I know predicting the future is always a challenge and full of uncertainties, but I’m still curious to see if you have any predictions of any modern books that might one day be regarded as a classic.
I personally haven’t read any that falls under this category. When I think of classics like To Kill A Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, or even childrens classics like The Velveteen Rabbit, it’s difficult for me to see exactly what actually made them classics. But maybe you’re better at this than I am. And I would love to hear your guesses on which you think will be a classic one day.
If I had to choose one, I’d hesitantly say The Hunger Games, as it’s easy to read but also has a lot to say about challenging a Communist regime. It was assigned in high school back in 2010. So at least one English teacher saw some literary value in it.
Um, what? You looked at that regime and thought communist? Lol. That is not a communist regime, it’s clearly capitalist.
Yeah, I did a double take at that. It’s a book about the evils of capitalism, OP. You might want to re-read it.
To me it just seems like a vague, authoritarian aesthetic. Like clearly the “you live in a district and can’t leave” is inspired by the soviet union or communist China, but the “people in the capital are entertained by bread and circuses” feels more like a capitalist critique imo.
It’s a YA novel and I don’t think it is really a critique of anything except authoritarianism / “the man”
Living in a mining town can (and in this case, was) absolutely a critique of capitalism.
Totally agree, I’m no apologist. But the USSR had coal mines as well, with similar levels of exploitation and poverty. So to me it always felt more like a comment on poverty rather than “this is a coal mine in West Virginia”.
Too many mixed aesthetics in HG to be a critique on capitalism alone imo
It might be the conservative mythos that capitalism = freedom and that capitalism and communism are exact opposites, so that no-freedom = communist.
The mid-century Ayn Randian individual vs. collective schema lingers still. How someone who attended high school in 2010, and also cares to read, still hasn’t reasoned his way out of that remedial economic/moral view is sort of concerning.