In 1929, the readers of the Manchester Guardian were asked to opine on the “novelists who may be read in 2029.” Sitting at the top of this century-hence summit of popularity was John Galsworthy. Granted, he has his partisans, and there are still some years to go, but he’s hardly the thing, even the Penguin Classic thing, that one sees clutched on the morning F train. It’s not that Guardian readers were being particularly adventurous; Galsworthy was a preëminent dramatist (a sort of wintry conscience of the Edwardian age) who sold heaps of copies in his day, and “The Forsyte Saga”—the one title you’ve probably heard of and not read—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1932.

History seemed to be on his side, but even in the late thirties, Galsworthy’s reputation was already on the wane. George Orwell—who, in his essay “Bookshop Memories,” coined the memorable phrase “Galsworthy-and-water stuff” to refer to the “average novel” (the sort that people always annoyingly seemed to be buying in his dusty bookshop)—makes a Galsworthy-sells-out argument, “Much of Galsworthy’s later writing is tripe, but some of the early plays and novels… do at least leave behind them a kind of flavour, an atmosphere—a rather unwholesome atmosphere of exaggeration and pity, mixed up with country scenery and dinners in Mayfair.” But, Orwell argues, Galsworthy’s “private quarrel with society came to an end,” and it became “obvious that he was in no essential way different from the people he had made his name by attacking.”

The problems with the Guardian list run deeper than one man’s changing critical fortunes. The next four, after Galsworthy, are H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, and J. M. Barrie. Again, all read, all referred to, all known for something or another, but hardly the brightest firmament in the canon. Which raises the question: Is there any way of knowing which of today’s books will last beyond a generation of readers, which will avoid being relegated to winsome curios or turgid pieces of historical sociology? Are there any discernible patterns? And why is it so difficult to predict literary futures?

The first issue is what you might call the high-school-popularity problem. We are all aware of the radiant prom king, adorned with varsity letters, an alpha commanding a legion of adherents, who settles down into a life of quiet non-consequence. Meanwhile, there is the terminally shy type, prone to be picked on (or perhaps even viewed as beneath that particular form of contempt), a seemingly unaccomplished sort who goes on to change the world. The idea is that the things which constitute high-school popularity (contrived contests, cruel conformity, a captive audience) turn out to poor predictors of success in the real world. And so what might make a book in a titanic success in one age often has little bearing on its later success. The iconic example here is the best-seller list. Picking a random year, 1903, one finds Mary Augusta Ward’s “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” Thomas Nelson Page’s “Gordon Keith,” “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” by John Fox, Jr., and so on—it reads like a chronicle of obscurity foretold. With relief, one finds “The Pit” by Frank Norris—an important book!—and Owen Wister’s “The Virginian” (they made it into a movie! Many movies!).

Why do best-sellers rarely survive the “tooth of time”? One theory is that many best-sellers simply weren’t very good or interesting books in the first place; they were empty calories without nutritive value. Or perhaps every generation simply reinvents the best-seller list for its own purposes, with its own temporal glosses, essentially publishing new versions of previous best-sellers, as if by some secretly determined formula (one steamy bodice ripper, one tale of Christian redemption, one torn-from-the-headlines suspense potboiler). And so today’s “4-Hour Workweek” is an info-age reboot of Arnold Bennett’s best-selling guide to utilitarian white-collar uplift, “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.” “Vegan Cooking for Carnivores” is a flexitarian-relevant version of Mary Green’s 1917 best-seller, “Better Meals for Less Money.” Rhoda Byrne’s loopy “The Magic” evokes the mystical dross of Madame Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine.” Some books seem so rooted to their times as to be non-transcendent—like 1929’s “The Specialist,” a back-to-the-land guide to building outhouses that sold well over a million copies—but even here, one could see parallels in a number of current “return to simplicity” tracts.

Another contributing factor to the failure of the Guardian poll is how we as individuals are poor at anticipating how our future tastes might change. If you had asked me what kind of car I desired when I was eight, I would have probably said a Trans Am. Now I’m not sure I long for any car, and certainly not a Trans Am. “People behave as if their future preferences will be more like their current preferences than they actually will be—as if they project their current preferences onto their future selves,” according to the psychologists George Lowenstein and Erik Angner, who call this “projection bias.” Cultures can suffer from projection bias as well; readers a number of decades from now may wonder why we became so infatuated with dour, middle-aged Swedish men who microwave their dinners and solve cold cases. Critics are no less prone to this fallacy. Jane Tompkins, writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne, points out that the stories viewed as most important by then-contemporary critics were not “Young Goodman Brown” or “The Maypole of Merrymount” but “peripheral and thin” sketches like “Little Annie’s Ramble.” Nineteenth-century critics, she writes, overlooked “completely those qualities in Hawthorne’s writing that twentieth-century critics have consistently admired: his symbolic complexity, psychological depth, moral subtlety, and density of composition.” The words may be the same, she implies, but the text has irrevocably changed.

But what of those books and authors who do last? Some seeming indicators, like prizes, matter little in the long haul (read much Pearl S. Buck lately?). Indeed, the first rule might be that there is no rule. In “The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library,” the scholar Jay Satterfield notes how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” despite being one of Modern Library founder Bennett Cerf’s “personal enthusiasms,” was, as Cerf noted in the nineteen-forties upon striking it from the series, “one of the poorest sellers in the Modern Library edition.” Meanwhile, a Freud anthology was one of its best-sellers. “We haven’t the faintest idea why or who are the people are who are reading this book so assiduously,” Cerf marvelled. And yet, who reads Freud today?

Despite the unpredictable fortunes of books, I’ll hazard a few general rules of what makes a title endure. The most obvious: be the object of a film, preferably by the BBC. This helped Galsworthy in the nineteen-sixties, and again with a later production, in 2002. Another: become an adjective. Because we talk about things being “Kafkaesque” or “Borgesian” means their work has become reflexively symbolic, and will continue to haunt the curricula of English courses for time immemorial. It also doesn’t hurt to coin a maxim or two. How many readers have been sent down the path of L. P. Hartley merely by some reference to the past being a foreign country?