some favourite novels of the last decade...
By way of procrastination, and because I discovered that I had ten years worth of lists of books that I’ve read during that year, I thought I’d attempt to make a list of the top ten novels I read in the last decade.
Disclaimers:
this is a list of novels - I saved myself time and stress by removing non-fiction or poetry or essays from the equation
not all of these (as will become obvious) were published in the last decade
I picked only from those novels I read for the first time in this period (sorry, War and Peace, you’re amazing and going to my desert island, but you were a re-read), to make life easier.
this is alphabetical, also for ease
there are runners up, and I’m not even a little bit sorry.
So…
My ten favourite novels that I’ve read in the past ten years
HHhH - Laurent Binet. A historical novel that is also about about the historian writing this historical novel and how hard he’s finding it. It’s an absolute treat, and so smart about the writing of history and fiction and how they’re not opposites.
Shotgun Lovesongs - Nickolas Butler. This book makes my heart feel at home, and I’ve read it about four times since it was published, and that’s all we need to say about that.
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach. While reading this book I got on the wrong train and instead of ending up at work I found myself in Esher, and then had to turn around to go back but accidentally got on the fast train and ended up in Waterloo. At which point I gave up and worked from the Southbank for the day, because I had no meetings, but I’d read a good 150 pages of the book. It’s about baseball and Moby Dick, and some pretty broken but quite lovely people.
Tigerman - Nick Harkaway. In part this is on the list because of the importance of Harkaway’s entire oeuvre in my life in the last decade — he’s become one of my favourite novelists, always ambitious, entertaining and thought-provoking — and in part because it punched me hard in the solar plexus as I finished reading it in the wee small hours, and I still object to having to deal with all those feelings.
Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel. The pandemic novel before there was a pandemic, beautifully exploring how people react to the end of their worlds. Also, hell is flutes.
In the Light of What We Know - Zia Haider Rahman. My gosh I loved this book, and the way it explores perspective and knowledge (and our failures of both). I’m not going to try and write anything about it other than what I wrote before, but it is so so good (and my copy has so many notes scribbled on it)
Do Not Say We Have Nothing - Madeleine Thien. A family saga, the power of music and story, and the Cultural Revolution. This is a novel that is doing some very interesting things with form and structure that I don’t fully understand (it relates to the Goldberg Variations, somehow...) but it works fully as a story even though I don’t understand that .
East of Eden - John Steinbeck. I made a deal with a friend to read this one January, having not read any Steinbeck before, and I was so surprised by how much I loved it and what he’s doing with ideas of good and evil. Also, Cal Trask broke my heart.
Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders. This book is gloriously full of love and death - and its ending took my breath away.
The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead. How Whitehead manages to tell a story and bring to life a character, while also presenting and dealing with different expressions of systematic racism in the different states that character and story travel through I do not know, but it’s incredibly powerful and keeps you reading even when the discomfort you experience wishes that you wouldn’t.
Runners Up
The Interestings - Meg Wolitzer
Human Acts - Han Kang
The Last Samurai - Helen de Witt
Augustus - John Williams
Home - Marilynne Robinson
The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng
The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
Idoru - William Gibson
Embassytown - China Mieville