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A 2025 Reading Challenge: Travel Back 100 Years to One of the Greatest Years for Books Ever
1925 was an amazing year
I have long known that the Billboard charts are both an unreliable measure of musical quality and an indictment of the musical taste of far too many Americans. If this were not true, how can you explain the fact that “Born to Run” only reached #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1975? It’s inconceivable.
I also know that just because a novel becomes a bestseller does not mean it’s destined to become a classic (I’m looking at you, Fifty Shades of Grey). Until researching this article in which I issue a reading challenge for 2025, I had assumed that it was the gradual dumbing-down of America that had caused this unfortunate phenomenon. I was apparently mistaken.
The challenge I propose for the new year is a simple one: reading novels that turn 100 years old in 2025. The first place I turned for suggestions was the Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels for that year, which you can see below:
1. Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs
2. The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy
3. The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter
4. Glorious Apollo by E. Barrington
5. The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
6. The Little French Girl by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
7. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
8. The Perennial Bachelor by Anne Parrish
9. The Carolinian by Rafael Sabatini
10. One Increasing Purpose by A. S. M. Hutchinson
With the possible exception of Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1926, most today have probably never heard of any of these (I know I hadn’t). That doesn’t mean there aren’t good novels among these ten, but other than Arrowsmith, clearly none have become “classics.”
A slightly different search produced ten novels or short story collections that you’re more likely to have heard of (if not the particular book, then surely the author). You may have read a few in high school or college and might even have some in that giant TBR pile on your nightstand…
