One thing I know after working on The Millions for all these years is that the site has some incredibly knowledgeable and avid readers, the sort of book people I loved working with back in my bookstore days and who are the lifeblood of literary culture. And so, even as we were polling our distinguished panel of writers, editors, and critics, we wondered, what do Millions readers think? We polled The Millions Facebook group to find out.
The list our readers came up with was very interesting, and deviated in noticeable ways from that of the Pros. Before I get into the details. Have a look at the two lists below (Links in our panel list go to the writeups we published throughout the week. Links in our reader list go to Amazon):
|
Panel
|
Readers
|
||
|
1
|
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen |
1
|
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz |
|
2
|
The Known World by Edward P. Jones |
2
|
2666 by Roberto Bolaño |
|
3
|
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell |
3
|
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides |
|
4
|
2666 by Roberto Bolaño |
4
|
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell |
|
5
|
Pastoralia by George Saunders |
5
|
The Road by Cormac McCarthy |
|
6
|
The Road by Cormac McCarthy |
6
|
Atonement by Ian McEwan |
|
7
|
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald |
7
|
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon |
|
8
|
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson |
8
|
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen |
|
9
|
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro |
9
|
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson |
|
10
|
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro |
10
|
White Teeth by Zadie Smith |
|
11
|
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz |
11
|
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami |
|
12
|
Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg |
12
|
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini |
|
13
|
Mortals by Norman Rush |
13
|
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro |
|
14
|
Atonement by Ian McEwan |
14
|
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald |
|
15
|
Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis |
15
|
Empire Falls by Richard Russo |
|
16
|
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides |
16
|
Runaway by Alice Munro |
|
17
|
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem |
17
|
The Master by Colm Tóibín |
|
18
|
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link |
18
|
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
19
|
American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman |
19
|
Unaccustomed Earth ** by Jhumpa Lahiri |
|
20
|
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson |
20
|
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke |
While everyone seems to agree that The Corrections is a great book (it was the panel winner by a landslide), Millions readers put seven books ahead of it, and anointed Oscar Wao the top book of the decade. Our readers have always loved Oscar, so that wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was also interesting to see that the readers had a high opinion of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, rectifying probably the biggest snub on our panel list, (along with White Teeth). But then, the readers snubbed The Known World, so who knows.
With a massive field of potential books, snubs were inevitable. Left off both lists were both of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (his only fiction of the decade), and Denis Johnson’s much praised Tree of Smoke. Voters were also dying to include Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. It was ineligible because it was published in Spanish in 1998, but it makes one wonder, what books will seem like shoo-ins for this type of exercise 10 or 11 years from now but are completely under the radar (or still untranslated) today?
Moving back to the books that did make the list, I also loved that the readers included Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a book that I’ve been hearing about from our readers for years, and Half of a Yellow Sun, a book that’s always had a lot of support in the online literary community. Also intriguing is the appearance of mega-best seller The Kite Runner.
Finally, if we try to look for a consensus among the two lists, several titles appear on both, but the two with the most support across the entire spectrum of respondents are 2666 and Cloud Atlas, which, if you had to pick just two books to define the literary decade now coming to an end, would make for very interesting selections indeed.
We’ll be publishing follow-up pieces in our Millennium series over the coming weeks, so look for those. I also wanted to thank our panel and Millions readers for taking the time to participate in the series. If you enjoyed the series and value the coverage that The Millions provides, please consider supporting the site.
