10 Books I’d Nominate As Future Classics

Top Ten Tuesday is currently hosted by Artsy Reader Girl and has weekly topics for bloggers to respond to and share a love of all things books! I love thinking up my responses and the weekly blog hop to see what everyone else wrote!

This week the prompt is for Modern Books You Think Will Be Classics In The Future (submitted by Veros @ Dark Shelf of Wonders)

This is a tough one, and I think people will interpret “classic” differently. You’ve got your classics that are taught in school, the literary classics taught at university, your publisher’s modern classics and then specific genre classics.

A classic is an outstanding example of a particular style; something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality; of the first or highest quality, class, or rank[1] – something that exemplifies its class. The word can be an adjective (a classic car) or a noun (a classic of English literature)

Usually, with literature, that means the work as a quality or themes that resonate through time, or say something about the social era.

1. Bunny by Mona Awad (2019): very strong style, enduring themes (creativity and mental health) and open to multiple interpretations. Margaret Atwood even named Mona Awad as her ‘successor’ in an interview.
2. Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo (2016): it made huge waves in South Korea as a snapshot of the pressures women face in society. As South Korea is passing the point of being able to reverse its population death, I think this book will continue to gain attention in the wider world.
3. Penance by Eliza Clark (2023): a masterful critique of the True Crime industry that has gripped Western culture for the last decade. Thematically rich with a fantastic use of an Unreliable Narrator, and captures life as a 2000s Tumblr teenager girl, and several cultural elements of a dying seaside town.
4. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016): in the last decade, we are more culturally aware of neurodivergence and more interested in stories from this point of view without making it a cute character quirk (a la The Rosie Project). This is also a challenge of Japanese society norms, and these are themes that recur in all of the author’s work.
5. My Husband by Maud Ventura (2021): I don’t know if this one will make it, but I think it deserves it as an intimate portrait of a peculiar mind and intense relationship, and I will keep repping it!
6. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020): It’s a masterpiece, and I think its exploration of isolation is culturally relevant to its publication during the COVID pandemic, without it ever referencing the pandemic.
7. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (2020): a profoundly difficult book told from the point of view of a woman who was groomed by her teacher, and is completely unable to let go of the relationship or admit it as wrong. Incredible, and disturbingly real. I think it’s also an interesting juxtaposition to the classic work Lolita (the groomer teacher’s favourite tool is to misinterpret that dark and disturbing story), and the title is a reference to another Nabokov novel.
8. Wool by Hugh Howey (2012): the trilogy is fantastic, and I could see it as a future sci-fi classic. I think the world is memorable, and it is a self-publishing success story. Plus, they already made a TV show out of it (even if only one season was good).
9. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018): feels like it could do it. I mean, I just bought a “Vintage Classics” edition of Death In Her Hands, which only came out in 2020, but I think this one captures more of the general imagination, and more people read it. Moshfegh has a strong point of view as an author, and her characters are very unlikeable; I think it does capture something of the time and place. Personally, Lapvona is my favourite so far, but that one is far too weird!
10. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (1995): I think this will be a children’s fantasy classic; I already think of it as one, so it may have already crossed the threshold since it came out in 1995 (30 years ago, WTF!), and I’m cheating by including it.