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.
There are, in Cormac McCarthy’s impossibly affecting novels, details that simultaneously open up his dismal universe and draw in the reader. In Blood Meridian, it’s the Apache wearing the wedding dress. In All the Pretty Horses, it’s the bullet hole in the wallet. In No Country for Old Men, the glass of milk, still sweating on the coffee table. In The Road, it’s the can of Coke, pulled from the guts of the vending machine. No, it’s that the soda has somehow stayed carbonated after the cataclysm. No, it’s that the father lets his son drink the whole thing. Surely this is one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments not just in fiction from this millennium, but in all of literature.
What a beautiful review! This book has received accolades everywhere, but this is up there with the most poetic I’ve read.
I had a rant about McCarthy’s violent sentimentality half-prepared, except you people put Sebald in your top ten, so you’re off the hook.
This review makes me want to go purchase the book at this very moment and do nothing else but read this book till I’ve absorbed it completely.
Do it Derrick, you’ll have it read in a few hours and won’t regret it.
Bradluen, I’d like to hear your rant about McCarthy’s violent sentimentality, out of interest.
Bradluen, I’m not sure what you mean by “violent sentimentality,” but you’ve given me the courage to say, very quietly, that i find the rapture over The Road sort of puzzling. I enjoyed the book, but I enjoyed it because it was willy-inducing and…gruesome, I guess. And it was sort of default-enjoyable because it was post-apocalyptic. Derivative is a strong word, but it seems to me that people act like no one ever wrote a story along these lines.
My two cents.
I was very disappointed by this book.
Maybe its interest wanes if someone has read a lot of science fiction.
The book is quite touching but I found it also not very imaginative and very repetitive and Providence’s recurrent role in the story is at best really upsetting. (I’m starving…oh some apples. I’m cold.. oh a blanket. A flaregun… oh some bad guys). The plot completely bored me.
The writing is perfect though.
I much much much preferred ‘All the pretty horses’.
Please, please, please. What father wouldn’t let his son drink all the coke (even the LAST one) any where, any time, any place? What on earth is so special about that?
The “colorless horizon” burns with…colorless horizon. This book is a travesty of the story telling art. It shows what a Big Name author can get away with.
Wow, why isn’t 1984 on this list, Big Brother? Censorship is quite passe on the internet, or so I thought, but when you critcisize the critic they get their feelings hurt. Here, again, is the worst line of criticism I’ve ever read:
“In The Road, it’s the can of Coke, pulled from the guts of the vending machine. No, it’s that the soda has somehow stayed carbonated after the cataclysm. No, it’s that the father lets his son drink the whole thing. Surely this is one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments not just in fiction from this millennium, but in all of literature.”
The “guts of a vending machine?” A father letting “his son drink the whole” coke is “surely one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments…in all of literature?” This is insane and asnine.
Complete horror with the darkest world I have ever seen. The father/son relationship a most profound story to such a backdrop. Excellent read.
this book bored me all the way till the end. i can’t see why it got all the good reviews. it is writing well but so are hundreds of other books that don’t get anyware near these lists.
this book only got ware it got because it made the opra book club.i don’t think we would have even noticed it if it didn’t
I only made it about a third of the way through this book. I found the son to be a flimsily written foil for an author who wanted someone to speak words of innocence for the father to brood over. In a novel that is entirely about two people in a dying world, I really need both characters to be real. This novel failed that. There must be something about the father’s brooding that struck a chord with people, but it didn’t work for me.
“In No Country for Old Men, the glass of milk, still sweating on the coffee table.”
This isn’t in the book, only in the movie.