The Literary Blog Hop November 25-29

Welcome back to the Literary Blog Hop, sponsored by Connie and Ingrid at The Blue Bookcase.

This week's question asks us to ponder and write about a book we would consider a modern classic.  Here are a few I would like to consider:

Cry the Beloved Country is a classic, to my mind, because of subject (South Africa in the years just before apartheid was institutionalized), theme, and writer's craft.  It is a whole, polished work of art, with whole passages written entirely in iambs.  The pieces of the book fit together as perfectly; the book is a beautifully constructed whole in which theme dovetails with language dovetails with character.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my favorite books of all time.  Zora Neale Hurston wrote it in a white hot blaze of creative inspiration, and the characters and images of this book are burned into my brain cells.  Hurston had a fascinating life with many ups and downs, and she ended her life in obscurity and poverty, but her book will live on, I believe.

I'm not sure about much, but I think it's a safe bet that anything written by Toni Morrison will continue to be read as long as there are readers reading novels.  Sula, Paradise, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye.  When you can remember actual lines from a novel a decade after reading a novel, that's some pretty good writing.

Those are my choices.  What are yours?  If you had to choose a book or a writer that will be a classic (some day in the future, soothsayers) which would you choose?