I am certainly not first out of the starting gate with the news that Entertainment Weekly has published a list of 100 “new classics” — supposedly the best reads of the last 25 years.  If that’s true, I have read depressingly few of them:

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling (2)
• Beloved, Toni Morrison (3)
• Maus, Art Spiegelman (7)
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (16)
• Possession, A. S. Byatt (27)
• Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (29) (most of it, at least)
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (48)
• The Giver, Lois Lowry (65)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (72)
• Holes, Louis Sachar (84)
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (93)
• The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (96)

Quite a few of the books mentioned are on my to-read list, and I have heard a lot of these books praised. However, I have to say that I don’t think some of them should be considered “classics.”  Popular, maybe, but that’s hardly the same thing.