I have been thinking more about things that are somehow “representative” of the time period, rather than focusing necessarily on superhigh literary quality. How about:
- Money by Martin Amis
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (I particularly like this one as it deals with an 80s childhood)
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- Anything by Douglas Coupland
- Someone else’s suggestion of Jurassic Park has grown on me in a weird way
- Haruki Murakami really feels to me like a good fit as well, maybe Norwegian Wood for the 80s even though it’s not my favorite of his—I think despite the cultural divide this works for some reason
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- The last two Rabbit books, maybe
- Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
For the current decade, while I maintain The Corrections as my first pick, I also like Ian McEwan’s Saturday.
PS—What are people’s thoughts on the 70s?
Interesting. I like the idea of thinking about books in terms of recent decades. It seems easy for most of us to match older books with their time period, but for the last 30 years, not so much.
I’m glad I found your blog. I love reading blogs about people who read. I’ll have to add some of these to my to-read list.
Norwegian Wood’s a great choice and one I was also considering. When I decided against it, I couldn’t give a reason why, but I just had this ‘feeling’ that it wasn’t suitable.
By the look of this list, maybe I should break my McEwan cherry? I’ve always shied away from his books as they seem too popular to be truly good. ‘Pop fiction’, you could say.
But even then (back on topic), is a list like this ever ‘complete’? Looking at Ryan’s original list of ‘classic’ books, it’s different to UK schools’ reading lists due to our different histories. Who says The Jungle is more representative as turn of the century literature than The Picture of Dorian Gray? Totally different books, for our totally different histories.
I’ve thought about this seemingly simple question more than I expected.
Lloyd—I would definitely recommend McEwan, he is not as pop as he seems, though I would possibly not start with Atonement, or with Saturday, for that matter. I myself started with Amsterdam.
Certainly Ryan’s list varies a lot even within the US. I myself have not yet read The Jungle, while we did read several things by Wilde.
I, too, have ended up thinking a lot more about this than I anticipated, and I’m actually mulling some thoughts that could turn into another post. The horror!