25 Years in Books

At the moment, Waterstones are celebrating their 25 th year and are calling readers to vote for the favourite out of 100 books published in the last 25 years.

Of these 100 books, I had only read 23! And 8 of those were books that I really did not like all that much.

Anyway. I voted for my favourite from the list (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke) and decided that I would try to read as many of the books on the list as possible!

While I am sure that most of the books on this list are excellent, I was surprised that there were NO books by:
PD James,
Patricia Cornwell,
Kathy Reichs,
Steven King,
Jostein Gaarder,
Alexander McCall Smith, or
Jacqueline Wilson

My favourite book written in the last 25 years: 'How to be good' by Nick Hornby was also not there and neither were 'We need to talk about Kevin' (Lionel Shriver) and 'Death and the penguin' (Andrey Kurkov).

Armed, with the list, I went to my local library, and I made the following observation:
Most of the books in the library were not on that list. I hypothesise two reasons for this:
(1) Even though books are being published at an ever increasing rate, most of the books out there were written more than 25 years ago.
(2) People borrow newer, good books preferentially over old favourites.