What could have been the editors’ rationale for choosing The Lovely Bones as a “new classic” instead of The Polar Express?

I agree wholeheartedly with The Polar Express and Heartburn. And…Eat,Pray,Love? HUH? Seriously?

By the way, this subject, and in fact your entire website, has inspired me to start a movement/crusade/effort (all of the above) to
KEEP all of these wonderful, priceless REAL BOOKS around and in the hands of readers far into the future. Here’s my blog on the subject, for anyone who feels similarly to check out:

http://searchingforsublime.wordpress.com/

Let’s get out the word: SAVE BOOKS!

Good discussion…

I haven’t run the numbers. But just by eyeballing the list, I’d guess that most working critics would say that at least half of the books on the list don’t belong there. You’d probably find strong agreement among them on, for example, Love in the Time of Cholera and even (among the more offbeat choices) Bridget Jones’s Diary. But Eat, Pray, Love? C’mon.

Sarah –
I’d love to read David Mitchell, and among my friends who are critics, the book they recommend most often is your choice, Black Swan Green, not Cloud Atlas. So I’m glad you raised that point. When I get to him, I’m going to start with Black Swan Green on the strength of recommendations from critics whose taste I’ve learned to trust …
Jan

Draabe –
Thanks so much. I haven’t by any means read all of the important books of poetry of the past quarter century.

But of those I have read, Larkin’s Collected Poems is the one I would choose if I could keep only one. It’s such a good book that it caused me also to start reading the poetry of Anthony Thwaite (his literary executor), including his A Move in the Weather (Enitharmon, 2003). A Move in the Weather is so hard to find in the U.S. that I’ve mentioned it only in passing on this site, but I’d love to do more with Thwaite’s work at some point.
Jan

Interesting list of the ones that were left out and shouldn’t have been, Janice. Thanks for including poetry collections. I don’t read much poetry but this gives me a starting point to look for.

I didn’t read all of the The Predators’ Ball, the book about business that EW chose instead. But of what I did read of it, Liar’s Poker is much better written and was, at the time, more influential.