At Last Night's Book Club...

Last night was my monthly book club meeting and it marked the first time I didn’t finish the book.  It wasn’t because I ran out of time; I always make time for reading to the sacrifice of other things that perhaps others would give priority to, i.e., parties, lunch, exercise, school, dinner, social life, taxes, sleep, dessert, and the latest episode of Dancing With the Stars.  When the book is good enough, I don’t care.

It just wasn’t the case with Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.  I read about a hundred pages (from the large print version they carried at the library because I couldn’t reserve anything normal) and once a couple of my red flags were raised, I checked on Wikipedia see how the story ends.  It confirmed my suspicions and I decided not to bother with the rest of the book.

It’s actually very well written and the circus was alive and vibrant in ways some sci-fi and fantasy don’t try for when creating planets.  And the characters were strong.  Jacob Jankowski was well realized, but I had a feeling I was going to hate his romance with Marlena.  I guessed that she was gonna be married to the bad boy and would have a secret affair with Jacob, and nothing short of an act of God would stop the creeper.  I ended up being mostly right and I decided I have better things to do.

Most content doesn’t bother me.  I am willing to put up with a lot of violence and sex in stories (since most stories can’t function without an element of one or the other; often both.)  But I have seen enough women choosing to attach themselves to horrible men for years on end and never making the move to save themselves from it, that I couldn’t bring myself to read about a wife doing the same stupid thing.  Just couldn’t do it this time.

Needless to say, I shouldn’t have had a whole lot to discuss this meeting, but because I don’t know how to shut up I spoke a lot anyways.  The best discussion wasn’t so much on that book, but a tangential topic on classical literature.  One of my friends asked if there are any books coming out today that could be considered the greats.  We came up with several books but then she pointed out each of our picks were still 20^th Century only.  The question is, what’s coming out in our century that will stand the test of time?

This was tough, especially since we’re only 13 years into our current century.  Still, this was fun to muse over and a little frustrating because very little was coming to mind.  Harry Potter is a no-brainer, but surely that couldn’t be the only great piece of literature to come out in our time.

The Hunger Games is a great commentary on reality TV and the media, but scratch past the surface, there isn’t much there.  Twilight does have some staying power, but it has a very select audience and who knows how long they’ll hold onto it.

After going through some of the obvious choices, though, we realized that we were just focusing on the children’s titles.  None of us are knocking on children’s books (they’re certainly some of my favorite selections) but are there any books targeted at adults today that would have the same cultural impact that Dickens, Austen, and Twain had on the 19^th Century, or Tolkien, King, and Steinbeck had on the 20^th?

None of us could come up with any.  A couple of folks in my group are not as harsh as me and enjoyed Water for Elephants, but nobody was championing it as a story for the ages.  This morning, the only contender I can think of for longevity is Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which I will justify because the best installment, A Storm of Swords, came out in 2000.  Still, the series isn’t finished yet and for all we know, the end is going to be crap.  Despite how much I’ve enjoyed the last two books, the series has lost much of its forward momentum.  We’ll see how it goes.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi may have something going for it in the long term.  I can’t say for sure since I haven’t read it yet, but then, it’s one of the few modern books in mainstream fiction that keeps coming to my attention again and again.

And then I felt really stupid when I realized, duh, we have Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke.  It isn’t just one of my favorite fantasy novels, it’s one of my favorite books, period.  It’s got great humor and lots of charm, all covering a darkly sinister and horrific plot of a monster threatening to destroy the two men who hold the civilized world in their hands, and in many ways, their own character flaws could undo them before they ever accomplish their great task.  I have trouble getting friends to read it because it’s so long and the prose is pretty dense, but everything about it is so delightful, and the footnotes are more fun than the main story itself.

What books do you think are going to last?