What Makes a Classic? Building the Modern Canon

Laura the Librarian here: I used a ton of different books and authors as examples during my talk about how we define classic books and what current books we might be reading years or centuries from now. As requested, here are the materials I referred to. Only one book is listed per author.

• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, print | ebook | eaudio
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, print | large print | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• Emma, Jane Austen, print | ebook | eaudio
• March, Geraldine Brooks, print | audio CD | ebook
• The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown, print | ebook | eaudio​

• Kindred, Octavia E. Butler, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Mysterious Affair At Styles, Agatha Christie, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros, print | ebook | eaudio
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Round House, Louise Erdrich, print | ebook | eaudio
• My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante, print | large print | ebook | eaudio
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, print | ebook | eaudio
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Writings (Library of America), Benjamin Franklin, print | Autobiography ebook
• The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen, print | eaudio
• The Lord of the Flies, William Golding, print | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, Rebecca Goldstein, print
• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, John Gray, print | ebook | eaudio
• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio

• The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, print | large print | eaudio
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Odyssey, Homer, trans. Robert Fagles, print | (editions not trans. by Fagles are available on ebook and eaudio)
• It Ends with Us, Colleen Hoover, print | large print | ebook | eaudio
• The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, print | large print | audio CD | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro, print | ebook | eaudio
• 11/22/63, Stephen King, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver, print | large print | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, print | ebook | eaudio
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel, print | audio CD | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, print | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• The Color of Water, James McBride, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy, print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, print | ebook | eaudio
• Twilight, Stephenie Meyer, print | ebook | eaudio
• Paradise Lost, John Milton, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, print | ebook | eaudio
• What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Heidi Murkoff, et al., print | ebook​

• The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, print | ebook
• 1984, George Orwell, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Collected Writings, Thomas Paine, print | Common Sense ebook
• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, print | large print | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, print | ebook
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• The Complete Works, William Shakespeare, print | (You can find individual works on ebook and eaudio)
• Plays, George Bernard Shaw, print | (You can find individual works on ebook)
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, print | ebook | eaudio
• Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, print | ebook
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Dracula, Bram Stoker, print | ebook | eaudio
• Wild, Cheryl Strayed, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, print | large print | audio CD | playaway | ebook | eaudio
• Working, Studs Terkel, print 
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers…, Henry David Thoreau, print | Walden ebook
• The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien, print | ebook | eaudio
• Mississippi Writings, Mark Twain, print | (You can find individual works on ebook and eaudio)
• The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls, print | ebook | eaudio
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward, print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, print | ebook | eaudio
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, print | large print | audio CD | ebook | eaudio
• The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson, print | ebook
• A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, print | ebook

Here's a printable list (PDF) to help you find these materials on the shelves.