30 day book meme: Day 17

[regshoe]

17. Future classic.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is fifteen (!) years old now, and I think it's already on its way to becoming a classic. It still has an active small fandom, it's highly-regarded and widely recommended by fantasy readers generally, it's still easy to find in bookshops and libraries (usually shelved under 'general fiction', but what can you do...). Thoroughly deserved, in my opinion. :D

(Tangent: Old historical fiction is always interesting, because it often says a lot about the time when it was written as well as about the time it's set—e.g. all the mid-to-late Victorian books that look back to the time just before railways and ubiquitous industrialisation as a way of commenting on/processing the pace of change in society—and I wonder what JSMN will look like to fans of fifty or a hundred years' time from that angle. Does it say very much about the 2000s in particular? It feels remarkably timeless to me, but who knows.)

Comments

[ohveda]

Oh I do hope it becomes a classic. It really deserves it.

I love your thought about old historical fiction. I read "Ivanhoe" recently and it told me far more about the 19th Century than it did about the reign of Richard I.

[regshoe]

Oh yeah, Ivanhoe is definitely another good example!

[pretty_plant]

We will never know what will happen. Maybe it will become obscure and forgotten in the next decade or so then become a true classic in who-know-how-long. Becoming a classic is a tricky thing. Look at how Jane Austen's work was pretty much forgotten for some time.

JSMN is my first obsession that I am sure I won't realize it has many faults when the obsession goes away. JSMN is too objectively good that I think I will still love it even when it gets replaced by my other obsessions.

[regshoe]

Aww, I feel the same way—obsessions come and go, but some of them stick around, always there in the background whatever others are currently attracting my attention. For me it's JSMN and the Silmarillion, both of which have the kind of expansiveness and thematic depth that make them really good long-term obsessions. Hopefully it'll also give JSMN the staying power to become a classic...