5 Literary Trends of the 2010s

As a group that never shies away from a good pun, I thought I’d lean into librarianship for this post on trends of the last decade. And to keep it even more on topic, I’ve doubled down with a term that lost  relevance amongst Millennials and Gen Z years ago. Here goes...

Hands down, the number one trend of the decade could be summed up as the following:

If it was Lit(erary), it was On Trend

Who says libraries and books are losing relevance? This last decade saw libraries and the publishing industry as veritable Hollywood incubators. The bread and butter of modern librarianship—books (including graphic novels, comics, short stories, short and long-form journalism)—were rapidly jettisoned onto big and small screens alike. 

Libraries support more than just books—from creating podcasts and writing blog content—and so too have these vehicles of storytelling been glamorized for wider consumption. Podcasters now produce television shows (Desus and Mero on Showtime and The Read on Fuse) and YouTube/eBay stars write memoirs that jettison into television shows (Issa Rae and Sophia Amoruso) being just a few examples.

Obviously the print-to-screen procession has existed since the early 20th century. Disney has long harvested from fairy tales since its first feature-length animation, tinseltown’s Lolita trailed Nabovkov’s by seven years, and the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies took decades to hit theaters in the aughts. However, the last 10 years have seen technology take this production to its rapacious fervor. And there’s little indication that this will stop in the near future. Before a book even hits the printing press it’s likely to have been snatched up by a production powerhouse (Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orisha series and Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa come to mind). 

Under this banner then here are the top five literary moments (some of which began way before the decade) that contributed to a global culture of rapid information and entertainment consumption in the last decade:
 

1. George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series and the subsequent HBO Game of Thrones adaptation.
   As the series grew so too did readers of the books, which encouraged other writers and publishers to expand into the realm of adult fantasy. The spark that Song of Ice and Fire “lit” in literature is a mash-up of the fast burn of YA dystopian novel of the aughts with the slow burn of fantasy fiction of the Ursula Le Guin mid-to-late century arc. We’ve yet to see what will survive the embers.
2. Lin Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop laced “Hamilton: An American Musical,” as inspired by Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton biography.
   Hamilton tickets became a conversational punch line. Many “think-pieces” were written about its importance as a genre of theater and its place in history. Likewise, quite a few book lists were created to help those either going through Hamilton withdrawal or waiting for ticket prices to drop. The play’s seamless take on diversity helped raise the curtain on the ways that inequality in America pervades the canons of art, culture, and history.
3. Marvel Cinematic Universe, as based on Marvel Comics from the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Fantastic Four, Ant-Man, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Spider Man, and Iron Man
   Known as the Silver Age of Marvel, these comics where penned by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and the rest of the ‘original Bullpen’ and had a film-worthy history of its own. In comparison to the DC comics-come-films of the 1980s, 1990s , and aughts (primarily Superman and Batman remakes) the Marvel Cinematic Universe tackled multiple characters, heroes and anti-hereos of different races, species, genders, time lines, ages and dimensions within a much shorter production period.
4. Crime fiction and thrillers that became film (or television shows).
   Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl feels like the first in this trend, setting the tone for seemingly one-dimensional grown women being described as hapless “Girls” in thrillers (Paula Hawkin’s Girl on a Train, following soon thereafter), only to be revealed that *shocker* said women are complex. It could be argued that Stig Larsson’s Millennium series from the early aughts (adapted for American film audiences in the 2010s) helped usher in this “dynamic-girl” phenomenon. Unearthing the depths of the female psyche in thrillers is still very much on trend as indicated by the success of HBO’s Big Little Lies, which is based on Liane Moriarty’s book of the same name. 
5. Stephen King’s books came to the screen. Already prolific for book to screen adaptations since the 1980s, television and films based on Stephen King works also made/re-made their mark (see: Carrie 1976 and 2013). Although on pace with the last three decades in terms of quantity, the aesthetic appeal of the films has grown rapidly, attracting big hollywood names. In 2017 and 2019 four films apiece were produced to wide anticipation (The Dark Tower series, It, 1922, and Gerald’s Game in 2017; Pet Sematary, It Chapter Two, In The Tall Grass, Doctor Sleep in 2019). Not to mention several long-running television series and high-profile miniseries this decade (Haven, Under the Dome, 11.22.63, Castle Rock).  

As librarians, here’s to hoping that we won’t experience book (by way of movie/podcast/blog/television) fatigue in the next decade. That libraries continue to remain relevant beyond trends, and that books stay a catalyst to creativity.