Flying_Monkey
Recyclist
- Location
- Odawa
I tried this on another apparently more intellecshul forum, but not many people were interested. Maybe it will go down like a lead ballon here too, but here goes...
What are your favourite (say, 10) books of the decade and why? It would be good is this can be an entirely positive thread and people needn't be afraid of being belittled for their choices (Dan Brown excepted of course... only joking). Mine are as follows:
Murakami Haruki (2000/2002) Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru / After the Quake. A great collection of short-stories inspired by the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, which I think was better than anything else he did this decade.
Kim Stanley Robinson (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt. One reviewer called it "a storehouse of thought... a dense, informed, impassioned and huge novel" - and indeed it is. No-one (and I mean no-one) has written a better novel on the current global cultural conflict.
Anna Funder (2003) Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall. No other popular non-fiction work impressed me as much.
Alan Garner (2004) Thursbitch. Another stunning, immersive but utterly otherwordly reflection on history, landscape and people. (This was my only choice that coincides with The Times' recent Top 100 Books of the Decade...)
Walter Mosley (2004) The Man in My Basement. I could have chosen many of Mosley's crime, SF or mainstream novels, but this one, in which a black man who has inherited a house is approached by an older white man who wants to be voluntarily imprisoned in his basement, is a disturbing take on power and race.
Joseph Boyden (2005) Three Day Road. A powerful novel of the First World War and the native experience in Canda.
George Mackay Brown (2005) Collected Poems. Simply the most grounded poet that the British Isles produced in the Twentieth Century. He died 9 years before, but his Collected Poems was a reminder of how much we lost.
Ian McDonald (2007) Brasyl. Another who doesn't get science-fiction should read this and marvel not at the plotlines involving quantum reality, but at the writing and construction.
Peter Matthiessen (2008) Shadow Country. The bastard wrote three of the best novels ever with his Watson Trilogy and then decided to rewrite them entirely as one novel. And it's even better. The greatest living US writer in my opinion, and I won't even listen to any case against!
Geoff Ryman (2008) The King's Last Song. Has something in common with Robinson's novel in that it is about a recreation and reworking of a past that never happened - a rich, beautiful and loving alterntive history of Cambodia. Ryman is an underrated British novelist - I could have also picked his experimental online novel of impending disaster, 253, or his wonderful and humane near-future work, Air.
What are your favourite (say, 10) books of the decade and why? It would be good is this can be an entirely positive thread and people needn't be afraid of being belittled for their choices (Dan Brown excepted of course... only joking). Mine are as follows:
Murakami Haruki (2000/2002) Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru / After the Quake. A great collection of short-stories inspired by the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, which I think was better than anything else he did this decade.
Kim Stanley Robinson (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt. One reviewer called it "a storehouse of thought... a dense, informed, impassioned and huge novel" - and indeed it is. No-one (and I mean no-one) has written a better novel on the current global cultural conflict.
Anna Funder (2003) Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall. No other popular non-fiction work impressed me as much.
Alan Garner (2004) Thursbitch. Another stunning, immersive but utterly otherwordly reflection on history, landscape and people. (This was my only choice that coincides with The Times' recent Top 100 Books of the Decade...)
Walter Mosley (2004) The Man in My Basement. I could have chosen many of Mosley's crime, SF or mainstream novels, but this one, in which a black man who has inherited a house is approached by an older white man who wants to be voluntarily imprisoned in his basement, is a disturbing take on power and race.
Joseph Boyden (2005) Three Day Road. A powerful novel of the First World War and the native experience in Canda.
George Mackay Brown (2005) Collected Poems. Simply the most grounded poet that the British Isles produced in the Twentieth Century. He died 9 years before, but his Collected Poems was a reminder of how much we lost.
Ian McDonald (2007) Brasyl. Another who doesn't get science-fiction should read this and marvel not at the plotlines involving quantum reality, but at the writing and construction.
Peter Matthiessen (2008) Shadow Country. The bastard wrote three of the best novels ever with his Watson Trilogy and then decided to rewrite them entirely as one novel. And it's even better. The greatest living US writer in my opinion, and I won't even listen to any case against!
Geoff Ryman (2008) The King's Last Song. Has something in common with Robinson's novel in that it is about a recreation and reworking of a past that never happened - a rich, beautiful and loving alterntive history of Cambodia. Ryman is an underrated British novelist - I could have also picked his experimental online novel of impending disaster, 253, or his wonderful and humane near-future work, Air.
