I think I have a new metric for a good, lasting writer: how well can you remember the characters and plot from an author when someone simply mentions the title?
For example, if you mention Hamlet or Macbeth or any other Shakespeare play that I’ve read, I can remember the plot and some of the characters within it. If you mention a Dickens book, I can probably speak to it generally.
Now, about modern writers, my favorites are at a bit of a loss. When you mention Robert B. Parker, I can talk about the early books pretty well, but once you get past Pastime, they start to blur. John Sandford? Not hardly, although I’d try to bluff and say it was about a murderer who posed the bodies ritualistically. John D. MacDonald? Some of them, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Raymond Chandler? I don’t think I could remember or explain a lot of Chandler’s plots if I’d just read them. Robert Heinlein? He wrote a lot of junior rocket jockey stuff that kind of blurs.
Stephen King, on the other hand, I can tell you the plots of It, Christine, The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, and so on and so forth.
Tom Clancy? You bet, although I’d be hard pressed to remember all the subplots and plot lines in Debt of Honor, but I remember the bit about the quality problem at the auto plant.
I think that the size of the oeuvre matters, as an author with fewer books will have more memorable books, or at least fewer books to confuse. Relevant titles help, too, which really hurts modern series authors who title their books similarly so readers will know the book belongs to a series.
So what do you think? Of whom you’ve read widely, whom do you recollect the individual novels the best? And do you think this is a mark of an author who will be widely read and regarded as a classical author in centuries to come?
Possibly. It’s hard to tell what will be a novel for a generation, or for generations to come.
I don’t read much fiction except for particular authors or genres that I like. For example, I’ve read of the corpus of alternate history fiction. And I’ve read almost everything that Richard Adams has published.
Every now and then, I get it into my head to read a book of serious, standing fiction, such as On the Road, Lolita, or The Saga of the Faroe Islanders. But mostly, I enjoy the books that are meaningful to me, and reread them often. I can, at times, recite passages or remember dialogues vividly.
They’re important to me, but some of them have long been out of print. I doubt that any of them will be regarded as classical. This is to say that the fact that I find a book to be lasting bears no relationship to what other people think as meaningful, or vice versa.
Memorable individual books are one thing. I can remember a lot of individual books, even individual books by authors of whom I’ve read widely, but I’m really struck by the limited number of those authors whose books I’ve read that I remember all the individual books I’ve read.
Sadly, Dean Koontz is on this list too, even though I didn’t like a couple of the books I’ve read of his. I think the total is five, so if I read more, they’d probably blur.
Note that “Stephen King” and “Tom Clancy” are my picks to be remembered a century hence if people still read books. They’ll be Shakespeare and Dickens of our time.