Will Our Grandkids Read Harry Potter?

The popularity of “popular literature” (aka “not likely to appear on an AP English exam”) tends to be pretty short-lived. Some pop lit books make it into the canon (Frankenstein, Jane Eyre); others vanish without a trace.

Which of our favorite books-of-the-moment will be read by the Sparklers of 2059, and which ones will have been totally forgotten? Let's discuss the odds:

Harry Potter
How could anyone forget Harry Potter? Among today’s popular books, J.K. Rowling’s series has to have the best chance of lasting. For one thing, Harry Potter is the best selling fiction series ever. For another, as long as the movies keep making money, people will keep making movies, which means Harry Potter might never really go out of style. So will the series still be popular 50 years from now? Almost certainly.

Twilight
You can’t swing a copy of New Moon without accidentally knocking Rob Pattinson in front of a taxi these days, so it’s hard to imagine a world without Twilight—but the chances that Stephenie Meyer’s franchise will be around several decades from now are somewhat slim. The problem is that the books haven’t caught on with guys or adults anywhere near the way Harry Potter did, so the audience might not get any bigger from here on out.

Angels & Demons/The Da Vinci Code/The Lost Symbol
In 1990, Michael Crichton published Jurassic Park. It sold millions of copies, got great reviews, and was made into one of the best-loved movies of all time. In 2003, Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code. It sold millions of copies, got bad reviews, and was made into a movie nobody really seemed to care about (although it did make a lot of money). Not many people read Jurassic Park today. Nobody will be reading or watching The Da Vinci Code twenty years from now.

His Dark Materials
Overshadowed by the popularity of the Harry Potter series, which came out around the same time, His Dark Materials might actually benefit from the fact that its only movie adaptation, 2007’s The Golden Compass, was pretty crappy. Eventually a fan of the series will decide to make decent movies based on all three books, and millions more people will catch on. (If any Sparklers out there plan on one day directing movies, this would be a really good project.)

What do you think? Will New Moon be assigned reading in the high schools of 2059?