Berkeley:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978407
The subject matter (literature through history, interpreted as theology, by a philosopher) sounds like a recipe for boredom beyond belief, but is actually stunningly interesting (except the last few lectures on Moby Dick which drag on about twice as long as they need to).
3 for me. And from those I also liked Bridget Jones best.
I would have liked seeing Einstein’s Dreams somewhere on the big list.
I only read physics books.
Sean — But to return to the idea of agency, characters can demonstrate agency in the face of one of those sweeping currents. The final outcome is a foregone conclusion (Maynard’s “ontological” tradgedy), but there is agency within it. Hamlet was pretty much a goner from the moment his uncle offed his dad and married his mom, no matter how much “agency” he demonstrated in between. Maus is similar, in that the Holocaust guarantees lasting scars in Spiegelman’s family, but his father demonstrated tremendous agency is his struggles to survive (though as non-fiction, this doesn’t necessarily count). So, the current guarantees you’re going downstream, but you can choose to paddle or not. Or, in the cases of Delillo, blather precociously while you circle around an eddy.
Random reactions:
LIke Sean, I think nonfiction should have its own separate category. And I note that poetry is sadly absent. Then again, it is sadly absent from most literary circles.
Updike’s Rabbit books annoyed the hell out of me; I vastly preferred THE CENTAUR. Thank god they saw fit to shut out Philip Roth from the top 20.
I cannot believe I am married to someone who enjoyed BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY, nor can I believe it is on the list. It made me cringe. 🙂
If we’re talking graphic novels, Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN series most certainly belongs on the list. As does PERSEPOLIS. Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS is a sprawling, multi-faceted, occasionally flawed work that certainly ranks up there with Eggers.
MYSTIC RIVER is a much more powerfully nuanced novel that most people like to acknowledge. That said, I’m not sure it would my make my top 20 list.
Cormac McCarthy? Okay, but for BLOOD MERIDIAN or ALL THE PRETTY HORSES.
I’d add Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and a host of others too numerous to name. Reading is such a subjective thing.
Finally, I second Moshe’s lament that 80% of the list is books written in English — and mostly by American authors, no less. It ignores some truly magnificent output from all over the world, down through the centuries.
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There may be some sense in separating fiction from non-fiction, but if the title of the list is going to be “100 greatest books of the last 25 years” (with no qualifier) then the list ought to be at least 90% non-fiction. Think about how much more we know about the world now than we did a generation ago. In terms of intellectual ferment and truly important discoveries there has never been as felicitous of a period in human history.
Fiction, on the other hand, has hardly advanced for a thousand years. Hell, there’s little worth having in fiction that you can’t get from Homer and the Greek playwrights.
I wish I had logged on before Sean’s comment #4. I love those contests.
Strangely, Bridget Jones is one I haven’t read, although with a teenage daughter who devours that genre I suspect it’s in the house somewhere.
But since I agree completely with Jennifer re Updike, McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (although also thought the Road was excellent) and Harper Lee, I’m going to go with her review instead of Sean’s.
Goncharov’s Oblomov. On the other hand, there is also a strand of Russian novel where the protagonists attempt to exert agency but are swept up in historical forces that are beyond their control, like Tolstoy. And sad young literary men who will make less difference in the long run than they expected have been around for a long time: I read Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (highly recommended) as a senior in college and was immediately and permanently disillusioned.
Philip Roth is on the list, he’s right there at number 5. However, Philip Roth’s had something of a renaissance with novels that are about more than just old goats who worry about whether they can’t get it up any more.
What I think is notable is that the list contains many more large ambitious books than it would have a decade or two ago, even if their protagonists are specks in a larger world. Ten or fifteen years ago, minimalism was still in favor and the time period would have included more of Raymond Carver’s books. One of them would have been higher than 75th.
I kind of agree with King Cynic. I have the feeling that more of the books I’ve read should have qualified as one of the greatest books this past quarter century. On the other hand, I also get the feeling that I have a myopic view of what a great book should be …
Re: comments #18 and #21 – To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and so doesn’t meet the “in the last 25 years” criterion.
Sean, your ideas intrigue me, especially your thought on passivity vs. external heroism. (Who cares if it’s an on-the-spot, bloggish conclusion? I’m quite guilty of those myself!)
I stumbled upon your blog, and I enjoy it. Keep writing!
Dana