what will be the classics from our era?

Harry Potter
Lord of the Rings
A Suitable Boy and others by Vikram Seth
Dorothy Dunnet;s Lymond and Niccolo series

can't think of any others at the moment but there are lots

Chronicles of Narnia
His Dark Materials
Mel Gibson's cyberpunk novels... (he invented the genre so)
Chrysalids (already a classic?)
Stephen King's novel?
John Grisham's?
Life of Pi (?)
Tom Clancy's novel?

.............

Artemis Fowl maybe too.
With the buzz The DaVinci code is making, it could be up there as well.

Books that last need to have a timeless quality that each new generation can relate to. Books by Grisham and Clancy are very steeped in the our moment of time and I'm not sure they will still translate well in 50 or 100 years like a Dickens or Austin.

I think books like "Girl With A Pearl Earring", "Cold Mountain", and "The Name of the Rose" might still be read far into the future.

Vivien, much of your list is mine.

I would add The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and def. agree with Cold Mountain.

I'd probably go Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland rather than Girl with a Pearl. I like the reverse tracing of the ownership of a Vermeer and what the effects and responsibilities are of owning great art.

In that vein, I'd also add Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read.

Re: what will be the classics from our era?


This leaves out The Lord of the Rings (written quite a while ago) and, barely, The Name of the Rose (1980).

What would be Classics in the XXII Century?
Perhaps the later works of Grass, Garcia Marquez, Eco, Toni Morrison...


Oh yes, and "Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed", by Tony Clink and Bret Witter.

Oh, and Ray--yea and big YES for
His Dark Materials

William Gibson, Ray, WILLIAM.
Mel's the one who brought us "The Passion of the Christ", remember?

Hmm.

Definitely on A Suitable Boy.

I'm not sure how "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" will age.

Some James Ellroy, maybe.

Alice Munro should really be in there.

Yesterday I had a delightful time in Staples, picking up notebooks and rubber bands and a variety of post-it notes.

I remembered that Colette has a meditation on her love of desk furniture--her observations on sealing wax are practically erotic--and I went looking for my QPBC Colette.

Gone, gone with the wind.

I checked the Gutenburg Project and found that those essays weren't immortalized yet.

Perhaps the readers who put their time where their opinions are will determine which works of the late 20th and early 21st century survive.

Grisham and Tom Clancy will be almost entirely forgotten within the next 20 - 25 years, especially Clancy. So will Dan Brown; The DaVinci Code will go down in literary history as a curious footnote, a third-rate thriller that made best-seller history. Today's best-sellers do not provide a reliable guide to a book's durability. Moby Dick had terribly disappointing sales when it was first published. It was soon out of print and Herman Melville died in relative obscurity and poverty. Louisa May Alcott confidently predicted that Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would go nowhere; she expected that her own Little Women and Little Men would endure the test of time. They haven't. The runaway best-sellers of just a few years ago are largely forgotten now. Most of Michener's works are out of print. Anybody remember James Clavell? Frank Yerby?

I won't comment on the specific books that will endure but I expect that authors such as Gunther Grass and William Golding (both Nobelists) will continue to be read. Toni Morrison, yes. Also Kurt Vonnegut Jr., perhaps Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow among American writers. I can't comment on Stephen King. His output is so huge, the quality of his work so uneven that it's just not possible to know whether he will be considred the E.A. Poe of the 20th Century or just an H.P. Lovecraft. And Dr. Seuss, I think, is as timeless as Lewis Carroll and A.E. Milne before him.

Noddy, what I find scary is that it may be the production giants like Amazon and Barnes and Noble who sell far more Dan Brown than Colette that will determine what survives. I sure hope not!

But I hope the books that are original in approach, and have the timelessness that is created because the emotions, character and dialog strike an important note, survive.

I'm for Toni Morrison and I loved the Naguib Mahfouz (sp?) trilogy.

loislane--

The Gutenburg project is a labor of love by unpaid workers who enter the books and then proof the entries.

Perhaps the Best Selling Authors could buy their way on the lists (after their copyrights expire), but all the advertising in the world can't convince posterity.

Speriamo! (we hope!)

I like the sound of The Gutenberg Project...wow!! I just visited the site and it is amazing! I gotta make it the thing I donate to next month (I'm doing a donate to a worthy cause every month thing!).
Awesome!

I think much of William Trevor's writing will stand the test of time, especially short stories like "The Piano Tuner's Wife" and the novel "The Story of Lucy Gault".

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Lol yeah.
There must have been some subliminal messages that made me think Mel.

Would Life of Pi make it as a classic?

Oh yeah I forgot Ray Bradbury! His novels can be eerie and depressing though, The Martian Chronicles Anyone?

The Martian Chrnicles is already a classic in its field.

Right.

In many bookstores the Lord of the Rings trilogy is already considered classic along with some of the other previously mentioned. I agree with many people on the His Dark Materials trilogy. Someone has already said Harry Potter right bcuz with all the readers world wide its gotta be considered a classic in the future. Some of my own favorites that i want to last would be The Sisterhood of the traveling pants trilogy\series. I'm not sure if I'm crossing my fingers.

the dark tower series by stephen king.....anyone?