Classics of 1980s, 1990s, 2000s.

September 14, 2007 10:30 AM

Classic Novel filter : What would be considered classics in 1980s, 1990s, 2000s? Must reads?

Basically I am trying to make a yearly reading list and want to make sure I dont miss out on the "classics" of my generation.
Thank you home fries!!

posted by boyinmiami to Media & Arts (37 answers total)

"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole - 1980
"Beloved" by Toni Morrison - 1987
"Snowcrash" by Neal Stevenson - 1992
"His Dark Materials" by Phillip Pullman - 1995-2000
"The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd - 2002

A New York Times article that wrestles with this same issue.

prophesy: you will receive eleventy billion favorites for asking this question. free second prophesy: someone will kindly direct you to eleventy billion other askme threads that are nearly identical to your question, which you would have discovered if you had simply looked for them using the search function.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 10:39 AM on September 14, 2007

Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night a Traveler
Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses
Isabel Allende - The House of the Spirits
Alice Walker - The Color Purple
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
John Irving - The Cider House Rules
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Tom Wolfe - The Bonfire of the Vanities
Laura Esquivel - Like Water for Chocolate
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Jung Chang - Wild Swans
Carol Shields - The Stone Diaries
E. Annie Proulx - The Shipping News
Zadie Smith - White Teeth
Ian McEwan - Atonement

(a rough 'greatest hits' from this list right here.)

It's hard to predict what will stand the test of time, if it hasn't been very long -- but I think at least a few of these have already started to be considered 'classics'...
posted by Jeanne at 10:46 AM on September 14, 2007

Infinite Jest, 1996.
It's long and jumps around and is self-indulgent (eg, hundreds of pages of footnotes). But if you can get past the "ain't I clever" tone, it's a fantastic book about family, addiction, commercialism, and lots of other things.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:47 AM on September 14, 2007

Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

I'd be surprised if you haven't read these 3 yet though.
posted by Phoenix42 at 10:59 AM on September 14, 2007

Yeah that is like every neckbeard's three favorite books. You may want to add Dune.
posted by ND¢ at 11:05 AM on September 14, 2007 [7 favorites]

Certainly at least one by Murakami. Probably The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Dune's from the 60s.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:06 AM on September 14, 2007

I meant as a book beloved by nerds. Not a classic from whenever.
posted by ND¢ at 11:10 AM on September 14, 2007

I think Mason & Dixon is going to turn out to have serious staying power. If only two of Pynchon's books wind up being regarded as classics, they'll be Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:13 AM on September 14, 2007

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992).
posted by raf at 11:14 AM on September 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

I would think you would want to add at least one ea. by:

Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian?)
Russell Banks (Cloudsplitter)
posted by mr. remy at 11:16 AM on September 14, 2007

@ mr_roboto:

seriously? What about Crying of Lot 49, if it's still being inflicted willy-nilly on high school sophomores? Much as I liked M&D, I think it's ultimately a lesser work than, believe it or not, Against the Day or V -- and certainly a tier or three below Gravity's Rainbow.
posted by mr. remy at 11:20 AM on September 14, 2007

Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1986)
Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson (1988)

Definitely Infinite Jest.
posted by mattbucher at 11:21 AM on September 14, 2007

Not sure if you mean, 'Which novels of the 1980s/90s/2000s do you think are likely to become classics?' or 'Which ones do you think of as characteristic "1980s [etc] classics"?' If the second, off the top of my head:

1980s:
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Martin Amis, Money
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
posted by Mocata at 11:22 AM on September 14, 2007

Blood Meridian, maybe a few others by Cormac McCarthy. I'd throw All the Pretty Horses in the mix, myself.
The English Patient
Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
White Noise, certainly.
The Handmaid's Tale. Personally, I don't even think it belongs in the top 5 books by Margaret Atwood (which is more a statement of esteem for her other work than a criticism of Handmaid), but it is fundamental to cultural literacy at this point.

How Late It Was, How Late
Wittgenstein's Mistress (though good luck finding it or anything else by David Markson in print).
The Wasp Factory
posted by willpie at 11:26 AM on September 14, 2007

mr. remy writes "seriously?"

Totally serious, man. I think it give GR a run for its money, actually. The only edge that The Crying of Lot 49 has is brevity.

On preview: Yeah, definitely Kundera.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:27 AM on September 14, 2007

The Brat Pack probably deserve a mention.

Seconding Money. I'd add London Fields, too.
posted by notyou at 11:30 AM on September 14, 2007

Smilla's Sense of Snow - Peter Hoeg
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 11:32 AM on September 14, 2007

From the 2000-era:

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski
posted by solid-one-love at 11:36 AM on September 14, 2007

Don't forget something from Bret Easton Ellis.
posted by Addlepated at 12:13 PM on September 14, 2007

I second Addlepated and notyou - Bret Easton Ellis is one of the signature writers of the 80's. Less Than Zero isn't actually a great novel but it's short and less stomach-churning than the better, funnier, nastier American Psycho (Glamorama is probably more accomplished than either but hits old notes for far too many pages).

Bright Lights, Big City and The Bonfire of the Vanities aren't great novels either, but both caused literary sensations and are good reads. BL,BC is sentimental and therefore more 'timeless' in some sense, kind of a late-adolescent novel to my eyes; Wolfe's book is a Wolfe book, so take with a grain of salt.

Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker just misses the temporal cut, but it's certainly as strong as If on a winter's night a traveler, which really is a gorgeous book. Hoban's novel is almost uncategorizable: a dark fairy tale, I suppose.

Yes to Douglas Adams, though Life, the Universe, and Everything is both much stronger (as Literature) than the first two H2G2 books and markedly less zany (after its fun it's-a-sequel opening). The later H2G2 books are weak. But the first three books are unquestionably classic satires. Which brings up the question of whether there are classic Terry Pratchett novels. (I doubt it, though they're all a blast.)

White Noise is already anointed a classic, though it's highly overrated; DeLillo writes sentences as strong as almost anyone else's but the book contains almost no authentic emotion.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a mighty thing as well. But history will accord House of Leaves greater respect, I think.
posted by waxbanks at 12:34 PM on September 14, 2007

Additionally: it's disingenuous to speak of contemporary literary culture without talking about the elephant in the room, Jo Rowling. The Harry Potter books will still be read years from now, on merit.
posted by waxbanks at 12:37 PM on September 14, 2007

I'd throw Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex in for the aughts. Yeah, it was in Oprah's book club, but still...
posted by mattholomew at 1:43 PM on September 14, 2007

nthing Cormac McCarthy. Upon reading him for the first time (Child of God), I knew I had hit on something with some staying power when I found myself totally disgusted and terrified... and totally unable to stop myself from wanting to see what happened next. That, and his word economy blew me away.

Also-- Hubert Selby published only a few books within your time frame (Song of the Silent Snow,The Willow Tree, and Waiting Period, but those last few are still better than most fiction of that period, IMO.
posted by Rykey at 1:59 PM on September 14, 2007

1980s: I'd call Neuromancer the SF book of the 80s in a lot of ways.
posted by sparkletone at 2:26 PM on September 14, 2007

Thats an interesting point. Should we include anything and everything Oprah recommended? I don't have a tv, and I know a lot of oprah books. Million tiny peices, kite runner, life of pi... If the definition of classic is influenced by the masses, then Oprah is probably right under Harry Potter
posted by Jacen at 2:52 PM on September 14, 2007

The Harry Potter books will still be read years from now, on merit.

Just like the Great Brain books and the Encyclopedia Brown books.
posted by solid-one-love at 3:47 PM on September 14, 2007

Douglas Coupland for the late 80s, early 90s.
Michael Chabon for the early 00s.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary is the stand-out hit of a characteristic genre from this time, professional-chick lit; I can't speak to its literary merits.
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:53 PM on September 14, 2007

sparkletone: You're absolutely right.

LobsterMitten: Coupland certainly has social relevance but he's a very, very minor writer. I suspect you're right about Chabon though.

solid-one-love: Don't be thick. The Encyclopedia Brown books were dated ('...carbon-dated!') when I read them 20 years ago; Rowling works in a genre that will surely age better and actually merits rereading. Atop which the books are almost universally acclaimed in high-toned and middlebrow circles; they have the right appeal. And they tell a whopping good story - actually delivering on the promise of Volume One sometime in Volume Seven is an admirable achievement, and 30 years from now I suspect the Harry Potter generation will be reading the books to their kids. They reward such engagement; the E. Brown books sure didn't.
posted by waxbanks at 4:08 PM on September 14, 2007

I'm now thinking genre stuff, rather than "literary" fiction -

William Gibson's Neuromancer, for being representative of that whole cyberpunk genre, very big just before the web really came live.
Stephen King? He's been a constant for 30+ years, and some of the books seem enduring, eg The Stand.
(Some of these kinds of books I can imagine having a kind Jules Verne-type longevity. Most will of course fade away, but don't count sci-fi out; often sci-fi works encapsulate an era better than any other genre.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:44 PM on September 14, 2007

Three books I wouldn't mind seeing becoming '90s classics:

AVA (Carole Maso)
Gold Bug Variations (Richard Powers)
The Fermata (Nicholson Baker) (plus, a VERY negative review from Michiko Kakutani, which is always a good time; I should also mention that Neil Gaiman is writing the film adaptation for it right now)
Maso is probably more under-appreciated than Baker or Powers, which positions her well for a major critical reevaluation/boner/canonization in 2039. Get on board now!!

And it's been 10+ years people, can we please stop pretending Wallace's footnotes, especially in Infinite Jest, are self-indulgent?

Dammit. I always told myself that my first Metafilter post would have nothing to do with DFW :/
posted by NolanRyanHatesMatches at 6:17 PM on September 14, 2007

And it's been 10+ years people, can we please stop pretending Wallace's footnotes, especially in Infinite Jest, are self-indulgent?

And technically, IJ has endnotes and not footnotes.

If The Fermata is considered a classic in the future, the future is going to be AWESOME.
I'd pick The Echo Maker or Time of Our Singing over Gold Bug Variations for Powers, but that's just me.
posted by mattbucher at 8:07 PM on September 14, 2007

About Wallace's footnotes (okay fine, endnotes) - I mention them because they do seem gimmicky, and so a person who has little patience for gimmickiness might put the book down -- unless warned that, yes, there are these apparently gimmicky things but it's worth it to get past that, and there is a point to it. I understand what they're for, but I hate to think that people who might otherwise love the book are turned off it by being annoyed by the notes.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:18 PM on September 14, 2007

Agree with lobster on that one. I enjoyed Infinite Jest, but it seems like those types of things are tricky to pull off without coming off as gimmicky.
posted by Rykey at 9:18 PM on September 14, 2007

I'd pick The Echo Maker or Time of Our Singing over Gold Bug Variations for Powers, but that's just me.

Yeah, for '90s Richard Powers, I actually enjoyed Galatea 2.2 more than The Gold Bug Variations, but it seems people respond better to the latter. Either way, I don't really think you could go wrong with him.

I mention them because they do seem gimmicky

This DFW's explanation of the IJ endnotes in this Charlie Rose interview might help make you sympathetic (around the 17-minute-mark he goes into IJ stufF). Or not. It might just be a fatal style-tick.
posted by NolanRyanHatesMatches at 9:19 PM on September 14, 2007

Yes - I understand why he includes them. But I mean that to someone coming to the book cold, they might seem like a pointless gimmick. Hence the disclaimer - yes, they seem gimmicky, but stick with it because it's worth it.

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell?

Tom Robbins and John Irving were huge authors of the '80s; no idea what their staying power will be.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:32 PM on September 14, 2007

Trainspotting is obvious and clichéd but I genuinely believe it will have legs.
posted by ClanvidHorse at 10:47 AM on September 15, 2007

Baby_Balrog's link got me an abstract, so here's a better link: What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

I think you absolutely have to include a Raymond Carver short story collection on any list of late 20th-century classics; the NYT judges chose 1988's Where I'm Calling From, a best-of collection to that point with some new stories as well.
posted by mediareport at 8:08 AM on September 17, 2007