Jump to content

The 20 best books of the decade


Recommended Posts

A writer for the Telegraph describes what he feels are the 20 best books of the decade.. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/7046298/The-20-best-books-of-the-decade.html - do you agree, how many have you read, do you now feel encouraged to read the rest?

 

Dreams from My Father

By Barack Obama

CANONGATE, 2007

When the enterprising publisher bought this memoir, President Obama was merely Senator Obama and there were few indications of what was to come. In recounting the story of his upbringing, Obama shows that his �Yes we can� mantra was not merely an aspirational soundbite but based firmly on his own experiences as a mixed-race American. The book was a key part of his mission statement about decency and optimism and helped to win him the goodwill of much of the world. As well as defining a moment in time, it also proved that Obama can write as winningly as he talks. Would it sell as well a year into his presidency?

 

The Corrections

By Jonathan Franzen

FOURTH ESTATE, 2001

A big book in size, theme and ambitions, The Corrections put Jonathan Franzen in the vanguard of America�s bright young novelists. A simple core � a mother�s attempts to reunite her disparate children for a family Christmas � burgeons into a story about the complexities wrought on the American dream by pharmaceuticals, sexuality and shyster capitalism. Through the Lambert family Franzen conjures up a modern Everyman with ordinary lives teetering on the edge of bathos, tragedy or triumph. Proof that the Great American Novel (see Philip Roth, above right) is still worth aiming for.

 

Fingersmith

By Sarah Waters

VIRAGO, 2002

A Dickensian story with a pink twist. With all the elements of a penny dreadful � orphans, double-crossing, madness and pornography � this Victorian tale could have sunk to the level of picaresque pastiche, but while much ink has been spilled on Waters�s lesbian characters it is her ability to summon up the past in palpable, brooding detail that is her most striking characteristic. This is a novel that seems easy to categorise but doesn�t fit into any obvious genre.

 

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

By Kate Summerscale

BLOOMSBURY, 2008

A high-end piece of true crime writing, The Suspicions encompasses far more than just the story of a murder. Mr Whicher was a celebrated Victorian detective, and the crime that got his senses twitching was the vicious and motiveless slaughter of a young child in a quiet Wiltshire village in 1860. The case itself induced both moral panic and universal fascination in the country at large. Kate Summerscale�s investigation unravels not just the details of the murder and its investigation but also the birth of the modern detective and the influence of the proceedings on writers such as Wilkie Collins and Dickens. This is documentary writing of rare quality and intelligence.

 

White Teeth

By Zadie Smith

HAMISH HAMILTON, 2000

White Teeth put multiculturalism on the literary map and made it fashionable to boot. Smith�s tale of three North London families � white, Indian and mixed � didn�t just show a slice of modern life but did it with wit and panache. The book is full of big themes, too, not least race, gender and class, but the potential for hectoring is deftly avoided, the messages being more subtly conveyed through vivid characters and sharp dialogue.

 

The Human Stain

By Philip Roth

JONATHAN CAPE, 2000

The first major book of the decade is a true Great American Novel. The Human Stain was the culmination of an extraordinary period of fecundity in Philip Roth�s long career. At 65, an age at which many novelists have said their piece, he started American Pastoral, the first part of a trilogy (with I Married a Communist and concluding with The Human Stain) that examines just how far the politics, social changes and political correctness of post-war America have eroded the promised land of his youth. The books � and in particular this last volume � powered by Roth�s autograph mixture of rage, sex and moral indignation, amount to one of the great achievements of American letters.

The Human Stain is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth�s alter ego, and deals with both racial and sexual politics and how they lay low Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at a Massachusetts college. First a piece of casual slang leads to him being forced from his job and then he starts an affair with one of the college janitors nearly 40 years his junior. And at the centre of the book is a plot twist that turns everything on its head.

The film version of The Human Stain, starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, is not to be recommended. The book cannot be recommended highly enough.

 

Persepolis

By Marjane Satrapi

JONATHAN CAPE, 2003

While the French may be besotted with them, graphic novels � apart from those by cult practitioners such as Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco � have never had much credibility on these shores. Marjane Satrapi�s two-part memoir changed that. In simple, bold, black-and-white drawings she tells the story of her childhood as the daughter of two well-meaning Marxists in revolutionary Iran. Through her six-year-old eyes and later as a student she recounts the experience of both the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq and she does so with both seriousness and charm. Like Khaled Hosseini, Satrapi shows a country by which the West is transfixed from an unusual angle. It was the combination of this powerful background, the striking graphics and a touching innocence that stopped Persepolis from being mawkish and made it into affecting personalised history.

 

The True History of the Kelly Gang

By Peter Carey

FABER, 2001

This was Peter Carey�s second Man Booker winner (his first was Oscar and Lucinda in 1988) and is a retelling of one of Australia�s great foundation myths. The story takes the form of a journal written by Ned Kelly to his as-yet-unborn daughter, and describes the hard scrabble outback life and frequent conflicts with authority that turned him from a mere larrikin of Irish stock into the Robin Hood of the Antipodes. The novel�s power comes from its unromanticised portrayal of Australia and the plausibly rough and flawed figure of Kelly himself. Most notable though is Carey�s employment of a distinctive vernacular prose style (based on the one surviving letter written by Kelly himself) that uses only rudimentary grammar and no commas. While it makes the book a frequently uncomfortable story to read, it does gives it a memorable and appropriate grittiness.

 

Atonement

By Ian McEwan

JOHNATHAN CAPE, 2001

The book that catapulted Ian McEwan out of his high-literary sphere to a new level of general acclaim. A seemingly straightforward tale of cross-class love and blundering miscomprehension in pre- and wartime Britain turns out to be not a piece of engaging and immaculate pastiche but a story about writing. It is a trick that could undermine the novel but McEwan�s brilliance with set-pieces � a sweltering country-house summer, carnage at Dunkirk, an hermetic love affair � wrap the reader so tightly in the story that the tricksiness comes as revelation rather than irritation, and the fact that McEwan has proved to be a manipulator of the highest order is forgiven. He may have won the Booker with Amsterdam but this is a better book by far.

 

No Country for Old Men

By Cormac McCarthy

PICADOR, 2005

The Laconic McCarthy, the icon of Southern gothic, is frequently likened to William Faulkner and hailed as one of the great contemporary American novelists. Public recognition, however, did not arrive until the early 1990s with All the Pretty Horses. No Country for Old Men (the title comes from Yeats�s Sailing to Byzantium) keeps the Western setting of his early books but the story is set in the modern age. The plot involves a drugs deal gone wrong, a man who finds a case full of dollars, a hitman and a sheriff, and mixes violence with pared down descriptions of the sun-blasted American-Mexican border. At heart a simple thriller, the menace is made tangible through the person of the icily deranged hitman, Anton Chigurh.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

By Lynne Truss

PROFILE, 2003

A book about commas and semicolons made perhaps the most unlikely best-seller of the decade. With this manual of grammar, Lynne Truss, formerly a droll journalist, emerged as the champion of proper punctuation and thus gladdened the hearts of the millions who bemoan the slackness apparent in contemporary English usage and the negative effects of email and text-speak. Their reason for gratitude was two-fold: through its anecdotes and gentle humour it laid out the case for punctuation, but it also saved purists from the charge of pedantry.

 

Life of Pi

By Yann Martel

CANONGATE, 2002

The previously unknown Canadian�s whimsical yarn was the unexpected Man Booker winner in 2002. The story of a young boy shipwrecked on a lifeboat for 227 days with only animals � in particular a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker � for company, combined elements of fairy tale, fable and allegory. While the imagination on display is unarguable what it all adds up to is less clear � and for many beside the point. Allegations of plagiarism from a Brazilian novelist did little to dampen the book�s popular success.

 

The God Delusion

By Richard Dawkins

BANTAM PRESS, 2006

The book that turned Prof Dawkins from respected genetic biologist into the God-worrier in chief. His contention that creation has nothing to do with God and everything to do with evolution has made him the rallying point and spokesman for atheists who can be as noisy in their proselytism as their religious opponents. �There�s probably no God,� he curiously claims, but this book definitely made militant atheism a pressing public topic.

 

Untold Stories

By Alan Bennett

FABER, 2005

A collection of both new and previously unpublished pieces, this book amounts to the quintessential Bennett. It is at its most affecting when describing his family, notably his parents� marriage and a strain of mental illness that was never discussed at home. It also includes revealing pieces about his own sexuality and private life. These are leavened by diary entries and accounts of childhood trips and adult musings all related with the gentle humour that he has made such an effective tool for wrapping around emotion. The words on the page are like hearing Bennett read them to you.

 

The Tipping Point

By Malcolm Gladwell

LITTLE, BROWN, 2000

Gladwell is the corkscrew-haired Canadian who has forged a new genre out of studying the little-regarded consequences of various sociological phenomena, from teen smoking to fads for certain types of footwear. The tipping point of his title is the �levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable� and the book itself is an examination of what establishes those levels. This left-field thinking has made Gladwell the Edward de Bono de nos jours, though some might argue that the granting of a $1.5?million advance was the book�s own tipping point for success.

 

A Short History of Nearly Everything

By Bill Bryson

DOUBLEDAY, 2003

Bill Bryson used to be the cuddly American whose love of Britain endeared us both to him and to our own country. This book used that popularity to striking effect. The perfect primer for an increasing non-specialist age, it explains in layman�s terms some of the big subjects and personalities of science. Bryson has been admirably candid about his motivation: he knew little about science himself and his teachers had failed to excite him in the subject. His broad-sweep survey, taking in everything from the Big Bang to evolution and from Isaac Newton to earthquakes, is a noble attempt to fill a black hole in the school curriculum.

 

Austerlitz

By WG Sebald

HAMISH HAMILTON, 2001

The son of a committed Nazi, Sebald moved to England in 1970. His life was cut short by his death in a car crash aged 57, but by then he had already established a new and deeply personal style of writing that is concerned largely with the theme of memory and in particular his struggle to understand the history of Germany and the Second World War. His favoured format was a mixture of fiction and fact interspersed with evocative photography. The career of Jacques Austerlitz, the eponymous hero, encompasses many elements of Sebald�s own history, and his travels tell not just the story of the Holocaust but of the lost world of old Europe.

 

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

FABER, 2005

The novel that should have won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, Never Let Me Go is nominally a science-fiction story. It describes the childhoods of a group of young people cloned, although they are not fully aware of it, to provide donor organs. A writer who shuns the overblown, Ishiguro�s gradual building up of the full import of their fate is hauntingly done. A masterpiece of incremental detail that becomes poignant as well as horrific, the novel includes elements of both boarding-school stories and superior sci-fi such as John Wyndham�s The Midwich Cuckoos. Ishiguro�s habitual feeling for ill-defined menace is used here to powerful effect.

 

A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Khaled Hosseini

BLOOMSBURY, 2007

The Kite Runner has sold some 12 million copies, and Hosseini�s follow-up is another lush and unashamedly emotive tale of hardship and the Taliban. This story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, has been hailed as an insight into the reality of Afghanistan. The plot itself is an old-fashioned heartstring-plucker and the writing is often hackneyed but the context gives the novel the appearance of capturing historical reality.

 

The Lovely Bones

By Alice Sebold

LITTLE, BROWN, 2002

Susie Salmon is a most unusual narrator � she has been raped, murdered, dismembered and is now in heaven looking down on the family she left behind and the man who killed her. Perhaps the reason for the novel�s success is that it is not a tale of retribution but rather an unusual coming-of-age story. Susie may be dead but she continues to grow up, using the living as the markers in her own development. Some critics, however, refused to be beguiled, criticising Susie�s God-free heaven. Alice Sebold based the story on elements from her own past � she was raped as a university student.

.......

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I kept falling asleep reading Bill Bryson's A short history of nearly everything, I usually love his books but this one I couldn't get into.

I'm currently reading the God delusion, it's interesting.

Edited by wiccibat
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree that some of those books are excellent (Eats, Soots and Leaves; Life of Pi; Fingersmith; and Never Let Me Go), but I cannot stand THe Lovely Bones. Terrible book. Haven't read the rest of them.

Edited by Kell
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read Atonement, A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Lovely Bones (meh :D ) from that list.

 

I have A Short History... on my 'to read' pile and Fingersmith and Untold Stories on my 'wishlist'.

 

I can't say I'm fussed about the others!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have read three; 'Never Let Me Go', a stunning book by Kazuo Ishiguro, and 'Lovely Bones', an unusual and startling book by Alice Sebold. The third is Lynne Truss' 'Eats, Shots And Leaves'. All three deserve a place on this list I feel.

 

I have another five of those listed here on my TBR pile. I will have to work my way through them to be able to say whether I agree with their inclusion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As much as I did like The Lovely Bones, there were other books that should have had a place on that list before it. A Thousand Splendid Suns is on my TBR pile right now, may need to bump that one up a bit. :D

 

I would have liked to see Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi on that list as it was a very powerful, well written book.

Edited by CaliLily
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have read Atonement, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Never Let Me Go, and The Lovely Bones; Never Let Me Go is the one that really made an impression on me.

 

Fingersmith, White Teeth, No Country For Old Men, Eats Shoots and Leaves are all books I have thought I would like to read, and reading about them again makes me think I should maybe formally put them on my wish list :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read two of those :D ... and seen one film. Maybe I should try harder, but I must confess I tend to rebel against reading what other people tell me I ought to. I've bought so many "worthy" books in the past that I've ended up putting aside because they're not my cup of tea, they're someone else's idea of a good book.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read a couple off the list, (Bill Bryson-not his best), Lovely Bones (meh) and I've seen Atonement (zzzzz) and No Country for Old Men, which is on my list to read.

But last year I read a quote from one of the judges of one of these lists....it might have been the Booker Prize and he said that crime would never be a contender while he still drew breath.

I just felt that anyone so close minded shouldn't be the judge of anything. Not that I take such things seriously anyway.

 

I'd like to know how they decide what's a contender.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is what the article in question says..

What are the books that can be said to have defined the first decade of the millennium? Here, Michael Prodger assesses the literature that shaped our reading habits of the past 10 years, produced new genres, created controversy, and entertained us, and then there are the books that, quite simply, would be hailed as great in any era .
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read two of those :D ... and seen one film. Maybe I should try harder, but I must confess I tend to rebel against reading what other people tell me I ought to. I've bought so many "worthy" books in the past that I've ended up putting aside because they're not my cup of tea, they're someone else's idea of a good book.

 

 

Snap, I have read a couple and want to read a couple but will probably do so when I feel like not because someone thinks it defines a decade.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

White Teeth i didn't think much of & The Suspicions of Mr Wicher i found incredibly boring. Fingersmith , Lovely Bones , A Thousand Splendid Suns & Untold Stories i did enjoy. Life of Pi & Atonement are on my TBR pile.

Edited by Kidsmum
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've only read two books from the list: Never Let Me Go, which I loved, and Atonement, which like all the McEwan novels I've read, I found a good read, but almost instantly forgotten.

 

I am in the midst of the trilogy Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias which would definitely make my list. For me, though, the great novel of the decade is Roberto Bolano's 2666.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've only read two off that list :blush: I don't know off the top of my head what my top 20 are but I don't think I agree with his list! Some there I wouldn't even bother picking up

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've only read The Lovely Bones and Fingersmith. I really enjoyed The Lovely Bones but I wouldn't consider it one of the 20 best novels of the decade. Fingersmith on the other hand was simply terrific and I was not surprised to see it on the list. I heartily recommend it to anyone.

 

The following are on my TBR: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

The following are on my wishlist because of the 1001 Books challenge: White Teeth, The Human Stain, Atonement, Life of Pi, Never Let Me Go and Austerlitz.

 

I'd also like to read the Obama novel and Eats, Shoots and Leaves because it was on The Complete Polysyllabic Spree and because some members on here have liked it.

 

So all in all, I've covered my bases.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read 4 of the books on the list. White Teeth which I read a long time ago and can't really remember. But I liked the other three which were A Thousand Splendid Suns, A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Lovely Bones. Although I don't know if I'd put the last two on this kind of list.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, White Teeth, Life of Pi and A Short History of Nearly Everything. They were all good but I struggled a bit with Bill's book because it was too scientific for me .. my brain nearly capsized.

I've got The Lovely Bones, Fingersmith and Never Let me Go on the shelf to read and I'd like to read No Country For Old Men and Persepolis (seen the films and enjoyed them).

Somewhere I think I've got a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves but I've never read it .. I should read it, my punctuation is terrible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dreams from My Father-doesn't look like anyone read this or seems remotely interested :blush:

The Corrections-I have this on my shelf...waiting to be read

The Human Stain-ditto this one ^

Atonement-I think I am the only one anywhere that didn't care for this book...just really did nothing for me:lurker:

No Country For Old Men-I didn't much like The Road (again I'm surely in the minority) by him, so I don't think I'll be reading this in the near future anytime

Life Of Pi- I couldn't get past five pages...but then again, i sometimes have to be in the right mindset for certain books (that make sense?? )

A Short History Of Nearly Everything-this interests me...sometimes

Never Let Me Go-I think I have this (unread still) will have to dig it out!

A Thousand Splendid Suns-a fave of mine...I loved this book...sometimes I wish I hadn't read it just so I could read it again!

The Lovely Bones-was good....until the last 20 pages or so :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...