So, how to celebrate World Book Day? How about – for the
simple fun of it – selecting one book published in each decade since 1880. (Why
1880? It got harder before that to know which decade a book was published in).
The list below is not intended to be the best book in each decade – much too
controversial – but just a spontaneous choice off my bookshelves. It’s necessarily eclectic,
and I realise it could be contentious, but here goes anyway:
1880s: It’s tight, but The
Woodlanders (1887) [Thomas Hardy] gets my vote. Actually I prefer it to Tess.
1890s: Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) [Hardy again]
1900s: The Hound of
the Baskervilles () [Conan Doyle] – Conan Doyle had to get in there
somewhere.
1910s: Mr Standfast
(1919) [John Buchan] is my favourite of the Richard Hannay series, and I have
always thought these to be classics of the time.
1920s: A Passage to
India (1924 [EM Forster]) –
mysterious and charming: a beguiling book even when I read it as a 17 year old.
1930s: The General Theory
(1936) [JM Keynes] – so good that as an undergraduate economist, I went out
to buy it because I wanted to own it. Well written, revolutionary, brilliant.
1940s: 19 Stories (1947)
[Graham Greene] The best set of short stories I have ever read – later published
as 21 stories, but that would put it in competition with the next decade.
1950s: The Lion, The
Witch and The Wardrobe (1950) [CS Lewis]. A rich decade for books – this choice
prevented my choosing a John Wyndham, which was painful, but what a classic.
1960s: Dead Cert
(1962) [Dick Francis]. Ok, so it’s not a classic, but picked for the
contribution to railway journey reading that he made: clever plotting, gripping
and interesting.
1970s: The Hitchhikers
Guide To The Galaxy (1979) [Douglas Adams]. So different at the time that
it was intoxicating – a marvellous book.
1980s: The Remains of
The Day (1989) [Kazuo Ishiguro]. Marvellously evocative!
1990s: Possession
(1990) [AS Byatt]. A huge work of fiction – the greatest suspension of
disbelief: I simply couldn’t believe all that poetry was part of the fiction.
2000s: Bleachers (2004) [John Grisham]. A novella which is
so much better than Grisham’s reputation.
2010s: Thinking, Fast
and Slow (2011) [Kahneman]. Guaranteed to change the way you see the world –
brilliantly light, wonderfully profound.
SO many wonderful books published in the 1950s, but I think my favourite would have to be 'The Go-Between (1953) [LP Hartley]
ReplyDeleteDid you mean only books in English? Otherwise 1880s would have to be Brothers Karamazov (just!), and you would have to include Kafka, Borges and Marquez somewhere.
ReplyDeleteYou have to find space somewhere for Salinger. I would go with "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction" and say goodbye to Dick Francis.
And there has to be a Copeland in there. I would choose "Girlfriend in a Coma", although "Hey Nostradamus" would be a 2000s preferable to Grisham.
And Ishiguro is horriby overrated. How about Amin Maalouf's rather excellent "Samarkand" (OK it was written in French).
Good to see HHGTTG get in there though - even though it pushes out the remarkable "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".
Dave