The best of the decade...u think?

The 20 best books of the decade
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 .


By Michael Prodger
Published: 5:31PM GMT 21 Jan 2010

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Barack Obama book, Dreams From My Father: Obamas made $2.7 millon last year, tax returns show
Nearly all of the Obama's earnings last year came from the president's two best-sellers

Dreams from My Father

By Barack Obama

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Genre: historical thrillers

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.

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.

The 2000s were a tumultuous time for words printed on old-fashioned paper. Memoirs went gangbusters. A boy wizard induced literary pandemonium. The notion of reading on screens (computer screens, Kindles, iPods and so forth) exploded in popularity, causing a certain amount of hand-wringing about the fate of the book. And the very definition of truth got a rigorous debate thanks to a fellow named Frey.

Amidst that turbulent environment, a slew of memorable texts emerged: some fiction, some non-fiction, all worth reading and cherishing. Today we present our 20 favorite books across all literary genres, with reviews by Paste staff and luminaries like Rosanne Cash, Arthur Phillips and David Langness.

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20. Chuck Klosterman: Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story [Scribner] (2005)
Wherein our hero expands upon a feature he originally wrote for Spin magazine, traveling the United States ostensibly to visit rock star death sites and tell the stories of their departed. Over the course of the book, he comes to terms with the romantic relationships he’s shared with four women, culminating in a story that, as its title humorously informs us, is 15% fiction. Exhausting? Surprisingly, no. Along the way, he names cars after Star Wars creatures, compares ladies to Kiss solo albums and makes myriad bold connections and claims involving anything from Rod Stewart to 9/11. In short, Killing Yourself to Live is everything we’ve come to expect from the mind of Chuck Klosterman. This time, he just decided to pack it into a Ford Taurus and take it on the road. Austin L. Ray

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19. Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point [Little Brown] (2000)
Journalist, author and pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell’s engaging first book is still his best work to date. Gladwell dives headfirst into a paradigm hunch he’d had while covering AIDS for The Washington Post: What if all events unfolded the way epidemics do; What if everything—from business to social policy to advertising—has a Tipping Point at which it hits critical mass and begins spreading like wildfire? Writing smartly, with passion, clarity and wonder, Gladwell uses a series of convincing case studies to anchor a thought-provoking argument that—over the last decade—has helped shape the way we think about the world. Steve LaBate

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18. Donald Miller: Blue Like Jazz [Thomas Nelson] (2003)
Subtitled “Non-religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” Blue Like Jazz reads like a memoir in which Christian thinker Donald Miller invites us along on his own weird spiritual journey. Peppering the pages with hip musical references and funny stories about his friends, Miller admits that Christianity involves quite a few paradoxes but argues that the faith is still relevant in a post-modern world. Spiritual leanings aside, his tone is instantly likeable, and there’s comfort in the realization that he’s really not trying to evangelize. “My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore,” he writes. “Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.” Kate Kiefer

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17. Carl Wilson: Let’s Talk About Love (A Journey To The End Of Taste) [Continuum] (2007)
No one expected Continuum’s 33 1/3 series to cover Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love—we were used to glowing observations on records that don’t suck, like Pet Sounds and OK Computer and Exile On Main Street. Céline seems like an easy target—she’s just so detestable, especially for fellow Canadians like Globe And Mail writer Carl Wilson. But Wilson avoids cheap shots in favor of a brainy socio-cultural examination of taste: Why do so many people love her? Why do so many more people hate her? What does this say about us as culture consumers? While Love isn’t Dion’s most popular album, it’s her most egregious—mostly because it features that ubiquitous song from Titanic—and Wilson gives it his undivided attention, even attending one of her Vegas shows. Now that’s a devoted author. Kate Kiefer

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16. Joseph O’Neill: Netherland [Vintage] (2008)
Anyone can write a book set in New York; many do. Few can write about a book about the immigrant experience in New York, which is of course the real story of the city—the tired, hungry, and poor; the con and the mark; the half-lit memories of home; the joy of having arrived. Netherland has been compared to The Great Gatsby, but O’Neill has more faith in the American Dream than Fitzgerald ever did, and the America that emerges at the end of his third book is wondrously, terribly alive. Matthew Shaer

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15. Eric Schlosser: Fast Food Nation [Houghton Mifflin] (2001)
The biggest revelation was learning that the mass-market meat industry is just as cruel to its human employees as it is to those poor old cows. Schlosser’s meticulous exposé challenged Americans to think hard about what we eat, and to demand alternatives. It also forced the burger barons to make serious changes in the way they do business. Or maybe, you know, they were gonna do that anyway. Nick Marino

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14. J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter [Bloomsbury] (1998-2007)
The Harry Potter series is an entertaining read with wide appeal and obvious references. But J.K. Rowling’s phenomenon is far from derivative. She culls from a wide array of children’s and fantasy literature, historical works and philosophical treatises to produce an original and potent story that grows in nuance and emotional realism as its central characters (and target readers) grow older. Rowling has done more than produce one of the entertainment world’s biggest brands and ignite a passion for reading in a new generation (or two). She has created a rich universe populated with compelling characters in a powerful parable of love and sacrifice. Tim Regan-Porter

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13. Ian McEwan: Atonement [Nan A. Talese] (2002)
A girl with a big imagination thinks she sees something. She is wrong, but she sticks to her guns. Lives are ruined. As an old woman, she wonders if she can repair her irreparable mistake. That summary seems so slight, yet this novel has stuck with me for years, and I expect it will stick with me forever. Love story, war story, childhood memories, a story about stories… “Can I make it up to you?” we lightly ask those we trespass against. What do you do when the answer is “No”? Arthur Phillips

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12. Doug Blackmon: Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II [Doubleday] (2008)
Every so often, a book revises a people’s view of their own culture—not with theories, but by constructing a narrative based on forgotten facts and the stories of real people. Blackmon’s deep research and dispassionate prose help us understand the contemporary South by casting new light on the not-so-distant past. Slavery by Another Name won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. It documents a system of labor conscription that was more barbaric and widespread, and more basic to the region’s history than most had realized. Ken Edelstein

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11. David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day [Little, Brown and Company] (2000)
David Sedaris’ breakthrough collection is a hilarious, heartwarming, eye-opening and often unnerving tour of its creator’s debilitating insecurities and rampant ego. The natural-born writer rattles off gutbusting screeds on family, drugs, art, travel, education, his too-bizarre-to-be-fabricated redneck thug of a brother “The Rooster” (“Fuck it, motherfucker. That shit don’t mean fuck to me.”) and what it’s like to be a gay carpet-bagging yankee uprooted as a child and shipped south of the Mason-Dixon line. Sedaris’ prose is effortless, charming, insightful and, above all else—real. Steve LaBate


10. David Foster Wallace: Consider The Lobster And Other Essays [Little, Brown and Company] (2005)
Wallace’s final collection keeps breaking your heart, and not just when you’re reading “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” That mind, containing multitudes. That matchless maximalism, literally breathtaking. He hooks us with nouns, the personsplacesthings of contemporary culture—talk-show hosts, state fairs, cruise ships. Then he captures us with verbs. Forget the lobster. Wallace shows us considering. He is all action and propulsion, a mind at work, more alive than we will ever be. Anne Trubek

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9. Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything Is Illuminated [Harper Perennial] (2002)
We shared it with our loved ones, pressing it into their hands like a locket. This astonishing story of self-discovery—of loss and hope and faith and sacrifice—is the story of every immigrant, every wanderer and sad romantic. It is fiction and fable. It is ancient and modern. It is guileless. It reminds us who we were and where we came from, and it shows us how to love for all time. Nick Marino

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8. Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking [Knopf] (2005)
Carving out a unique place in the lexicon of memoir, Didion documents her husband John Gregory Dunne’s death and her state of mind in the year after. The sequence of searingly painful scenes is articulated with such clarity that they have the opposite effect of what we expect: Rather than depress, the book liberates and inspires. In an almost unprecedented literary voice, Didion combines great depth of feeling with a journalist’s cool detachment. The reader comes away feeling honored at having been included.
Rosanne Cash

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7. Craig Thompson: Blankets [Top Shelf Productions] (2003)
Blankets is Craig Thompson’s lyrical bildungsroman told in graphic-novel form. Maligned and mistreated by his religious family and community, a self-loathing Thompson grapples with faith and love only to discover that loss is everywhere. The expert drawings and absorbing narrative depict the inherent sadness in growing up, but the real resonance is found in the marriage of text and image. Amanda Stern

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6. Markus Zusak: The Book Thief [Knopf] (2005)
By some unfathomable marketing logic, publisher Knopf labeled Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief as young-adult fiction. Formerly called “juveniles,” YA books typically lack the swearing, sex and inscrutability of “adult” literature, and publishers can sell them to schools by the score without fear of parental backlash. Despite its reductionist label, The Book Thief transcends age and most other categories and has found its footing among adults. Since its publication in ’05, this remarkable, deeply emotional Holocaust tale—narrated by Death and focused on the maturation of a grieving girl named Liesel—has stayed on bestseller lists around the world. Orphaned by the loss of her Communist parents and traumatized by the death of her brother, Liesel is adopted by an Aryan family as the Nazis take power. She learns to read after stealing three books, and the words she comes to love resuscitate her heart. Then she meets Max, the Jew her new family hides in the basement at their collective peril. Critics always search for books that will be read long after we are gone, and The Book Thief is without question one of these immortal works. Destined to join Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Anne Frank’s diary in the rarified reaches of category-transcending triumphs, Zusak’s masterpiece belongs in the highest ranks of serious literary achievement. I wept when I finished it, partly out of its passionate, fervent humanity, and partly because I wanted it to go on forever. David Langness

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5. Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex [Picador] (2002)
In many ways, Middlesex resembles Eugenides’ 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides: Both novels are heady with self-discovery, closely kept secrets and fumbling sexuality, all etched in the author’s gorgeous, quivering prose. But Middlesex mines a deeper, richer field. The book tills three generations of a family’s evolution from Greek farmers to Detroit suburbanites, ultimately grappling with the unimaginable burden laid by history on the body of Calliope Stephanides. It’s a masterpiece—beautiful, brave and devastating. Rachael Maddux

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4. Marilynne Robinson: Gilead [Farrar, Straus and Giroux] (2004)
In this Pulitzer-winning novel, dying 76-year-old Reverend John Ames pens an explanatory letter assessing his checkered lineage for his six-year-old son. Although the missive is chockfull of Ames’ theological contentions and his own shortcomings, it never once dips into that loathsome territory of storytelling as sermon. Instead, his commentary is quietly profound. It creates an aching hope that we, too, may be so enlightened when our time comes to pass from this world. Elissa Elliott

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3. Cormac McCarthy: The Road [Knopf] (2006)
Don’t believe The Road is great because of its meditations on the human condition. It ain’t. The Road is an adventure book. That’s why it’s great. A father and son travel an American wasteland, avoiding bands of cannibals. Sound like fun? Hell yeah. McCarthy spares the ponderous “wisdom” that can sometimes make his work a slog. Father and son are hunted. Starving. Probably doomed. Father despairs. Son has faith. Both are right. That’s beyond wisdom—that’s eternal truth. Victor LaValle

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2. Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius [Simon & Schuster] (2000)
We understand any mixed emotions about this pick. Eggers himself has moved on from this book’s hyperactive po-mo voice, and progressed to a more mature style—shouldn’t we move on, too? Doesn’t this debut memoir, published at the dawn of the century, seem dated? No. Please resist the reflex to knock A Heartbreaking Work as outré. Recall instead how hilarious, smart, vibrantly alive and simply fun this book was to read. And read it again. Thomas Mullen

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1. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay [Random House] (2000)
Ever since my eyes lingered over the concluding sentence of Michael Chabon’s magnum opus and I pressed the book shut with a gale-force sigh of yes indeed, I have owed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay this little fan letter. To simply recount Kavalier & Clay’s narrative—a pair of cousins reunite in 1939 in New York City, combine their artistic gifts and ultimately help usher in the Golden Age of Comics—misses the point. Plenty of authors can unspool a fascinating yarn. What sets this particular novel apart is the alchemical explosion triggered by the convergence of Chabon’s 200-proof delight in the comic-book artform with the writing craft and conscientious research he invests in every single one of his novels. What is the comic-book formula if not an exaggerated Technicolor recasting of the American ideal? A world of perfect moral clarity where Good and Evil wear bold, legibly written nametags? A world in which sheer will and determination can propel a man to skyscraper-leaping heights? Our heroes, a pair of mere mortals, spackle over their crippling insecurities by writing and drawing men of steel. Chabon paints the superhuman fantasy with such gleeful strokes that you recoil when faced with the crushing reality that would-be Clark Kents like Josef Kavalier and Sam Clay—like you and me—have hearts of kryptonite. Jason Killingsworth

20 White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
Related Links

* The 5 Worst Books Of The Decade

* Books Of The Decade: The Critics' Choices

* The Times on the 100 Best Films of the Decade

This dazzling first novel became a classic as soon as it appeared. No voice like Smith’s had yet been heard — clever, wise, street-smart and riotously inventive.

19 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)

Franzen is the author who famously turned down Oprah. He could afford to. The novel is a triumph, exploring the fragmentation of one middle-class family as they gather for a Midwestern Christmas — ailing, embittered parents and their unsatisfactory adult children.

18 Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (2008)

Goldacre, a hospital doctor, is a witty debunker of all forms of bad science: quack medicines, ropey dietary theories, incompetent reporting. At a time of increasing credulity, he is a tonic.

17 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (2007)

The final adventure in the most successful series of all time — Harry, now a teenager, helped by his Hogwarts mates Ron and Hermione, vanquishes the Dark Lord and his minions, avenges his dead parents and lives happily ever after.

16 Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)


An intimate and emotionally frank collection of love poems that, following the course of a love affair from first spark through ecstatic conflagration to final burn-out, probably did a lot to earn its author her appointment as first female laureate.

15 The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006)

Dawkins showed that you could be a bestseller with a book positing a negative. His witheringly argued treatise against the notion of divine creation made him the poster boy for atheists, the thinker whose arguments every religious person must address.

14 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)
Related Links

* The 5 Worst Books Of The Decade

* Books Of The Decade: The Critics' Choices

* The Times on the 100 Best Films of the Decade

Nafisi’s reading group, set up in Tehran in the 1990s, was an assertion of identity and freedom. Her book offers a depiction of a society in a time of war and a celebration of literature.

Azar Nafisi on Reading Lolita in Tehran "People often say, what can we do for Iranians? The point implicit in my book was: Look at what these young Iranians are doing for you. They are reminding you of the best in your own culture, and showing you how through imagination one can connect"

13 Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (2001) Sebald’s masterpiece: the story of a man’s search for his lost history. Austerlitz comes to England in 1939 on the kindertransport. Raised by a Welsh minister who tells him nothing about his real family, he returns to his birthplace 50 years later.

12 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)

With this modestly titled calling card, the most influential young author of the decade announced his arrival. As well as writing books and screenplays, Eggers has been, as editor of the journal and imprint McSweeney’s, the centre of a literary coterie.

11 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, in a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007)

The greatest novel in the world is given new life by the remarkable translating team who have already blown the dust off Dostoevsky; if there is one essential desert island book, this is it — the literary equivalent of digital remastering.

10 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)
A murder in the Louvre, and the clues are all hidden in the works of Leonardo. Some love it, some hate it (see our worst of the decade article), but you can’t deny that its mix of conspiracy, riddles and action dominated the decade.

9 Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)

A foolish act of bravado and a simple act of conceit at a 1930s house party combine to spoil three lives. Can amends be made? You either love or hate the postmodern twist at the end, but you cannot deny the brilliance of the descriptive set-pieces.

8 Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood (2008)
Related Links

* The 5 Worst Books Of The Decade

* Books Of The Decade: The Critics' Choices

* The Times on the 100 Best Films of the Decade

From Scrooge to Faustus, the Canadian seer’s fascinating examination of debt, balance and revenge in history, society and literature is essential reading for those curious about the breeding ground for our current financial turmoil.

7 Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002)

Martel was an unknown when his compelling, amusing, eerie fable won the Man Booker Prize: the novel remains the bestselling Booker winner yet, and deservedly so. With a hero named after a swimming pool and a tiger named Richard Parker, this a book like no other.

Yann Martel on Life of Pi "I prepared Life of Pi in the quiet of my creative kitchen, thinking it was a delicious meal but worried that no one would join me. Were there readers out there willing to give animals and gods serious consideration? Well, Pi has proved to be a roaring feast. So many people have joined me at the table. And I'm grateful for that. It's no fun cooking just for yourself. Food is to be shared"

6 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (2000)

By identifying the points at which trends and goods graduated from specialist tastes to mass-market phenomena, Gladwell established himself in the lucrative role of anatomist of contemporary success.

5 Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (2006)
Its astonishing rediscovery more than 40 years after Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz should not overshadow that the two novellas here are miniature masterpieces. In the first the veneer of civilisation is stripped from a group of Parisians fleeing the advancing Germans, while the second is a moving tale of forbidden love across the divide of war.

4 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst (2002) One hundred years ago Ghandl and Skaay, two great native poets of the northwest coast of Canada, spoke their stories aloud; Bringhurst’s translations and analysis bring a lost world brilliantly to life.

3 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004)
The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built.

2 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
With its feisty, irresistible heroine and shapely, naive style, Satrapi’s comic-book account of her childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran is hugely enjoyable — and an essential, humanising eye-opener on a little-understood country. From an interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2007

1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Related Links

* The 5 Worst Books Of The Decade

* Books Of The Decade: The Critics' Choices

* The Times on the 100 Best Films of the Decade

The Road is our book of the decade; but it will outlast that judgment, too. It is a work of force and dark brilliance, a perfect expression of the early 21st-century’s terrors —- and of the hope we must all have that we shall not destroy ourselves, nor yet be destroyed. Erica Wagner

Cormac McCarthy on The Road
Four or five years ago, [my son John] and I went to El Paso, and we checked in to the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about two or three o’clock in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages, and that was about the end of it. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn’t two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy.

Descriptions by Nicholas Clee, Kate Saunders, Tom Gatti, Erica Wagner, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Paul Dunn, Richard Whitehead

Compiled by Erica Wagner with assistance from Anjana Ahuja, Lisa Appignanesi, Nicola Beauman, Marcel Berlins, Celia Brayfield, Ian Brunskill, Sarah Churchwell, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Amanda Craig, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Howard Davies, Matthew Dennison, Iain Finlayson, Philippa Gregory, Christina Hardyment, Mark Henderson, Thomas Lynch, Derwent May, Peter Millar, Neel Mukherjee, Rebecca Nicolson, John O’Connell, Stephen Page, Libby Purves, Margaret Reynolds, Ziauddin Sardar, Peter Stothard, Peter Straus, Lisa Tuttle.