what are your favourite novels post-2000?

Provoked suddenly by finishing Zadie Smith's On Beauty and wondering if it should be on such a list - of ten, say? I wondered what else would be on my list and realized it would be very mainstream indeed.

(let's say post-2000 includes 2000, here)

wow, this board can't handle the humble apostrophe; or I can't (apos).

2666.

Making a list of the best 10 novels of the 2000's is proving more difficult than I first thought. I can't seem to get to 10. But I like this sort of thing, so I'll obsess about it some more.

i'm going to be interested in what ppl put here bcz i dont read enough current fiction. agree w/ jim that 2666 is definitely on the list tho

yes, it's harder than it should be - my list will doutbless be impoverished, in a sense, in its obviousness, though I love and admire some of these recent books.

THE CORRECTIONS? I think so.

My list would look something like this:

1. Nowhere Man, Hemon
2. White Teeth, Smith
3. Cloud Atlas, Mitchell
4. The Intuitionist, Whitehead
5. Shadow Country, Matthiessen
6. The Hakawati, Alameddine
7. Bee Season, Goldberg
8. The Human Stain, Roth
9. Kafka On the Shore, Murakami
10. The Devil and Miss Prym, Coelho

All of these novels have flaws, but I'm happy to have read them.

this is sort of hard for me because my taste has changed so much in the last 9 years--stuff i loved when i was a freshman in high school is totally different from stuff i loved when i was a freshman in college is totally different from stuff now

Off the top of my head, I'd include these:

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira
2666, Roberto Bolano
The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas

off the top of my head, not counting short story collections

1. bolano, 2666
2. jonathan lethem, fortress of solitude
3. david mitchell, black swan green (cloud atlas is still on my shelf waiting to be read)
4. arthur phillips (i can't single out one of his novels as being really outstanding, but i like his work as a whole)
5. richard price, lush life
6. haruki murakami, kafka on the shore
7. colson whitehead, sag harbor (because i just read it, and because the intuitionist is '99)
8. junot diaz, the brief wondrous life of oscar wao
9. samuel delany, dark reflections
10. orhan pamuk, my name is red

Aira has a new book coming out, or is out already, which is very good. Ghosts.

Shit, this is hard. Must think.

its cool to see ppl repping david mitchell i had to interview him once around when cloud atlas come out and he was a total bro despite me writing a kind of meh review of the book. not that ive met or interviewed that many writers but he was the coolest of those that ive met.

these kinds of lists are pretty flawed i guess + im for sure forgetting really awesome stuff + savage detectives was 98 but i read it in 07 + runaway has some of the best writing post-2000 but isnt a novel + i have pretty terrible taste, obv

black flies: burke
call be your name: aciman
cold six thousand: elroy
line of beauty: hollinghurst
lightning on the sun: bingham
memories of ice: erikson
netherland: o'neill
russian debutante's handbook: shteyngart
storm of swords: martin
veronica: gaitskill

oh 02 should be call me by your name

With all the usual caveats, my fairly mainstream and conventional list:

The Human Stain - Philip Roth
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
The Dream Life of Sukhanov - Olga Grushin
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

danielewski - house of leaves
houellebecq - elementary particles & platform
jon franzen - the corrections
chris adrien - the children's hospital
sam lipsyte - homeland
jack pendarvis - awesome

did you read adrian's collection of stories he released last year? i wasnt that into children's hospital but i thought the short stories were wonderful and managed all the best bits of his work w/o becoming ridiculous they way the novel could

2666

I hope so! I'm about to start reading it. Not sure what my list would look like, but Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America would be on it.

The Corrections
Twelve
Erasure: (a novel)
Middlesex

?

Hm, I don't really have time to read much contemporary literature these days. I absolutely adore Ben Marcus' Notable American Women, though (released in 2002).

Also, I haven't read it yet but I must give more promotion to my friend Chris Killen's new novel The Bird Room, which I'm sure will be top 10 of the decade, yeah!

xp haven't gotten to adrien's collection. i know i had read one of his that was sort of coming-of-age & 9/11 themed that i liked a lot that i would guess was in there

I need to re-read it, but I really really loved Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper.

roughly in this order

Toni Morrison: A Mercy
Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
Toni Morrison: Love
McCarthy: The Road
Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Richard Powers: The Echo Maker
Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty.
Nicholson Baker: A Box of Matches

i can't think of any others i love but if i could go back to 1999 i would include Morrison's Paradise and Coetzee's Disgrace. fwiw i loathed the 150 or so pages i read of 2666.

Maybe i would put The Corrections on my list too. it's truly great until the last section.

I haven't read most of the novels mentioned, but I'm touched by how a few names that I have keep coming up - The Line of Beauty, Black Swan Green, even On Beauty. My own limited list:

Franzen: The Corrections (at least this is respectable)
Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty (a masterpiece, if cold in a way)
Smith: On Beauty (her masterpiece so far, and not cold at all)
Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude (I am deeply fond of it)
Peace: GB84 (harrowing, desperate, relentless, like life was)
Lennon: Pieces For The Left Hand (readable)
Doyle: Oh Play That Thing! (audacious)
Sansom: Ring Road (likeable)
Bracewell: Perfect Tense (probably his best, good on his great theme of cultural change)
Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (oddly I don't feel so fond in retrospect, but it is stunning)
McEwan: Saturday (perverse - so many despise it, and it has flaws - but I think it has real intelligence too, about a recognizable world)

I don't read too many contemporary novels, so it's a short list:
Tom McCarthy: Remainder
Mitchell: Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green
Pynchon: Against the Day
Houllebecq: Atomised (is this a cheat? 1998 in France apparently)

Interesting that you call The Corrections "respectable", Pinefox. I swithered about including it but left it out on the basis that "favourite" implied "what did you like", not "what did you think was good". I found it very impressive, faults notwithstanding, but only patchily enjoyable. Asked to pick a novel from this period that would be likely to be taught in universities in 20 years time, it would have been at or near the top of my list, along with Gilead; both had an underlying earnestness, even puritanism, that prevented me from enjoying them wholeheartedly. Re-reading might change that.

I preferred Black Swan Green to Cloud Atlas for similar reasons: CA is probably more remarkable but BSG was a much more enjoyable read for me.

x post

yes I did mean 'what did you like', though it could, possibly, be the same thing (but it might not - I know my list is packed with special pleading and old favourites).

I don't think I draw a line between 'impressive' and 'enjoyable', etc. + (a digression?) I can never really understand when people say things like 'I just read it for the story, not critically' - I think of all reading of literature as thoughtful and critical, in some broad sense (doesn't mean you then have to write a book about it).

I thought BSG sounded like it ought to be the best book ever, but it really really disappointed me. Some of it was actively bad. It's a bit like Joyce's Portrait in that one way - it seemed like it ought to be amazing, but didn't do much for me (at 18), and in a way has never really won me over. (another digression: books that don't live up to what they ought to be.)

(Corrections = respectable for me cos I don't think other people will mock me for putting it on a list, as they might re. Bracewell for instance)

of course The Corrections should be on my list. i've no idea why i left it off. even the relative fainlure of the last section can't affect how great the writing and characterisation are.

pinefox, if you loved Fortress of Solitude (which i loved and loathed in equal measure) you need to read "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" ASAP. now that book is audacious. i haven't even finished it yet but it's quite clear that it's one of the best novels of recent years and unless Diaz falls at the last hurdle i don't think i'll be changing my opinion of it.

i wasnt that impressed with oscar wao but it was ambitious in a really good way. so different than something like gilead which is the only book listed so far that i dislike outright altho i never finished the lethem.

oh the corrections. i reread it a few months ago and liked it a lot it was better than remembered more generous and less didactic and self-satisfied. i still think theres a smallness of spirit esp in the denise sections that keeps it from being a great or likeable book too much dont u see dont u see hysterical moralism but its undeniably important

also jed if you havent already read it based on that list i think you might really like call me by your name its a beautiful book imo

Nicholson Baker: A Box of Matches

OTM. I liked Checkpoint a lot too.

My complete list contains about ~20 novels published since 2000, which surprised me since I feel like I barely ever read anything contemporary. Favourites:

Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee
Breath, Tim Winton
Julius Winsome, Gerard Donovan
Europe Central, William Vollmann
Ticknor, Sheila Heti

Re: The Corrections, I liked it a lot.

Lamp, i'll definitely check that out thanks.

the section of the corrections with Gary and the spycam and the booze and the hedge trimmers and the cut hand with the plastic bread bag over it is kind of miraculous.

I would probably nominate "The Feast of the Goat" by Vargas Llosa. But that's quite possibly just because I am a huge Vargas Llosa stan and I think that's his best of the three he's published this decade. Really not sure what critical consensus of his later work is.

McEwan: Saturday (perverse - so many despise it, and it has flaws - but I think it has real intelligence too, about a recognizable world)

does anyone really despise this? its too slight and misguided to despise i think ~~~

where did you find real intelligence pinefox? not tryna bait you atonement was my favorite new book in high school and i still admire mcewan but i thought this book was stupid about ppl and about how they feel (rather than think) their way into and out of problems. also theres no denying the "reflections of a great man on the rabbelous proletariat on the eve a squash match" aspect. its kinda gross no?

didnt love the book when it came out at the big new yorker profile on mcewan last month made me dislike it even more

cmon post a list max

lol i tried and i came up with

2666
the emigrants
the intuitionist

and it turns out that two of those are not even from the 2000s... i guess i dont read enuf contemporary fiction. i didnt know my name is red is post2000, i guess i would include that. um... the known world?

i need 2 go back and look at my bookshelf in NJ

i liked motherless brooklyn more than fortress of solitude so maybe that

o i really loved middlesex when i read it

but like i was saying above that was in 2003 and im very different now than i was, so i dont know if id still love it as much?

great thread thanks people

Like Emily I have only read Notable American Women and nothing else! Maybe Ben Marcus puts people off current fiction or some such...I could read some Bolano, but not before I'm done with my other Latin Americans (Carpentier, Donoso or Cortazar).

motherless brooklyn is '99, max. lol u love the '90s.

this is a good thread for me. i hardly ever read anything new(ish). sebald and alice munro were probably my big discoveries of the last ten years. so, everything by them that fits this time-frame.

i mean, i DO read some new(ish) stuff, but i can't think of anything "great" that i read. mostly just some stuff that i thought was "good" to "pretty good".

i am really fond of reading all about the new hot big books in reviews and essays and articles, but i never actually read them. i know a LOT about franzen and i've never read a word of his fiction.

i figure if something is really good, it'll keep. until i get to it.

Was going to add DFW's Oblivion before checking the thread's title. Have been shocked at how few post 2000 novels I've read. Couldn't finish Line of Beauty (so, so dull). Appreciated The Corrections for its humour and characterisation but then I thought it let itself down (the cruise ship ectsasy stuff). Couldn't finish My Name is Red (I don't know if dull is right, but certainly close). So all I'm doing is compiling a list for a mirror thread: "dullest novels since 2000". I've been saving up Austerlitz so maybe it's waited long enough. Same with Europe Central. Oh, wait, I've just checked my copy of The Royal Family and YES it makes it for 2000.

I think Motherless Brooklyn might well be better than TFoS but like Jordan said, it'd 1999, so not on my list. It's actually one of the most impressive books by anyone anywhere anytime I've ever read.

Lamp, your contempt for Saturday kind of makes the point about whether people despise it. It's too late here now to take it up again, but I don't really agree with you about this book, though as I said and have always said, it's also flawed, maybe sometimes embarrassingly so.

Glad the thread has been a handy provocation to thought for one or two people.

lots of ppl think dara is a psuedonym, possibly of vollmann but i dont really see it

which dara is the best to read first?

check out the lost scrapbook first id say

lots of names that come to mind have been mentioned already, but i'll mention 'bel canto'. looked forward to returning to it each day while i was reading it and i remember being quite taken with the beauty of some of the sentences and aptness of certain metaphors.

Hey, yeah, 'Bel Canto' was really good.

thirded

Never read The Autograph Man, but it sounded abysmal in the LRB, which I don't consider 'british newspaper-level criticism'.

Avoided 'On Beauty' because 'The Autograph Man' was unfinishably bad, plus I already love 'Howard's End' and couldn't see the point of a retread. Am now reconsidering in light of above comments.

I understand your doubts, James, but can at least assure you that it's radically, radically different from White Teeth; wouldn't be surprised if it's radically different from Autograph Man also. I kind of love Howards End myself, but don't think this book would ruin that one for anyone. It's just full of fine writing and insight in its own right.

I have literally stopped reading books since graduation. It's awful. :(

you graduated? Congratulations!

There's no doubt OB is also radically different from AM. I found AM enjoyable enough as pure entertainment, but it was a second division attempt at a kind of book Smith isn't really equipped to write. OB is hugely better, although not without its weaknesses (noteably a rather flabby sense of structure). I think Pinefox is also right, James, in suggesting that your fear of it spoiling Howards End is misplaced. The Howards End echoes are fairly subtle and I suspect many readers would have missed them entirely if Smith hadn't drawn attention to them herself.

am i alone in finding ZS's sentences in OB (only work of hers i've read)...clunky? sometimes almost...unnatural? i don't have the book handy for an example, unfortunately.

Human Stain, The Immigrants, 2666
and probably another unknown novel that wasnt translated (yet?!)

My big fiction discovery this decade = William Gaddis

― Mr. Que, Thursday, March 19, 2009 3:14 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

Me too! I've been trying to do 1 per year because they're so emotionally exhausting. I have Carpenter's Gothic for this year, and then I guess I'll start re-reading.

don't know whether you're alone, but I don't share your response: I think many many sentences in OB are very finely judged. (I don't think many sentences at all in WT are.)

OK, 'On Beauty' is on the list to get!

I don't think OB is a continuous stream of finely judged sentences (although as the pinefox says it has many). But if that kind of aesthetic polish were what mattered "The Master" by Colm Toibin or "The Sea" by John Banville, perhaps "Mothers Milk" By Edward St Aubyn - I could no doubt come up with some others if I worked my memory a bit harder - would be on my list. It's not that I'm indifferent to a consistent beauty of style - Hollinghurst is in my list partly for that reason - but in the final analysis other things matter more.

Well, beauty in prose is an odd thing, hard to define, and maybe hard to separate from a sense of cognition. Hollinghurst's book is beautifully written, but that's not to say it's all purple prose - rather it's full of fine judgements, perceptions rendered with great precision and concision - and that seems to be part of what I find beautiful about it. OB does share that quality of perception and emotional nuance with TLB, though it doesn't really go in for fine descriptive writing so much.

I loathe Banville and hope I never have to read that last book of his.

god, i loathe him too and i've only read two half-books. i found his prose v ugly, actually.

I loathe Banville too (& was v scathing about him here when The Sea won the Booker). I do think he writes beautifully controlled sentences. My point was that that isn't enough - they don't compensate for the pretentious awfulness of his dreary books.

I like his sentences too but the two novels I've read have never thrilled me.

It's great that three of us hate the odious Banville so much !

Banville scandal: he wrote the introduction to one of the Penguin Simenon Maigret reprints a few years ago, but in a more recent introduction to a Simenon book for an American publisher, he talks about how he has never finished a Maigret book.

Ha, I thought I was going to like Christine Falls by one Benjamin Black but just could not get into it at all let alone finish it and then I discovered it was really by Banville so I was off the hook.

Good! More justice meted out to bad Banville!

i dislike banville generally but the book of evidence was a great, i have to admit.

Kepler was great too. Upon that rock I stand.

- Banville Holdouts Resistance Group

reading a lot of short fiction l8ly its weird feelin like theres been a "comeback" in terms of critical appreciation for plainly told "moment of clarity" stories this decade iirc werent we supposed to be reading mostly short fiction abt robot ghosts or cyborg detectives or smthn ca. 2004 w/e happened to that i wonder

mb its just necessary to find a way to present to us so clearly and sharply and unadorned the ways in which we make ourselves unhappy

Off the top of my head, I'd include these:

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira
2666, Roberto Bolano
The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas

― wmlynch, Tuesday, March 17, 2009 5:50 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark

oh whoa, I wonder if this thread is where I first heard about Bartleby & Co.? great book, at any rate. the story about Salinger was pretty great/hilarious. I haven't read the whole thing straight through yet, though; just been dipping into it at random, like I do with Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (which it reminds me a little of, and which I think the narrator actually mentions reading at one point (maybe even talks about doing so by opening it to random passages??))

haven't read Austerlitz or Melancholy yet, but what Sebald I've read is obviously great, and the other Laszlo Krasznahorkai I just started on, War and War, seems really intriguing/promising.

so I am glad

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n27/n137756.jpg
she got pretty bad after this tho

loooool sorry it came out in 1995 decades blow by so fast these days

surprised this hasnt been mentioned

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/Never_Let_Me_Go.jpg

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Any appetite for a proper write-in end-of-decade poll? I may even do the honours myself if people are into it.

i was wondering the same myself actually. although i seem to have only read 3.6 new books this decade

city of tiny lights

but then, i'm me.

you should sign off all your posts that way

looks like it's just me & you, thomp

I don't read contemporary fiction very often because i'm so behind on the old stuff my interest in current stuff is competing with my interest in fucking ages of over stuff.

other even

I vaguely remember liking Walter Mosley's The Man In My Basement

I'd love to see a post-2000 poll. Can't say I've read more than 15 or so new books this decade though.

I'd say yes to a poll!

Right, I'm going to give it a shot. I'll get a nominations thread up later today.

Two thoughts before I start:
- nominations will be curtailed to keep the list manageable; and
- I'm going to make it a 'best books' poll, not just 'best novels' - so you'll be able to vote for Jordan's autobiography after all.

In the meantime, start racking those brains!

One more thing: should I put it here or on ILE? I don't want it to be lost, and I'm never sure how many people ever read I Love Books.

I loved these recently published ones:

Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
William Trevor - Love and Summer

Here's the nominations thread - have at it!

i have just bought my father a copy of this 'city of tiny lights' book.

but then, he's him.