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.)
