• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Modern classics of all kinds

Meadow337 said:
LOL there is a wonderful invention ..... its called .... wait for it .... GOOGLE! It can turn any idiot into a genius with the click of a button or two :rofl
(especially at 2 am)

I did think that link hit in on the head, but now if only all 'classics' met those criteria.
Click to expand...

Yes indeed! Google is our good ol' friend, and we should not have to reinvent the wheel.

Hence my suggestion to try to start with now. Is anyone reading about "now"? And will it last 50 years, let's say? (And if we can't tell whether a book is written in now, with now people, and now situations and issues, then where are we?) As for not all classics being similar, that is harder to answer. (So, postpone? :D )

As for older classics, sometimes I do wonder why they were written (or why they have lasted), i.e. what was noteworthyfor their times? Or our times? (Not being a lit major, I flounder.)

So, calling all lit majors . . . Help needed.
 
Meadow337 said:
Technology is always an issue in a 'now' book or a book that gives you a feeling 'oh gosh isn't that funny' if we are talking about books that are meant to be a reflection of 'life now'.

For example - is a book like Bonfire of the Vanities still as sharply relevant as it was when it came out? It was a product of its time, and raised great questions for that time, but has it stood even a short test of time?

On the other hand you can read a book like Remains of the Day which is also a book set in a particular time and place, and yet somehow transcends that.
Click to expand...

Bonfire of the Vanities I think not. It sounds dated, for exactly the reason that it was closely a product of its time.
Remains of the Day I have not read, so no comment. Just a question: If a book speaks to current times because it transcends its own time, is it a modern novel for purposes of this discussion. Grouch here says no, otherwise I quickly add The Bible.

But The Book Thief seems to have legs and continues to turn up at the head of many lists, even though I think it s a very poor book about the Holocaust and misleads more than informs. Again, I have doubts about its being modern for a "now" discussion.
 
LOL well lets take a CLASSIC classic Shakespeare - I will concede he has a way with words - but is that enough? His works are highly sanitised these days, but if they were translated into properly equivalent modern English to the words he actually used, it isn't all nice flowery poetic language, It's foul mouthed coarse 4-letter words and innuendo. Is this a classic? Because we don't actually get how rude it actually is because we don't recognise the meaning of the words?

Theater in those days had to walk a delicate line - the toffs in the seats didn't like being lampooned, and the unwashed standing below the stage (and armed with rotten produce) loved nothing better than seeing the high brought low and sufficient rude words to please them. Much like today there is a nod to the um how to put it .... less refined ... in certain kinds of books - think pulp fiction.

I think time has been kind ... Chaucer was also pretty darn graphic ... and again ... we don't read medieval English so well and modern translations are sanitised. They don't use the equivalent 4-letter words (if there are even modern equivalent terms - vulgarity has gotten so limited!) (Pause for a moment to mourn the loss of language).

I'm not sure either of them would appreciate what we have done to their work.
 
Meadow337 said:
LOL well lets take a CLASSIC classic Shakespeare - I will concede he has a way with words - but is that enough? His works are highly sanitised these days, but if they were translated into properly equivalent modern English to the words he actually used, it isn't all nice flowery poetic language, It's foul mouthed coarse 4-letter words and innuendo. Is this a classic? Because we don't actually get how rude it actually is because we don't recognise the meaning of the words?

Theater in those days had to walk a delicate line - the toffs in the seats didn't like being lampooned, and the unwashed standing below the stage (and armed with rotten produce) loved nothing better than seeing the high brought low and sufficient rude words to please them. Much like today there is a nod to the um how to put it .... less refined ... in certain kinds of books - think pulp fiction.

I think time has been kind ... Chaucer was also pretty darn graphic ... and again ... we don't read medieval English so well and modern translations are sanitised. They don't use the equivalent 4-letter words (if there are even modern equivalent terms - vulgarity has gotten so limited!) (Pause for a moment to mourn the loss of language).

I'm not sure either of them would appreciate what we have done to their work.
Click to expand...

Well some books are clearly "then" classics, not "now" classics. :D
I only know "now," not "then." I am not bi-classic. :rolleyes:
 
Meadow337 said:
Technology is always an issue in a 'now' book or a book that gives you a feeling 'oh gosh isn't that funny' if we are talking about books that are meant to be a reflection of 'life now'.

For example - is a book like Bonfire of the Vanities still as sharply relevant as it was when it came out? It was a product of its time, and raised great questions for that time, but has it stood even a short test of time?

On the other hand you can read a book like Remains of the Day which is also a book set in a particular time and place, and yet somehow transcends that.
Click to expand...

Your example of Remains of the Day has the distinction that although being about the more distant past, was written much closer to "our time". So even while the book depicts the "past", it was written with the sensibilities of the "present".

It's the same reading History. When one reads contemporaneous renditions of the past, they can certainly differ from what is written "now". It's not (always) deliberate, it just is.
 
I'm not sure we are any closer to an answer to the question, but I'll add another book to the list
The Intercept by Dick Simon​
It is certainly a "now" book, being about the search for a terrorist loose in NYC bent on producing a greater impact than 9-11, and written by the writer/producer for the Law and Order TV series.
Will it be a classic in 50 years? I doubt it. But there it is. And it's a great read right now.

Any other definitions, books, reads, suggestions?

Anyone at all reading any "modern"?

Or have we beaten this topic to death without reaching any conclusion?

OP?
 
Peder said:
I'm not sure we are any closer to an answer to the question, but I'll add another book to the list
The Intercept by Dick Simon​
It is certainly a "now" book, being about the search for a terrorist loose in NYC bent on producing a greater impact than 9-11, and written by the writer/producer for the Law and Order TV series.
Will it be a classic in 50 years? I doubt it. But there it is. And it's a great read right now.

Any other definitions, books, reads, suggestions?

Anyone at all reading any "modern"?

Or have we beaten this topic to death without reaching any conclusion?

OP?
Click to expand...


OP is GWTW, which, btw, is a modern classic...........:p
 
Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Hitchhikers Guide

Lord of the Rings

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Love Story?

Jonathon Livingstone Seagull

Books like Dr Zhivago, War and Peace, Jane Austin, I think are already entering into the public consciousness as classics.
 
Last edited:
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
Gulag Archipelago , and others, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Dreams of my Russian Summers by Andrei Makine
Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Plus I still see mentions of the multi-volume sets:
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, and
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

Plus maybe something on the Prague Spring?

And Londonistan by Melanie Phillips?
 
Classic I would say in a sense the the writing structure and language type is written like it was in the classic. Versus modern day the use of such language or words or wording structure isn't the same as the classics. Such as Ayn Rand, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Aristotle, William Shakespeare and so on.
 
Perhaps I'm too much of an individualist because I've always found it a struggle to embrace a singular definition when personal opinions are involved. Especially when it is a topic that people feel passionately about. In literature, I define 'modern' as anything written after 1940ish. Most likely because I'm pushing 50 myself. 'Classic' (for me) is a work that is an exemplary example of a genre or style. That being said - I would venture to offer a few that I hold dear as modern classics (IMHO):

The Blood of Others - Simone de Beauvoir
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Brave, New World - Aldus Huxley
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

... and about a hundred others.

Unfortunately, it's been a real struggle for me to find anything after - say the 1970's - that would wind up in my "classic" shelves. (It just seems to me that, for the most part, formulaic writing has taken over on an epic scale and everyone from writers to publishers are chasing sales instead of developing talent.)

Something Happened - Joseph Heller
The Handmaid Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Weight of Water - Anita Shreve
Redwall - Brian Jacques
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - H.S. Thompson
The Terror - Dan Simmons
Asylum - Patrick McGrath
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top