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.
The intellectual history of modernity is in one sense the story of specialization. In the 16th Century, Descartes imagines writing a magnum opus called The World; by the 21st, it takes 500 pages just to cover Salt. Nor has the novel, that mirror dragged down the road of the culture, been immune to the proliferation of specialties and subspecialties. James Wood may posit two novelistic bloodlines, extending from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, and Zadie Smith may see two paths going forward, but to stand before the Barnes & Noble fiction tables circa 2009 is to be asked to choose among thrillers and literary fiction, psychological novels and novels of ideas, novels driven by plot and novels driven by language, novels hailed for their imagination and those hailed for their accuracy.
Of course this should be higher up the list, but it’s good to find it listed in any case. I chose a passage from Mortals to be read at my wedding; yes perverse and yes pretentious, maybe, but where else do you turn for love in this language?
Rush’s talent is obscene, which means, I suppose, that he’s the right man for an obscene job. Christ, what a book.
Thank you, Garth. This is a wonderful book.
Congratulations to this blog for promoting Norman Rush’s work — he is the most neglected major writer in America. Like Garth Hallberg, I definitely hear echoes of Bellow; but Rush is unclassifiable, as you also suggest, and I think his next book — his first to be set in America — will be unlike anything he has written before.
James Wood
For those playing along at home, Rush’s next has been in the works since 2003. Set in the Catskills on the eve of the Iraq War, it’s got the working title Subtle Bodies, and examines friendship, as Mortals looked at marriage, and Mating examined…well, mating.
Three years ago, I was lucky to attend a reading at the 92nd Street Y, featuring Martin Amis and–hooray!–Norman Rush. Rush read from “Subtle Bodies,” and, while I have loved every one of his sentences I have read, and while, like Mr. Wood, I think his work is unjustly neglected, there was indeed something different about this new work–something fresher, more poignant, more human (if that is in fact possible, given the great humanity of Rush’s previous novels). While other so-called “major” writers have written themselves into self-aggrandized corners (and I think we all know who I’m talking about here), Rush has held back. I like to think of him as a kind of American JM Coetzee, if such a thing is possible: a public intellectual who has, in only the most interesting ways, rebuffed the role of the public intellectual; a novelist who draws emotional power from restraint, and who is capable of locating the being in the nothingness that surrounds us.
You all have to be kidding or retarded regarding Mr. Rush. He is a dreadful
writer. As the NY Times critic said about , “Mortals”:
”Mortals” is a long, tedious and thoroughly haphazard production — a kitchen sink of a book that possesses none of the pointillist detail of ”Whites,” the author’s haunting debut collection of stories (1986), and all the flaws of his 1991 novel, ”Mating” — and more. Though ”Mortals” gradually gathers speed and focus near its conclusion, only the most persevering of readers are likely to slog through the book’s 700-odd pages to get there.
Despite (or perhaps because of) all this bad Lawrentian writing, their marriage never seems like a real relationship. It’s hard to believe that after 17 years of marriage, Iris and Ray discuss their feelings about religion for the first time — ”so you were a believer for how long?” — or that they say things like ”I just wanted to touch voices” when she calls him at the office to say hello.
Despite (or perhaps because of) all this bad Lawrentian writing, their marriage never seems like a real relationship. It’s hard to believe that after 17 years of marriage, Iris and Ray discuss their feelings about religion for the first time — ”so you were a believer for how long?” — or that they say things like ”I just wanted to touch voices” when she calls him at the office to say hello.
I read Mating for the first time a few weeks ago. It had been on my TBR list for awhile and life had simply gotten in the way. I was blown away and purchased Morals right away. NOw I am about 100 pages into Morals and loving it – expansive- I am expanding into its world – and with pleasure. Still not sure why this writer is under the radar – so smart, so funny, I am enjoying it so much and dreading getting to the end.
And Rick, remember who said it was a “long, tedious and thoroughly haphazard production”. If Michiko Kakutani likes a book I know to run the other way!
Does anyone care, can anyone care, what Kakutani says in any of her recent reivews? If any other reviewer’s works were so inconsistent and lacking in understanding of the books under review then they would have been fired long ago. She works hard at getting noticed but deserves to be ignored.