The twenty-first century’s Top Ten (plus five, just because…)
In case you’re a book person who somehow missed that the New York Times did a poll of assorted writers, critics and ‘other book lovers’ to produce a list of the Top Hundred Books of the Century so far that is the context for this…
Inevitably such a list means many opinionated book lovers like me go, ‘hey why does so-and-so’s opinion matter more than mine, and also where is X and Y, all the sci-fi and fantasy not written by NK Jemison?’ So I made my own top ten list and since it’s my day off and this site is just languishing over here, I thought might write about what I picked.
Firstly, I ended up just going with fiction—and because I lean towards novels more than short stories, novels (and a novella) is what is here. Trying to add in poetry was complicated enough, but non-fiction, oooof. Was I supposed to try and get in the academic stuff as well? Too many books, too little space… If I was going to do a top hundred, maybe—but time and energy lacked for that.
Secondly, the top ten (and then the following five) aren’t in any particular order: picking them was hard enough without ranking them. There’s no serious and explainable metric to my choosing. They’re not just ‘my favourites’ (the books I’ve think I’ve read more than any other this century, Nick Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven aren’t here—they would have been in a top twenty): they are books that have made me think things and feel things and opened up a bit of world to me or me to the world in some way, but also that seem in some way ‘important’ or to have made an impact on people or on literature / literary culture more generally (though please don’t ask me to get empirical about that). There were also novelists I couldn’t imagine not including—Miéville, Makine, and in the five following Mitchell, Robinson and Ishiguro…. The next five would have included Atwood (Oryx and Crake) and Murakami (Kafka on the Shore).
The Top Ten
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.
Reading is a lot about experience, and my abiding memory of reading this book is of demolishing it one Christmas. I think I read a good 80% of it between Christmas Eve and late night on Boxing Day, as I refused to go to sleep before finishing it. I particularly remember sitting in the kitchen on Christmas Day with my feet up on the Aga reading and occasionally checking on the state of the duck and roast potatoes. The novel is magical in all the possible ways: its world and its history are intricate and rich and weirdly utterly believable, rooted deeply in a particularly English folklore and place, its atmosphere is heady and eerie, and its story utterly compelling. When you read it, you move in. And while it’s hard to think of anything quite like it, it also seems hard to imagine fantasy without it.
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders.
Perhaps if there’s a theme to my choices, its that a number of them embrace the idea of ‘other spaces’ in the world that are real and yet unseen and use them, or slightly alternate versions of the world (Kavalier, Underground Railroad) to explore life and humanity. Lincoln in the Bardo is a lot about death and grief, life and love in the most beautiful way. It was so utterly itself that it confidently carried me through as I got accustomed to its form and style, and its ending continues to completely poleaxe me. I enjoy Saunders’ short stories and his writing about writing (A Swim in the Pond in the Rain), but oh, I want him to write another big novel.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon.
I remembering hearing about this for a while before I read it. If I recall correctly, it came up as a Seth Cohen reference in The OC, and from there I was sort of fascinated with the idea, but I didn’t really grow up with comic books, so I wasn’t sure how I would get along, and it was probably the idea of the golem that really intrigued me. Of all of Chabon’s novels, this is the one that holds up best for me, in terms of having something deep and true to say about family, relationships, history, trauma, and the way that creativity and storytelling can help heal wounds and build bonds—and it proves his point about the depth and value of ‘pop’ culture as literary culture. Chabon’s writing is always warm and easy to read, but I don’t think it always reaches or sustains the kind of profundity he seeks—but in this it does.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien.
This was a book club favourite that pays reading and re-reading. Formally it is doing something clever with forms of storytelling and the form of the Goldberg Variations that I don’t really understand and yet am utterly fascinated by, and which works even if you don’t ‘get’ it or it doesn’t explain itself in that way. It tells the story of a musical family in the cultural revolution, and is thoroughly compelling in its insistence on the power of music and the horror of trying to approve or disapprove of particular pieces on political-cultural grounds, and in its insistence on the possibility of relationships and bonds surviving enforced separation, division and apparent hopelessness.
In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman
This is Rahman’s only book, but also, what a book. Fundamentally it is about the partiality of human knowledge and access to truth, wrapped up in a story about two immigrants trying to fit in to British life and culture, in the strange, elite worlds of Oxford, finance, and international affairs that are both meritocratic and not. It is one of the best ‘unreliable narrator’ novels I can think of, in a way that is particularly affecting as a woman given the relationships depicted in the novel. It’s also the second novel on this list best read while listening to Bach (along with Do Not Say We Have Nothing).
Wizard of the Crow, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
I came to this from Ngũgĩ’s little book Decolonising the Mind, which I was read as I started to get more deeply engaged with postcolonial theory and method. I’d been reading more and more fiction by African authors, but some how not the established ‘classics’ (I only read Things Fall Apart this year, finally, and still have a stash of Wole Soyinka waiting to be read, for example). This I read while I was locked away during the Great British Pingdemic of Summer 2021, which gave me a perfect time to spend with it without having an excuse to veer off. It is, famously, Ngũgĩ’s own translation of his Kikuyu novel, which is determined to be of and in its own culture and traditions. It is sprawling, but not ever rambling; fiercely, darkly funny, and committed to articulating the power of religion, faith and spirituality, and the violence of power, and more than somewhat blistering on the way that western politics and nations engage with African nations and leaders in the post-colonial international world.
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
Aka the one where Colson Whitehead went mainstream (and some of us me went out and bought up his back catalogue). The Underground Railroad is inventive and powerful and somehow optimistic despite being deeply realistic about the terrible things that have been and continue to be done and proposed. I really love the way the novel manages to explore different situations and horrors in each chapter without it feeling forced or fake, a telling of something true while not being ‘historically accurate’. The writing is great—though a bit of me thinks that actually, if you want to really get the quality of Whitehead’s writing, you have to go to Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, which are socially and historically alert and also deeply deeply funny.
The City and the City, by China Miéville
Miéville was one of the novelists I couldn’t imagine not being on this list, and for a while Embassytown was the entry of choice, as the novel of his I’ve probably thought about most in the past few years (honourable mention to The Scar, though). But then, there next to it on the shelf was The City and the City, which I’ve read at least three times, and which each time has made me go ‘oOoOo’ at the way it understands history, identity, and the political and somehow brings them to life in a detective story set in a weird double-city. I can never remember the precise details of the twist and so it always surprises me while actually, given the world, never really surprising me. The weirdness of the setting (two cities layered on top of each other, which have to be perceived and unperceived) is somehow simultaneously imaginable and not, and the plot is a cracker.
A Life’s Music, by Andrei Makine.
Makine must be one of my most-read novelists of the first decade of the century, and this little novella is probably one of my most gifted books. Makine is a Russian novellist who decamped to France and writes in French (and who apparently lived in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise for a while—I once read an interview with him and concluded I want to read him, never meet him). This is a story about connection, love and loss, displacement, memory and history, all opened up through a piano in a railway station. I’m not sure there are many better than Makine at exploring nostalgia and memory, place and time, and the variety of connections and dislocations that people experience, and this is, I think, his gem.
HHhH, by Laurent Binet.
I don’t always enjoy a historical novel (I find it helps if I don’t know the history) but the special trick of this one is to include a running commentary on the perils of historical fiction and the fraught relationships historians can have with them, and on the perils of writing about World War II and the Holocaust. It is ‘about’ Operation Anthropoid (the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich)—and I would also, side note, fully recommend watching the film Anthropoid alongside reading this—but more about the relationship between research and writing, and what it is to ‘do’ history through fiction. How do you present real people in fiction? Can you shift or change events or facts - and if so how much (what colour was the car, and does it matter? to whom?) What is responsible or not, engaging or not, good history, or good literature, or neither. And it does all that while being fun (and perhaps worrying about if it should be fun).
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And the next five…
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell.
Mitchell is one of my favourite authors, someone who is wildly imaginative and ambitious and yet whose writing promises me I’m absolutely safe with him. His novels don’t always work perfectly (Bone Clocks) or very well for me (Utopia Avenue), but I enjoy his ambitions and flaws far more than I enjoy many other novelists tidy perfections. They make me sing. Jacob de Zoet is perhaps my favourite, making wonderful use of its historical and geographical setting (Nagasaki at the time of the Dutch East India company’s Deijima link) with a story that looks like it’s going to be a straightforward literary novel that is (inevitably for Mitchell) not. His description of the gulls wheeling through the Nagasaki sky near the end of the book is sublime. It’s the book that made me visit Nagasaki.
Austerlitz, by WG Sebald
I still don’t quite know how I managed to read and grasp this novel in short chunks during breaks of a summer job, and yet, it completely held me. Sebald’s train-of-thought writing is peculiarly distinctive, and in this exploration of a personal history of a child of the kindertransport really makes good use of it.
The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Never Let Me Go was on the NYT list and seems to be on lots of people’s lists, and yes, it is very very good. But it is this Ishiguro, with its folklore and forgetfulness, that has really stayed with me. It also feels like the one where he feels most free to let go of being a ‘proper literary novelist’ and enjoy writing about dragons.
Home, by Marilynne Robinson.
I know Gilead is the standard Robinson choice on booklists, but I have to say that Home, with its focus on Glory and her brother Jack is my personal favourite of Robinson’s series of books set in this world.
The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich.
Erdrich is another author I feel like I’ve come to late, with a back catalogue for me to steadily work through. This one, a story about ghosts, complicated relationships and the possibility of reconciliation (and a bookshop) is one of those books where you get to the end and you just don’t want to read anything else for a while.
And the rest of the top twenty… Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood), Station Eleven (Emily St John Mandel), Shotgun Lovesongs (Nickolas Butler), Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami), Story of your Life, and Others (Ted Chiang)