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The New Classics—You Sure About That?
July 15, 2008
I’ve been catching up with some magazine reading, and buzzed through the June 27/July 4 Entertainment Weekly dedicated to “The New Classics” of film, TV, music, theater, and, of course, books. Although I enjoy reading EW, they often have these goofy lists that don’t ever include their criteria for how they selected the 100 best comedies of all time, etc. This time, however, the criteria were listed, and in part say that the titles in all areas were picked because they are “memorable works that have endured in the public consciousness….”
Okay, but when opening to the book section, the mag’s number one choice is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a book that is only two years old. There is another title on the list—Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—that debuted only last year. How much real enduring have these books done? There are some great titles in here like Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, but those books have some mileage on them. Declaring something a classic after only two years seems a tad premature to me. Eye of the beholder, I guess.
Posted by Michael Rogers on July 15, 2008 | Comments (3)
