{"id":1751,"date":"2008-06-24T11:16:58","date_gmt":"2008-06-24T16:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/06\/24\/the-books-of-our-time\/"},"modified":"2008-06-24T11:16:58","modified_gmt":"2008-06-24T16:16:58","slug":"the-books-of-our-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/24\/the-books-of-our-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Books of Our Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entertainment Weekly<\/em>, 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<\/a>. (They have the 100 Greatest Movies<\/a>, too.) Here are the top 20:<\/p>\n

\n

1. The Road <\/i><\/b>, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
\n2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire<\/i><\/b>, J.K. Rowling (2000)
\n3. Beloved<\/i><\/b>, Toni Morrison (1987)
\n4. The Liars’ Club<\/i><\/b>, Mary Karr (1995)
\n5. American Pastoral<\/i><\/b>, Philip Roth (1997)
\n6. Mystic River<\/i><\/b>, Dennis Lehane (2001)
\n7. Maus<\/i><\/b>, Art Spiegelman (1986\/1991)
\n8. Selected Stories<\/i><\/b>, Alice Munro (1996)
\n9. Cold Mountain<\/i><\/b>, Charles Frazier (1997)
\n10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle<\/i><\/b>, Haruki Murakami (1997)
\n11. Into Thin Air<\/i><\/b>, Jon Krakauer (1997)
\n12. Blindness<\/i><\/b>, José Saramago (1998)
\n13. Watchmen<\/i><\/b>, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
\n14. Black Water<\/i><\/b>, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
\n15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius<\/i><\/b>, Dave Eggers (2000)
\n16. The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i><\/b>, Margaret Atwood (1986)
\n17. Love in the Time of Cholera<\/i><\/b>, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
\n18. Rabbit at Rest<\/i><\/b>, John Updike (1990)
\n19. On Beauty<\/i><\/b>, Zadie Smith (2005)
\n20. Bridget Jones’s Diary<\/i><\/b>, Helen Fielding (1998)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of these 20, I have read precisely half. And my favorite among those 10 would be Bridget Jones<\/em>. Draw whatever conclusions you will.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Perhaps any such list that ignores Mason & Dixon<\/em><\/a> but somehow finds room for The Da Vinci Code<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}