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30 day book meme: Day 17
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.)
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.)
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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.
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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.
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