Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The Best of the Decade
Making "Best of" lists is ridiculous when you love almost every book you read. Do you prefer Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible to Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Brimming Cup? Julie Hecht's Happy Trails to You to Laurie Colwin's Happy All the Time? They're all great, but there's probably not room for all of them on the list.
And if you can't decide which books you loved most this year, imagine what it's like to catalogue the best of the decade. Earlier I listed an absurd number of my favorite books of 2000-2004. Now I've winnowed the whole decade down to a Top 30, and, guess what, my Top of the Charts is in reality more like a Top 200! Below are a mix of 30 classics and pop, old and new, listed by the year I read them.
2000:
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Romola by George Eliot
2001:
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina by David Hughes
2002:
In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor
A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt
2003:
None Shall Look Back by Caroline Gordon
The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery by Janwillem Van de Wetering
2004:
Long for This World by Michael Byers
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
The Best Awful by Carrie Fisher
Aloft by Chang-rae Lee
Don’t Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford
2005
One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens
The Newcomes by Thackeray
2006
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence by Goeff Dyer
The Trench by Abdulrahman Munif
2007
Hunk City by James Wilcox
The Towers of Trebizand by Rose Macaulay
2008
Honourable Estate by Vera Brittain
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr
A Hazard of New Fortunes by William dean Howells
2009
The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt
Ovid's Heroides
The New Moon with the Old by Dodie Smith
An Avenue of Stone by Pamela Hansford Johnson
The Brimming Cup by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
They Walked like Men by Clifford Simak
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
See a longer Best of 2009 list here.
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