Books of the Decade

I see that the Guardian has published its list of the 50 “books of the decade” with comments from a variety of authors and critics. It’s worth reading their comments for insight.

Here’s just the list – bolded titles are the ones that I’ve read. Only 15 out of the fifty, not a particularly good score, I’m afraid. However, nothing would ever persuade me to read anything written by Dan Brown – “Bestselling” does not guarantee quality; it’s a logical fallacy. Still, there are definitely some titles here that I would like to add to my reading list; Wolf Hall, for example.

2000

✒ White Teeth, by Zadie Smith (Penguin)
✒ No Logo, by Naomi Klein (Fourth Estate)
✒ The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
✒ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Picador)
✒ The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman (Scholastic)
✒ How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, by Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus)
✒ Experience, by Martin Amis (Vintage)

2001

✒ The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Harper Perennial)
✒ Atonement, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
✒ Austerlitz, by WG Sebald (Penguin)
✒ A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, by Rachel Cusk (Fourth Estate)

2002

✒ Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta)
✒ London Orbital: A Year Walking Around the M25, by Iain Sinclair (Penguin)
✒ Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters (Virago)
✒ Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (Jonathan Cape)

2003

✒ The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (Corgi)
✒ Landing Light, by Don Paterson (Faber)
✒ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon (Vintage)
✒ The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)
✒ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss (Profile)

2004

✒ The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (WW Norton)
✒ Small Island, by Andrea Levy (Headline)
✒ The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)
✒ Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (Sceptre)
✒ Being Jordan, by Katie Price (John Blake Publishing)
✒ Earth: An Intimate History, by Richard Fortey (Vintage)

2005

✒ Freakonomics, by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner (Penguin)
✒ Untold Stories, by Alan Bennett (Faber)
✒ The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (HarperCollins)
✒ Postwar, by Tony Judt (Pimlico)
✒ Saturday, by Ian McEwan (Vintage)

2006

✒ The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Black Swan)
✒ The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Picador)
✒ The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright (Penguin)
✒ The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery (Penguin)
✒ The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock (Penguin)

2007

✒ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury)
✒ The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)
✒ The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries (Arrow)
✒ Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Harper Perennial)
✒ The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid (Penguin)

2008

✒ Change We Can Believe In, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama (Canongate)
✒ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross (Harper Perennial)
✒ Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill (Harper Perennial)
✒ The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins (Vintage)
✒ Home, by Marilynne Robinson (Virago)
✒ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes (Harper Press)

2009

✒ Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
✒ 2666, by Roberto Bolaño (Picador)
✒ Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (Viking)