A few weeks ago, when Tony Blair was still prime minister, I was asked to appear on a panel to discuss the books and writers I felt best summed up the Blair decade. I wasn't able to accept the invitation, but the question lingered. I began to think about the books and writers in the English and American traditions that best reflect their era. I put these into a category I called "zeitgeist books".
It's an odd list. Zeitgeist books often sell a lot of copies, but they aren't necessarily bestsellers. They might turn out to be classics (George Orwell's 1984, for instance) but they don't have to be (Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape). A zeitgeist book reflects the spirit of the age in which the author and their readers don't necessarily understand. Such books say something about their time, but often they survive more as curiosities than classics. Sometimes, as in Robert Pirsig's Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, they can seem incredibly dated.
Anyway, my Observer colleague Tim Adams and I have compiled a list of zeitgeist books for the years 1900 to 2007, in which we consider the impact of both Thatcher and Blair on the literary climate of their times. The results are published in The Observer on Sunday - and we have invited readers to take issue and/or comment on what we've said. As a taste of what's to come, we identify Dan Brown and Don De Lillo as much as JK Rowling or Dave Eggers. Typically, it is US writers more than their British counterparts who seem to speak to the moment - but perhaps that just because America is a bigger marketplace.
