# What books today do you think will be relevant a hundred years from now?



## Leslie_Messy (Sep 14, 2012)

I am amazed when I read something and I learn that it is over a hundred years old, but still reads like it could be released today. What books today do you think will be relevant a hundred years from now?


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## Kenneth Rosenberg (Dec 3, 2010)

Wow, that's a great question. I wish I had a crystal ball so that I could see! One book I read recently that I think could have a chance was _Cloud Atlas_, by David Mitchell. It is a bunch of tenuously interconnected stories that take place starting far in the past and stretching out far into the future. I think that one could still seem fresh 100 years from now. I'm definitely looking forward to checking out the movie version, too.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

This gets my vote:



It will come in handy after the collapse of civilization. It would probably be a good idea to get the DTB version, because there won't be a way to read an ebook then.

Mike


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## CoraBuhlert (Aug 7, 2011)

It's almost impossible to tell. And awards or bestseller status don't say much about whether a book will stand the test of time or not.

This site has year by year bestseller lists for the entire 20th century. Here's the list for 1912, i.e. exactly 100 years ago:

1912: Fiction
1	The Harvester	Porter, Gene Stratton
2	The Street Called Straight	King, Basil
3	Their Yesterdays	Wright, Harold Bell
4	The Melting of Molly	Daviess, Maria Thompson
5	A Hoosier Chronicle	Nicholson, Meredith
6	The Winning of Barbara Worth	Wright, Harold Bell
7	The Just and the Unjust	Kester, Vaughan
8	The Net	Beach, Rex
9	Tante	Sedgwick, Anne Douglas
10	Fran	Ellis, J. Breckenridge
1912: Non-Fiction
1	The Promised Land	Antin, Mary
2	The Montessori Method	Montessori, Maria
3	South America	Bryce, James
4	A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil	Addams, Jane
5	Three Plays	Brieux, Eugene
6	Your United States	Bennett, Arnold
7	Creative Evolution	Bergson, Henri
8	How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day	Bennett, Arnold
9	Woman and Labor	Schreiner, Olive
10	Mark Twain	Paine, Albert Bigelow

How many have you read? How many authors and titles do you even recognize? For fiction, I recognize Basil King and Harold Bell Wright. I have read books by both authors, though not the ones on the 1912 bestseller list. For non-fiction, I have read _The Promised Land_ by Mary Antin at university for a class on Jewish immigration and I recognize the names of Maria Montessori and Arnold Bennett. However, I don't see any work on either list that is considered a time-honoured classic.

Now let's take a look at the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 1912 winner was Gerhart Hauptmann. Now I know who he was and have read one of his plays. But then I'm German and so was Hauptmann. How many of Non-Germans recognize the name, let alone have read him? And there are three German winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who are so forgotten even in their country of origin that only scholars have heard of them.

Let's try the Pulitzer Prizes. Now the Pulitzer Prizes weren't awarded until 1917 and there wasn't a novel award in the first year, so the earliest winner we have is _His Family_ by Ernest Poole which won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel 94 years ago. Ever heard of him or his book? Cause I haven't.

Now let's take a look at some novels from 1912 that actually stood the test of time: _A Princess of Mars_ and _Tarzan of the Apes_ by Edgar Rice Burroughs, _The Lost World_ by Arthur Conan Doyle, _Riders of the Purple Sage_ by Zane Grey.

Do you think that anybody in 1912 would have bet on those books lasting?


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## Leslie_Messy (Sep 14, 2012)

Good point Cora. And thanks for the research! How interesting to see the bestsellers of the time that didn't not make the test of time. Wonder what that says about present day fiction. I have a few ideas of what won't last...


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## Ty Johnston (Jun 19, 2009)

Hmm, I truly can't imagine to many of today's authors being remembered a hundred years from now. If anyone makes it, I would think Stephen King stands a shot, especially as he's become more acceptable by the literary crowd as he's grown older. Others? Hmm, not too many, to be honest. Maybe Rushdie. Most of the award-winning novels I've read from the last 20 years haven't done much for me, and very little of any fiction I've read from the last 20 or 30 years would I say has been truly eye opening with any kind of timelessness. That's not to say I've not read some good books from that time period, even a few I treasure, but classics that will still resonate in a century? I'm thinking not, or at least none are coming to mind.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

As was well pointed out above, it's probably impossible to know with any degree of certainty. Of relatively recent novels I've read (e.g. published in the 21st century), the first that comes to mind for me is Christopher Moore's _Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal_, due to its subject matter, underlying research, writing, and effective combination of satire, humor, speculation, absurdity, poignancy, etc. But who knows?

I'd like to think that at least some of Terry Pratchett's pithier satires like _Night Watch_ and _Jingo_ would still be read; but again: I would not be terribly surprised if they were not.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

PS: And perhaps a more relevant question: will anyone still be reading books 100 years from now, or will everything be virtual reality stories directly injected into our sensory systems, making books unable to compete?


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## julidrevezzo (Sep 15, 2012)

Ooh! That's a tough question. I'm sure there will be some... I know SF/F books best so I'll say I'd like to see some of those read. Catherine Asaro, Clarke, of course. Perhaps some Anne McCaffrey--I'd love to see Michael Moorcock's works still alive then. That's a fangirl dream thought, I think.  What do I think _honestly_ might survive? Game of Thrones, Robert Jordan's works maybe, hopefully the works of Clarke and Asimov. I don't know...Good question though!

Will we still be reading books? Well, I think yes. Since storytelling has survived since the beginning of time. What forms they take most definitely will be different. The question is, what form will that be? I'd like to hope we have holographic novels someday wherein the characters emerge from the book and narrate the story. Wouldn't that be neat?


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## Tony Richards (Jul 6, 2011)

The word was not 'good,' the word was 'relevant.' And as relevance goes, it's still got to be _1984_, doesn't it? That, and Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_.


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## FrankZubek (Aug 31, 2010)

Interesting question

Let's see...  3012....

Considering just 20 odd years ago we didn't even have cell phones
.... and look at what we NOW have to communicate with (including the fact we can read a book WITH our cell)

I have to agree that story telling has taken many forms since the first story was told around a campfire under the stars ( Verbal at first and then on paper and now electronically) 

But with the speeds that technology has been advancing these past couple of decades I won't even try to guess what will be around in a hundred years.
I just wish I could be around to see it happen


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

FrankZubek said:


> Interesting question
> 
> Let's see... 3012....


3012 is a thousand years from now.

100 years is 2112.


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## D. Nathan Hilliard (Jun 5, 2010)

CoraBuhlert said:


> It's almost impossible to tell. And awards or bestseller status don't say much about whether a book will stand the test of time or not.
> 
> This site has year by year bestseller lists for the entire 20th century. Here's the list for 1912, i.e. exactly 100 years ago:


Thanks for the research, Cora! That could make for some interesting reading! I'm going to try and look those up and see how many I can get on my kindle.


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## bordercollielady (Nov 21, 2008)

I would think any of David McCullough's biographies or Doris Kearns Goodwin's.. both are amazing historians.


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## BTackitt (Dec 15, 2008)

CoraBuhlert said:


> It's almost impossible to tell. And awards or bestseller status don't say much about whether a book will stand the test of time or not.
> 
> This site has year by year bestseller lists for the entire 20th century. Here's the list for 1912, i.e. exactly 100 years ago:


Cora that was an amazing site! Thanks for the link! Who knew Charles Shultz had books in the top 10 2 years in a row, and one year it was the #1 & #2 spots? Or that HEY Bob Hope had a top 10 book? Man I wanna read that one. "I owe Russia $1200."


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## CoraBuhlert (Aug 7, 2011)

D. Nathan Hilliard said:


> Thanks for the research, Cora! That could make for some interesting reading! I'm going to try and look those up and see how many I can get on my kindle.


A lot of the books from the early 20th century should be public domain and available on Gutenberg by now. I know they have Harold Wright Bell and Basil King.


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## CoraBuhlert (Aug 7, 2011)

BTackitt said:


> Cora that was an amazing site! Thanks for the link! Who knew Charles Shultz had books in the top 10 2 years in a row, and one year it was the #1 & #2 spots? Or that HEY Bob Hope had a top 10 book? Man I wanna read that one. "I owe Russia $1200."


What struck me most about that site is that many of the books on my parents' and grandparents' bookshelves were not just obscure books my parents and grandparents happened to read, but books that everybody read thirty or forty or fifty years ago.

And the title of that Bob Hope book is great. I wonder what he owed Russia (Wouldn't it have been the Sovietunion at that time or did he specifically owe the Russian Republic and not Kazakhstan or Lithuania, etc...?) 1200 dollar for.


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## BTackitt (Dec 15, 2008)

CoraBuhlert said:


> What struck me most about that site is that many of the books on my parents' and grandparents' bookshelves were not just obscure books my parents and grandparents happened to read, but books that everybody read thirty or forty or fifty years ago.
> 
> And the title of that Bob Hope book is great. I wonder what he owed Russia (Wouldn't it have been the Sovietunion at that time or did he specifically owe the Russian Republic and not Kazakhstan or Lithuania, etc...?) 1200 dollar for.


I will find out, it's arriving Wed. DH & I were both intrigued by the title.


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## FrankZubek (Aug 31, 2010)

Ann in Arlington said:


> 3012 is a thousand years from now.
> 
> 100 years is 2112.


oops! Skipped coffee this morning!


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## lvhiggins (Aug 1, 2012)

A hundred years from now I think our grandchildren will still be reading Stephen King . . . and Harry Potter.  Maybe Michael Chabon, who writes such fabulous stories with such enthusiasm.  Tom Wolfe?  His books tend to be so reflective of the decade in which they've been written, I suspect that'll make them stand the test of time (Bonfire of the Vanities.)


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## D. Nathan Hilliard (Jun 5, 2010)

Pretty much anything by Dr. Suess


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## Julia444 (Feb 24, 2011)

I think a lot of books that pose questions about spirituality, the universe, the unknowns--will be fascinating reads in one hundred years, because some of them will have proved most prescient about things that haven't happened yet, just as people like Jules Verne and George Orwell predicted a future based on what they saw in the present.

So maybe things by Deepak Chopra or Malcolm Gladwell, or by astrophysicists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who tries to imagine the things we might know by then. Here's one of his books:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Black-Hole-Quandaries-ebook/dp/B000XPPVCY/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1348970247&sr=1-3&keywords=neil+degrasse+tyson

Julia


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

CoraBuhlert said:


> It's almost impossible to tell. And awards or bestseller status don't say much about whether a book will stand the test of time or not.
> 
> This site has year by year bestseller lists for the entire 20th century. Here's the list for 1912, i.e. exactly 100 years ago:
> 
> ...


Nice and humbling.

I don't think Moby Dick made the bestseller list either.


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## M Ramberg (Jun 23, 2011)

The Great Gatsby was also a flop when it first came out. Who will last 100 years? As curiosities, as artifacts of how we lived, I'd go with the current realists like Franzen. As barometers of the social times, maybe Toni Morrison or Philip Roth. I have a feeling Harry Potter will be as dated in 100 years as the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson are now - they may be re-invented and useful as source material, but the orginals will be collectors reilcs. Discuss.


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## CoraBuhlert (Aug 7, 2011)

I don't know about the US, but in Europe the original Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales are still a staple on children's bookshelves.


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## balaspa (Dec 27, 2009)

I think Rowling's Harry Potter series will still be read by younger readers in that time, but I have a hard time imagining much else. I am a huge Stephen King fan, so maybe he will be like Poe and Lovecraft.


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## vikiana (Oct 5, 2012)

Historical and romantic books are going to be relevant anhundred years from now! Nobody can change the history and love. Both htese things are going to stay untouched by the years!   Do you agree with me?


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## vikiana (Oct 5, 2012)

Kenneth Rosenberg said:


> Wow, that's a great question. I wish I had a crystal ball so that I could see! One book I read recently that I think could have a chance was _Cloud Atlas_, by David Mitchell. It is a bunch of tenuously interconnected stories that take place starting far in the past and stretching out far into the future. I think that one could still seem fresh 100 years from now. I'm definitely looking forward to checking out the movie version, too.


 I'm completely agree with you. People and their relationship itself can not be changed in their basis. There are some differences in situations and characters but the basis is absolutely the same for everyone and it is unchangeble by the time. Especialy if we talk about history and love...


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## vikiana (Oct 5, 2012)

My suggestion for the day is "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Zorba the greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis.  What do oyu think about my suggestions?


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

vikiana said:


> My suggestion for the day is "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Zorba the greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis.  What do oyu think about my suggestions?


Good bets, I think.


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## vikiana (Oct 5, 2012)

M Ramberg said:


> The Great Gatsby was also a flop when it first came out. Who will last 100 years? As curiosities, as artifacts of how we lived, I'd go with the current realists like Franzen. As barometers of the social times, maybe Toni Morrison or Philip Roth. I have a feeling Harry Potter will be as dated in 100 years as the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson are now - they may be re-invented and useful as source material, but the orginals will be collectors reilcs. Discuss.


Good point! Completely agree


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## scottnicholson (Jan 31, 2010)

seems to be a big difference between "what we THINK will be relevant" and "What we HOPE will be relevant."

As Cora pointed out, bestsellers do not tend to stand the test of time. In fact, the rise of corporate strategy in publishing practically ensures those books will not make the leap. Remember Erskine Caldwell? Used to sell millions and millions of copies. Sidney Sheldon? Jackie Collins? People you can see dying even while they are still held up as the bestsellers (I love King but his sales are a small fraction of what they once were.)

I believe Seuss, Harry Potter, Vonnegut (true, he isn't from "today" but I consider him modern), perhaps King (but far from certain--more like there will be an endless array of "new Stephen Kings" they keep trying to anoint) will still be around. The anointing process of the literary establishment, which functions much like a corporation itself, will also be key. Would "the masses" read The Great Gatsby if they didn't have to for a school project?

I don't think any "visionaries" of today will be read--that stuff will read like bad parody in a couple of decades, just as spiritualism and magnetism and all the other fleeting fads got buried. Because no visionary ever gets it close to right and the real problem with visionaries is they almost always have a price tag attached. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed still rock it. Ekhart Tolle, not so much.

I don't have much ego stake in the future, as long as it's not Fifty Shades of Gray. Let them folks figure it out themselves, I say!


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## QuantumIguana (Dec 29, 2010)

It's virtually impossible to guess. When Treasure Island was published in 1883, who could have guessed that it would still be read in 2012? Who would have guessed that A Princess of Mars would be made into a movie 100 years later? (Yes, I know the movie bombed). The popularity of Lord of the Rings doesn't show signs of fading away, I expect it will still be read 100 years from now.

Might Harry Potter still be read? It is too hard to say. I think it will resist being dated, it is not strongly tied to any particular time. But that doesn't necessarily mean that people will still be reading it a long time from now.


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## Aaron Scott (May 27, 2012)

If you don't mean very recent books, I think _The Trial_ is certainly one. Other books that are relatively recent classics will be more important in terms of studying to understand 20th century thought and culture. But _The Trial_ has a sense of the eternal, or rather it is adaptable to different eras.

I do find it is more difficult to find recent books not doomed to ephemerality (I think I'm borrowing a phrase from Faulkner there), probably because the publishing industry is trying to stay afloat and so needs to tap into the current trends more. I say that without judgement, things are as they are.


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## Aaron Scott (May 27, 2012)

An interesting bit from Orwell sort of related to the topic:

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/books/english/e_books


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## DH_Sayer (Dec 20, 2011)

I think David Foster Wallace pretty much cemented his place in literary history so that any discussion of late 20th/early 21st century capital-L Literature has to consider him in some way.

Stephen King has about as good a chance of still being read in 100 years as Charles Dickens had, which is to say a very good chance indeed.

Jk Rowling will be, based solely on sales and how she got a whole generation (or two) interested in books.

I want to say Palahniuk's Fight Club and Coupland's Generation X will stick around just by dint of adding a phrase to the lexicon, the same way Catch-22 will always be read.

Beyond that, who knows?


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## CoraBuhlert (Aug 7, 2011)

Dr Seuss is an interesting case. His work will almost certainly last in the US. However, he is largely unknown elsewhere, because his brand of whimsy and humor doesn't translate very well. I had never heard of Dr. Suess until I got on the Internet. And the various films based on Dr. Suess novels (The Grinch, Horton, etc...) never do all that well outside the US, because no one knows the characters and the background. 

But in general, children's and YA books have a better shot of hanging on than many adult books, because people tend to pass on the books they loved as children to their own (and other people's) children. For example, a lot of the books I read as a child and teen were the same books my mother and grandmother had already read and enjoyed. Why else is Enid Blyton still read, even though she's seriously outdated and already was outdated when I read her as a kid? Because many generations have grown up loving her books and still pass them on to their kids. Why do people, at least in Germany, still read the original Grimm's fairytales and Hans Christian Andersen to their kids at bedtime? Because that's what was read to them. 

Eventually, however, even kids' books that have been popular for decades or longer can falter, when society has moved on too far. I'm the last generation of German kids to have grown up with some kids' and YA books that have been childhood mainstays since the late 19th and early 20th century. What happened was that the general social unrest of the late 1960s/early 1970s also affected choices in children's lit, because a lot of the old, often decades old, children's and YA books were suddenly deemed too old-fashioned, too conservative and promoting the wrong values. Instead, YA and children's books should reflect social issues affecting children today. Of course the old books were still around and older and more conservative parents like mine were still passing them on to their children. Never mind that plenty of kids did not like the new, socially conscious YA. Still, those of us who came off age in the 1970s and 1980s still read the old traditional children's books alongside the newer, socially conscious stuff. But our generation didn't pass either of those books on to our own children, because suddenly Harry Potter and Twilight and their ilk came along and were obviously a lot more suitable and fun than the books we'd grown up with that had been old-fashioned even when we read them.


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## Devin Smyth Author (Sep 14, 2012)

THE WORLD WITHOUT US comes to mind, but I suppose if we're all gone, it won't be so useful.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Twilight will replace The Lord of the Rings....

(Sorry, I guess I don't have much hope for the future)


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