Talk about good, old-fashioned flame-bait. Assuming of course that people with an interest in classic books can be lured into a flame-war, then this is the article to start the fire. Blog site The Second Pass has taken issue with 10 highly-regarded classic books and makes the bold claim that none of them are particularly good.
Trashing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude? Unconscionable! No love for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road? A Tale of Two Cities?! The only one I agree with completely is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
In 1996, Franzen wrote a piece for Harper’s called “Perchance to Dream,” in which he bemoaned the state of serious reading and chronicled his “despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social” in today’s novels. The essay received a good deal of attention and set expectations for his next book, which would appear five years later, pretty high. The Corrections was published in mid-September 2001, when the world was preoccupied. But the anticipation in literary circles, and the “controversy” surrounding Franzen’s rejection of Oprah Winfrey’s benediction, helped propel robust sales, and the novel won the National Book Award.
