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.
I read Cloud Atlas with two contradictory impulses: first to let loose a yodel, dance a fandango, wrestle an alligator, seize strangers by the hair and hold them firmly until they, too, read this shockingly beautiful Matryoshka doll of a book; second, to pout alone in the darkness under my desk. My first reaction was as a dazzled reader who saw each movement of the book as David Mitchell one-upping himself with his genre-bending (historical, mystery, science fiction), his sublime prose, his broad and breathtaking ideas. The other was as a writer who was intimidated almost to petrification by the mere idea that such a book exists and was written by someone of my generation. It is hard not to make sweeping pronouncements after having lived this book, and, still under its spell three years after I read it, I would say: yes, yes, yes, this is the way novels should be written, with such electric ambition, with such exhilarating sweep.
Personally I prefer the GHOSTWRITTEN…
Damn straight, Cloud Atlas.
Cloud Atlas is so good. I’m surprised it’s not at #1.
Sorry, it’s a fine novel…but number 2 best novel published since 2000? This ranking of the top books of the new millenium is just turning out to be bizarre.
I prefer Ghostwritten as well. I stopped dead at the sci-fic section of Cloud Atlas, which I thought too artificial — but maybe I’ll give it another shot someday.
Yeah, I thought this was going to be number one. Or maybe I just knew that it was my personal number one and therefore hoped? Glad to see it in in the top five, though.
Dunno, I think there’s something too self-conscious about Cloud Atlas’s virtuosity – too ingratiating. Some of the sections work well – didn’t like the science fiction bits because I think they’re overly derivative, especially the central section which (as the author freely admits) owes a great deal to Riddley Walker without repaying the debt by doing anything that Russell Hoban didn’t.
He is very good, no doubt, and I hoover all his books up as soon as they’re published… but I (unfashionably) prefer Number 9 Dream…
Even allowing for the inherent (and I assume intended) humour of announcing the “best books of the millennium” in the middle of 2009, Cloud Atlas is a strange choice. I guarantee that half the people who voted for it will be embarrassed about it in a few years’ time. If indeed they remember the book at all. It is often quite entertaining, but it is ambitious in only the narrowest and most modish sense, in that Mitchell writes in a number of different styles. This is the literary equivalent of a fashion designer of the 80’s being praised for producing the largest shoulder pads.
In any other terms you might choose it is, frankly, not that great. And certainly not original. There isn’t a single one of the six stories in the book that can’t be found elsewhere (and better). The detective thriller is just plain bad. And the moral message that wraps the whole thing up manages to be both condescending and childish. To the expression of wonder that this book was written by someone of our generation, I can only reply, “what other generation would bother?”
Really, Cloud Atlas’s place on this list epitomises the problem with the whole enterprise: how many of these books will last even into the next decade, never mind the next 991 years? How about you just retitle this feature “The Last 15 Books We Remember Reading Of The Millennium (So Far)”?
@ Tom B — I actually liked the sci fi parts of CLOUD the best — which surprised me. Don’t remember which off the top of my head, maybe e.g. the music one, but some of the others I found nearly unreadable.
GHOSTWRITTEN totally contrived, but I totally bought the contrivance. And loved the idea of the little communicable narrative spark/genie that was passed on from character to character.
I must say, I loved Cloud Atlas, and am thrilled to see it on here. While it’s true that any one of the stories that make it up has been outdone within its genre, it has to be read in the context of the greater whole. Each story shows up in some form in the next, which in some way calls into question the veracity of the one outside it. But then the stories also depend on what came before for their depth of meaning and emotional core, and outlast that which comes after them. It’s not only a structural trick, upending the directionality of narrative, it’s an epistemological one as well. And for the author to pull it off without it seeming irrelevant or external to the greater narrative set this book apart from other works with a similar ambition.
I agree, best book I’ve ever read in my life, next to 100 years of solitude . I listened to the audio book too, and it was so good, perfect narration!