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.)
As King Cynic’s nom de plume indicates, the concept alone is worthy of deep cynicism. While Bennett and Bloom have fomented about their treasured Greatest Books canon of dead white guys (books, nearly all of which are long past their copyright protections outside of the Great Books series), this list serves solely to promote the royalties and profits of publishers and artists in the US. Is this the 100 Greatest Books of the last 25 years as published in the English language for mostly American audiences??? Is this a newly promoted canon for k-12 reading education, thus insuring (long into the future) further profits and royalites???? Is this too cynical???
I don’t think so. We can easily surmise what this list is not: comprehensive, inclusive, diverse, engaging, debated in academe, etc.; and we can easily surmise what this list represents: profits, high volume sales, bestseller lists (not critical reviewed materials), and the like. Therefore the “New Classics” are just more promotional babble by publicists to advertise their desperate need for income. We should boycott these books until the authors’ agree that all of these books are alone their own top 100 (that will only happen when there is life found on Mars–oh wait, that is going to happen relatively soon i suspect, damn).
Where’s Wald (1984)!
I propose a Call for the Best Physics Books of the Last 25 Years. Any suggestions?
Some of those books on the list are truly terrible. Others should be way higher (Love in the time of Cholera and the Wind up Bird chronicles).
Bryan, Wald is good, but I bet if you try really hard you can come up with even better GR textbooks.
Dana, thanks. Not our usual fare, but we have our fun.
Spyder, you are far too cynical. Or, if you think the list above is reflective of anyone’s best-seller lists, you should spend more time in airport bookstores.
macho, don’t listen to Jennifer, she’s crazy.
Julianne, we (or the characters) are always paddling against the stream, but the question is whether or not we can paddle as fast as the water is flowing. (Or, in terms appropriate for the audience, whether we are still outside the event horizon or we are doomed to hit the singularity.) At some point the scales tipped, and the favored literary stance seemed to become that the world around us is just too big for us to affect in a meaningful way.
Note that this diagnosis is not in any way meant to be judgmental; Pynchon certainly epitomizes the genre of ineffectuality, but I love his stuff. Too much of this kind of thing does become a downer, though.
New hypothesis: the imaginative space that was formerly occupied by novels and plays of heroic action has now been largely taken over by movies and TV, leaving literature to deal with tales of passive angst-ridden milquetoasts.
Bryan, it’s cheating a bit, since a lot of the content is reprinted from papers more than 25 years old, but ‘t Hooft’s Under the Spell of the Gauge Principle ranks high on my list of favorite physics books released in the last 25 years.
As for the fiction books on the list: Remains of the Day should be much higher, I think. And if you’re going to pick a DeLillo book, and you have any taste, you don’t pick Underworld, unless you just want to impress people with the fact that you plowed through all N-hundred pages. (Interestingly, they didn’t go that route with David Foster Wallace, picking a nonfiction book again instead of the look-how-thick-a-book-I-can-read Infinite Jest.) There also seems to be a significant bias toward the more recent end of the 25 years. There’s also an implicit “no two books by the same author” rule, which is a little odd. And look at what’s missing: nothing by Salman Rushdie deserves as much credit as The Da Vinci Code or Jon Stewart’s America or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? Really? We get Jane Smiley, but no David Lodge? Haruki Murakami, beloved of American hipsters, is the only writer from East Asia who makes the cut? Funny, that. Of course, that’s just one aspect of Moshe’s complaint…. And the whole ‘look at us, we’re hip, we read graphic novels’ thing is taken a bit far.
OK, enough carping.
My 5 greatest novels of the last 25 years:
1. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco (1988).
2. Fiasco, Stanis?aw Lem (1987).
3. Perfume, Patrick Süskind (1985).
4. House Of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski (2000).
5. Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon (1997).
If anyone can recommend an author at the level, in the style and with the interests of Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges, I would be much obliged. Otherwise, I’ll continue my enforced furlough from the world of fiction.
Here’s a vote for both Inifnite Jest and House of Leaves. I have read several other DFW books and liked most of them, but I haven’t been able to make much headway with Only Revolutions yet.
Also Chuck Palahniuk deserves a mention….
Sean, what you’re describing is in large part the transition from the Romantic period to modernism and the rise of subjectivity as the prime territory of the novel. Compare Dickens and Tolstoy to Flaubert, Henry James, Kafka, Proust, Virginia Woolf. Or Kipling to “Catch-22.” This is a turn of the century development, but it was the turn of the previous century.
Any list which chooses Goblet as the best Harry Potter novel is really straining too hard. The 3rd and 5th books are both superior to Goblet.
I am not the most avid fiction reader in the world. I am a non-fiction sort of person (Guns, Germs, and Steel gets my vote).
I do have a couple of problems with it, though. First, this list is compiled by EW… not known to be arbiters of literary taste. Second, based on their 100 best albums from 1983 to 2008 list, I think we can pretty much disregard their opinions on music, too. Seriously, “In Rainbows” is at 10, but “OK Computer” shows up at 62 (below Coldplay??)???
That is all.
-e
I’ve only read Bridget Jones out of the whole list. Didn’t count, but think I ‘ve *heard* of some 30-40 of them …
Of course, I’ve not been reading much the last coupla years, but still. Perhaps it has to do with my only buying used books these days.
I think the “Two Cultures” are alive and well.
For what it’s worth (FWIW?) the Sunday Times (UK) featured an article – sub-titled the bonfire of the inanities – that listed books that, though lauded by the good and great, turn out to be really rather crap on closer inspection – burning being too good for them apparently. This exercise ranged over rather more than the last 25 years and included all manner of things I’m now glad I never got round to reading. So – given that we all love lists – why don’t the readers of CV put up their contenders. Science books too, folks – I’ll consign the Feynman Lectures to the flames (absolutely no use at all, unless you have a reasonable grasp of the subject already) just to fire you all up. Harry Potter (tawdry derivative pot-boiling) and Weinberg’s QFT (who would use that metric, or that alarming font, and still claim to be a genius?) as well. Go for it!!
To put together a list like this I would gather a group of readers, and I can’t imagine people who have each read 2/3 of these books and think *these* are the top 100.
Perhaps the EW method was to assign a staffer/intern pair to do this, and after they add the 20-30 books they’ve read and like, they go around the office asking for ‘good book’ suggestions, but, you know, none of that really old stuff or school books. To order them, they ask questions, “Was it better than Bridget Jones’s Diary?”!!!
I like 16 of their top 20 list, but am offended from the viewpoint each of 3 of my major professions. As a scientist and engineer, I agree with Sean Carroll: where’s Feynman? Where’s Isaac Asimov and Sir Arthur C. Clarke (as scientists and engineers who wrote so brilliantly)? And given those latter two names, and as I am a science fiction professional (co-authored, co-edited, or co-broadcast with Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Feynman) where is real Science Fiction (I don’t count the reinvented wheel of dystopia by Cormac McCarthy, much as I like his other novels, nor quite the Moore and Atwood, much as I like them)?
As a professional poet (keep your day job!) with over 220 published, I’ve got to ask — where’s the poetry? Is nothing by, say, Allen Ginsberg or Bob Dylan or Philip Larkin or Wislawa Symborska or Czeslaw Milosz or Yehuda Amichai good enough?
The list is stupid and insulting and pretentious and forgetful in so many ways.
I’ve listed over 20,000 authors in my web site, many in science, more in genres such as Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, Mystery/Detective, Westerns, Romance. If one does list Cormac McCarthy, his Westerns are much better than The Road. I don’t mind the Harry Potter books (Stephen King loves them for reasons skin to me). But this list shows why Art should not be done by committee.
“If anyone can recommend an author at the level, in the style and with the interests of Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges, I would be much obliged.”
Italo Calvino. For Borges-style, read Cosmicomics or Time and the Hunter. For Eco-style, read If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Invisible Cities, or Six Memos For The Next Millennium. Regardless, read Marcovaldo.
If they’re going to include non-fiction at all, it’s absurd there aren’t more of them in the list, and obscene that there are so few in the top 20. As far as I can tell there’s only Maus, and that’s narrative (it does, of course, deserve its place).
Jonathan Vos Post, maybe one of your illustrious coauthors and acquaintances, of whom there are so many, and whom you will never let anyone forget for even a minute, could explain the meaning of “last 25 years” to you.
Re: 42 — and which were not in the past 25 years?
* The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Jeffrey Robbins, Perseus Books, 1999
* Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation (1993)
* Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
* Collected Poems 1947-1997: Allen Ginsberg
or what? And don’t get me or Sean Carroll started on The Arrow of Time, or Time Travel…
3001 or Forward the Foundation among the top 100 books of the last 25 years? Few would agree with that, even if they were science fiction devotees. Seems like a way to sneak in a sort of “lifetime achievement” award to someone whose best works are long behind them…. Similarly with Feynman and Ginsberg, it’s cheating to use these “collected works” when the highlights in them are much older. Might as well open up any book that was reprinted in the last 25 years, even if it’s centuries old.
Re #44:
Okay, on or after 1983 and not mere collection of earlier publications.
You don’t think any of these are top 100?
* Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), Edward Hutchings (editor), W W Norton, 1984, ISBN 0-393-01921-7
* QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman, Princeton University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-691-08388-6
* What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), W W Norton, 1988, ISBN 0-553-17334-0
* The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Richard Feynman, Perseus Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0738201669.
[eliminated: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Jeffrey Robbins, Perseus Books, 1999, ISBN 0738201081]
* “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics.” (1942) PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. Publication: Dissertation. Published by World Scientific, 2005, under the title Feynman’s Thesis: a New Approach to Quantum Theory, edited by Laurie M. Brown. ISBN 978-9812563804 [previously unpublished]
[* Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, edited by Ralph Leighton, W. W. Norton, 2005, ISBN 0-393-06132-9. Chronologically reordered omnibus volume of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, with a bundled CD containing one of Feynman’s signature lectures, eliminated]
* Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman, foreword by Timothy Ferris, Basic Books, 2005, ISBN 0-7382-0636-9 (Published in the UK under the title: Don’t You Have Time to Think?, edited and with additional commentary by Michelle Feynman, Allen Lane, 2005, ISBN 0-7139-9847-4) [previously unpublished]
* Feynman Lectures on Computation, edited by Tony Hey and Robin W. Allen, Perseus Books Group, 2000, ISBN 0738202967, fairly important, as Feynman was the grandfather of the quantum computer, as well as of nanotechnology
Or you reject all of Asimov’s:
* Foundation and Earth (1986), ISBN 0-553-58757-9
* Prelude to Foundation (1988), ISBN 0-553-27839-8
* Forward the Foundation (1993), ISBN 0-553-40488-1
as, along with the authorized sequelae by Bear, Benford, and Brin, complete a set of 10 or more collected novels?
Or you reject all of Clarke’s:
* The Songs of Distant Earth (1986)
* 2061: Odyssey Three (1988)
* Cradle (1988) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama II (1989) (with Gentry Lee)
* Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) (with Gregory Benford)
* The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990)
* The Garden of Rama (1991) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama Revealed (1993) (with Gentry Lee)
* The Hammer of God (1993)
* Richter 10 (1996) (with Mike McQuay)
[* 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), eliminated]
* The Trigger (1999) (with Michael P. Kube-McDowell)
* The Light of Other Days (2000) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Time’s Eye (2003) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Sunstorm (2005) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Firstborn (2007) (with Stephen Baxter)
* The Last Theorem (to be published August 5 in 2008) (with Frederik Pohl)
Or Allan Ginsberg’s:
* White Shroud Poems: 1980 – 1985 (1986)
* Cosmopolitan Greetings Poems: 1986 – 1993 (1994)
* Howl Annotated (1995)
* Illuminated Poems (1996)
* Selected Poems: 1947 – 1995 (1996)
* Death and Fame: Poems 1993 – 1997 (1999)
* Deliberate Prose 1952 – 1995 (2000)
and I mention Bob Dylan as the poet Ginsberg considered #1 in America, and who has been proposed for Nobel prize in Literature…
Do reject the premise that ANY science fiction, or poetry, or science book has been overlooked for the top 20, or top 100?
Or it just sour grapes that I’ve been apprentice to extraordinary people, and you have not?
A great book is a great book, even if ignored in its day, especially if it changes the flow of society, or politics, or many individual human lives.
Nabokov had a sly mention in his fiction that, late in the 21st century, everyone acknowledges that the great author of the 20th century was someone ignored in his day, named Sinatra, not to be forgotten with a now-forgotten pop singer.
Other arguments aside, it is true that the list completely forgot science books, science fiction books and poetry, though there have been some huge publications in those fields.
I propose any of the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, written 1989 and onward, though my favorite is Endymion. I would also submit In Conquest Born by C.S. Friedman and The Paladin by C.J. Cherryh. Both timely, tightly written, and profound.
Come on, Sean, how can anyone lend credence to a list of top books that does not include the Oprah Winfrey Cookbook?
If there is a God, can he possibly worship anyone greater than himself? No, so that would make him an atheist, wouldn’t it? And he can’t worship himself either, since that would be committing one of the seven deadly sins (pride and vanity). So… if Catholics are badmouthin’ atheists, they’re badmouthin’ God!
A list -yet another list- driven by bestsellers and movie-made american -I mean, US- works of fiction, which unapologetically stands as “the greatest books of our time”. Is the industry so much lacking in translation?
The Entertainment Weekly issue containing the booklist has a great comic story by Alison Bechdel titled “Compulsory Reading”, about (self-referentially) canons and “greatest books” lists. It’s reprinted here:
<a href=”http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/compulsory-reading#more-598″Compulsory Reading
And if you liked that, check out the graphic memoir “Fun Home”, #68 on the list.