Your Top (10) Books of the Decade

[Flying_Monkey]

No-one seems particularly impressed by The Times's list (on the other thread), so let's be a bit more positive and talk about what we liked. What are your favourite (say, 10) books of the decade and why...

Murakami Haruki (2000/2002) Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru / After the Quake. A great collection of short-stories inspired by the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, which I think was better than anything else he did this decade.  

Kim Stanley Robinson (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt. One reviewer called it "a storehouse of thought... a dense, informed, impassioned and huge novel" - and indeed it is. No-one (and I mean no-one) has written a better novel on the current global cultural conflict.

Anna Funder (2003) Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall. No other popular non-fiction work impressed me as much.

Alan Garner (2004) Thursbitch. Another stunning, immersive but utterly otherwordly reflection on history, landscape and people.  

Walter Mosley (2004) The Man in My Basement. I could have chosen many of Mosley's novels, but this one, in which a black man who has inherited a house is approached by an older white man who wants to be voluntarily imprisoned in his basement, is a disturbing take on power and race.

Joseph Boyden (2005) Three Day Road. A powerful novel of the First World War and the native experience in Canda.

George Mackay Brown (2005) Collected Poems. Simply the most grounded poet that the British Isles produced in the Twentieth Century. He died 9 years before, but his Collected Poems was a reminder of how much we lost.

Ian McDonald (2007) Brasyl. Another who doesn't get science-fiction should read this and marvel not at the plotlines involving quantum reality, but at the writing and construction.

Peter Matthiessen (2008) Shadow Country. The bastard wrote three of the best novels ever with his Watson Trilogy and then decided to rewrite them entirely as one novel. And it's even better. The greatest living US writer in my opinion, and I won't even listen to any case against!

Geoff Ryman (2008) The King's Last Song. Has something in common with Robinson's novel in that it is about a recreation and reworking of a past that never happened - a rich, beautiful and loving alterntive history of Cambodia. Ryman is an underrated British novelist - I could have also picked his experimental online novel of impending disaster, 253, or his wonderful and humane near-future work, Air.

There's probably an entirely different Top 10 I could make on another day, of course...

[citoyen]

Off the top of my head...

Arthur & George - Julian Barnes.
Probably my #1. My favourite author at the height of his powers.

Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre.
I know it's derivative but I've not read the books it's derived from, so not concerned by that aspect of it. Very funny.

The Corrections - Jonathan Frantzen
Just really enjoyable and well written.

Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events
My son has been reading these, so I've been reading them by proxy. OK, so they're not all from this decade but most of them are. And they're great. This is what all children's books should be like - scary, funny and poignant in turns. Top class. Much better than the Potter nonsense.

But I'm not really very well read when it comes to contemporary fiction, so no point adding more to my list - there are probably loads of books that would be on my list if I'd read them.

d.

[RJ]

Hmmm.  Tricky.  In no particular order, and avoiding any on the Times list, or "upthread":

William Blum:  Rogue State Not an easy read, but a useful exposé of US covert foreign policy and its consequences

Norman Davies & Roger Moorhouse:  Microcosm A history of central Europe told through the medium of Bresslau/Wroclaw (the same place ...).

Bernd Heinrich:  Why We Run Raven biologist gets all natural-historical and ecological about his hobby - ultra-distance running.

Hunter S. Thompson: Kingdom of Fear Righteously raging prose from HST's last book.

Günter Grass: Crabwalk Readable Grass tackling big themes of 20th century European history from the perspective of 3 generations.

TC Boyle: A Friend of the Earth A motivational text in my line of work ...

WG Sebald: The Rings of Saturn The only reason that I would now ever contemplate cycling to Dunwich.

Rachel Seiffert: The Dark Room More fictionalised 20th century German history from 3 perspectives.  More thoughts provoked.

Richard Flanagan: Gould's Book of Fish Hugely unreliable and melancholy magical narrative of transported convict life in Tasmania  

Walter Moers - The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear Fantastic fantasy nonsense of the highest order.

[αdαmsκι]

I did agree with some of the things on The Times list, such as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Half of a Yellow Sun and The Kite Runner, but I hadn't heard of a lot of the books. The following are some of the books I've enjoyed.

• For Tibet, with Love: A Beginner's Guide to Changing the World by Isabel Losada - an account of the author's personal attempt to understand the current political situation in Tibet and what one person can do another a single issue.
  
  
• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - The story is written through a series of letters from wife to husband discussing why their child, Kevin, ended up the way he did and whether it was nature or nurture. It's very dark and powerfully written and I also ended up moving between who I felt sympathy for throughout the book.
  
  
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger - I've not seen film, but from the reviews I understand it's rubbish, and yes the book is a mussy love story. However, the key to the book is the unique idea Niffenegger had, which was for the male lover to be a time traveller, which for me worked very well.
  
  
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - The story is told by Susie who is murdered and watches the impact this has on her family from heaven. Like all of Sebold's work, it's harrowing, but the story has stayed with me for a long time.
  
  
• Saturday by Ian McEwan - I know The Times list contained Atonement, but I prefer Saturday. The way McEwan recounts the tale of a single day in the novel is incredible, as is his ability to avoid prose.

[pcolbeck]

Kim Stanley Robinson (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt. One reviewer called it "a storehouse of thought... a dense, informed, impassioned and huge novel" - and indeed it is. No-one (and I mean no-one) has written a better novel on the current global cultural conflict.

+1 A fantastic book. Should be more widely known.

[Flying_Monkey]

Kim Stanley Robinson (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt. One reviewer called it "a storehouse of thought... a dense, informed, impassioned and huge novel" - and indeed it is. No-one (and I mean no-one) has written a better novel on the current global cultural conflict.

+1 A fantastic book. Should be more widely known.

It's funny how David Mitchell, who is a 'mainstream' novelist, gets praised for his imagination when he uses what are essentially borrowed SF elements, and then when an 'SF' writer who is just as skilled a craftsman rewrites the entire history of the world and uses a Buddhist form to link it altogether, he gets totally ignored by the critics... KSR had a go at the Booker judges this year for not reading any SF, and the childish comments from some supposedly well-read guy on the judging panel in response were just amazing. 

[onb]

.

[/li][li]Saturday by Ian McEwan - I know The Times list contained Atonement, but I prefer Saturday. The way McEwan recounts the tale of a single day in the novel is incredible, as is his ability to avoid prose.[/li]
[/list]

I have just finished reading Saturday which I thought was a great book ,I havnt read Atonement as I made the mistake of seeing the film ,I have read on Chesil Beach which wasnt as good as Saturday.

[onb]

The Time travelles wife

Old Filth

Saturday

Push Yourself just a little bit More

Fatherland

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Angelas Ashes

We need to talk about Kevin



Shalimar the Clown (really hard to get into ,unputdownable at the end )

Under a Thousand suns .

[Mrs Pingu]

Birds Without Wings - Louis de Bernieres
The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman
Redemption Ark - Alastair Reynolds
Kafka On The Shore - Haruki Murakami
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Death and The Penguin - Andrey Kurkov (I'm going by the English version publishing dates here)
The Testament of Gideon Mack - James Robertson
Atonement - Ian McEwan
American Gods - Neil Gaiman

and I can't think of another 2 1 from the last decade yet.....

[bikenerd]

I don't really read that many new books : I tend to apply the hindsight filter to maximize the number of good books I read, but the best book I've read that has been published in the past decade is Leviathan, or the Whale, by Philip Hoare.  Part natural history, part literary criticism, part historical account, part travelogue, part autobiography it's a superb book and much more than the sum of its parts.