Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

Best of the Millennium Notable Articles
September 25, 2009 | 15 books mentioned 85 3 min read

Related Books:

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.

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

Essays Notable Articles

Orwell and the Tea Party

Essays Notable Articles
July 26, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 40 6 min read

George Orwell never thought that his work would outlive him by much. After all, he considered himself “a sort of pamphleteer” rather than a genuine novelist, and confidently predicted that readers would lose interest in his books “after a year or two.” Yet sixty years later, Orwell endures, and I am not sure that this is a good thing.

I say this as someone who not only reads Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four once a year, but who also owns collections of essays, biographies, and even a copy of Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying, which according to one reviewer “at times mak[es] the reader feel he is sitting in a dentist’s chair.”

But for people like me who are under 30, there will always be something remote and incomprehensible about Orwell. I was in preschool when the Berlin Wall fell, and I know perestroika and détente as answers to exam questions rather than lived experiences. I grew up fearing nuclear power plants more than ICBMs, and found LBJ’s infamous “Daisy Girl” ad far less terrifying than some of the spots from the 2008 presidential election. I think of politics in terms of individual issues and partisan planks rather than grand, historicizing political ideologies. In short, because my worldview is so different from that of Orwell and his Cold War-era readers, I have to “think” my way into their political struggles in a way that someone even twenty years ago probably did not.

In ninth grade, I was required to read Animal Farm. My class read the book over a period of three weeks, which was not that hard of a task, since it is all of 30,000 words. Our teacher gave us the barest outline of historical context, enough at least to know that Napoleon represented Stalin, Snowball represented Trotsky, and that was about it (a whole unit on allegory would have to wait until sophomore year, and Billy Budd). But because the book is a “fairy story,” I learned its themes easily: power corrupts, principles are elastic, revolutions will be betrayed, and evil’s greatest allies are the unthinking masses.

Two years later, I found myself following Winston Smith into the cabbage-smelling hallways of Victory Mansions on a bright cold day in April. This was the year of “relatable” protagonists, so after Ralph from Lord of the Flies and Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, I was primed to look for affirmations of my own worldview. And Nineteen Eighty-Four was both cynical, anti-authoritarian, and a paean to hopeless dissent in the face of inexorable conformity (its working title, after all, was “The Last Man in Europe”). To my teenage mind, Winston was both pathetic and sympathetic – a role model – even if Big Brother got him in the end. Surely, I thought, these were the only lessons that were worth keeping from the book, since nothing else was obvious.

If there is such a thing as a “right way” and a “wrong way” to read books, then my high school approach to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been the latter. But that was because I did not know exactly how these books were shaped by their times, and how contemporary audiences would have reacted to them. We never heard about Orwell’s influences, such as Arthur Koestler, Yevgeny Zamyatin, or James Burnham, because they are not part of the literary canon. We never learned about the show trials in Moscow or the Spanish Civil War, either, because that was meant for history class, not English. And any textual analysis that smacked too much of politics was strictly out of bounds: I did not, for instance, understand that the concept of “Ingsoc” was supposed to be a satire of Nazism, whereby fascism advanced under a socialist veneer, until much later. In short, I could not have known what Orwell intended his works to be, and so I understood them in the only way I knew how, as advice manuals for the American adolescent.

I’m not the only one who never quite “got” Orwell the first time around. Because few people who read Orwell’s novels in classrooms also learn about their context, most people misunderstand them, or at least half-remember them, in the same way. Sometimes, his name gets applied to topics that he never really thought about, such as the “Orwellian” investment philosophy of Goldman Sachs (at best, Orwell railed against the “sheer vulgar fatness of wealth” and the “worship of money” in general) and the “downright Orwellian” American Community Survey form for the 2010 Census (Orwell has nothing specific to say about government paperwork). Other times, this means that Orwell’s political enemies try to claim him for their own side. This is nothing new: in the 1950s and 60s, for example, Soviet publications like Kommunist and Izvestia argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four was actually a critique of American excesses and amorality, and in 1984, Norman Podhoretz famously tried to make Orwell into a pro-nuclear neoconservative hawk.

But even though Hitler and Stalin belong to the dustbin of history, people still manage to find shades of totalitarianism and organized lying – Orwell’s favorite targets – in more places than ever. During the summer of 2009, for instance, opponents of health care reform wielded Orwell’s name indiscriminately. Steven Yates, a philosophy Ph.D. and member of the John Birch Society, told us that “‘Obama-care’ would make George Orwell spin in his grave.” Bill Fleckenstein, an MSN Moneywatch columnist and hedge fund manager, also decried such an obviously “socialist” project: “For those who aren’t clear on why socialism doesn’t work, I recommend reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”3 And Tea Party protesters have carried signs reading STOP. YOU’RE STARTING TO SCARE GEORGE ORWELL, ORWELL WARNED US, or ORWELL WAS A VISIONARY. Never mind that, in “How the Poor Die,” Orwell criticized how the indigent had inadequate access to health care; never mind that, in The Road to Wigan Pier, he blamed inadequate government intervention for poor nutrition and squalid living conditions in northern mining towns. Never mind that, for most of his life, Orwell advocated nothing short of a socialist revolution in England! As far as these people were concerned, Orwell’s works amount to nothing more than an anti-government, anti-change screed.

Overuse on the one hand, distortion on the other: what perversely fitting tributes to a writer who underscored the dangers of reductionism, revisionism, and willful ignorance. Clearly, George Orwell is a victim of his own success, and in a peculiar way – there are no public fights over the legacy of Hemingway or Joyce or even over other midcentury political writers like Hannah Arendt that rival the ones for Orwell’s posthumous stamp of approval.

So Orwell was right to consider himself more pamphleteer than novelist. Many critics have dismissed this as a kind of false modesty, but in this case, Orwell was not merely managing expectations. Pamphlets are designed to make a specific point to a specific audience, and then to be thrown away because they can no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended. Orwell’s works are ephemeral too, in the sense that they cannot really be understood without some semblance of historical and intellectual context. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of reading, and a lot of extracurricular effort to do so, however. Obviously, many readers simply find it easier to shout down any opposite political position with Orwell’s own words – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others – than to really understand what these words, in context, were supposed to represent.

And Orwell was wrong to believe that good writing alone could promote honesty. He wrote that euphemistic, dishonest, and generally bad prose “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” whereas “good prose is like a windowpane,” through which the author’s purpose can be seen clearly. All true. But good writing can still be perverted, as many of his readers have shown and continue to show. As Louis Menand observed in The New Yorker, “Orwell’s prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining, mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought.” His style, in other words, has overwhelmed his substance, and if he had not been such a good, clear, memorable writer, he would not be plagued by grave-robbers.

Clearly, literary immortality has its downsides. And as the last sixty years have shown, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are not like other canonical works of literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby, whose messages are straightforward in comparison. Instead, they are as much pamphlet as novel, which means that it is impossible to understand his political purpose without knowing the intellectual and ideological environment in which he wrote. Until Orwell’s readers bother to do so – which, as a rule, they don’t – then we can look forward to another sixty years of use and abuse.

Essays Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 40 6 min read
● ●

85 comments:

  4. I think something to take away from the whole exercise is that it is silly to ascribe merit numerically. Number one, number three, number thirteen—these are basically meaningless distinctions (unless, I suppose, you are running a race). Consider the Modern Library 100, which creates a fairly arbitrary, often ridiculous, hierarchy between books, using basically the same process used for this list (which is, to reiterate, *not* a round-table consensus-type situation, but one based on tallies). Folks seem a little grumpy about The Corrections’ number one spot. Of course it feels a odd to call The Corrections “the best novel of the millennium.” But I don’t see how any of the novels we talked about this week would be less troublesome in that lauded position (unless, naturally, they happen to be your particular favorite).

    We’re all just having a good time, right?

  5. I would take the readers’ list over the panel’s anytime. The Corrections is only notable for the Oprah huff, other than that its professorial navel-gazing which is why it was at the top.

  7. What is it with people and “professorial?” I keep hearing this adjective leveled at things I find conspicuously intelligent, but maybe it’s meant to denote some tone or rhetorical trait to which I (a quasi-professor) am as deaf as a human to a dog-whistle. Do people hate professors? I’ve always sort of liked them. At any rate, between Chip, Gary, Denise, Enid, and Alfred, there seems to be something for everyone in The Corrections. But maybe not?

  8. You conducted a big poll and went through all of the trouble of tabulating and organizing and compiling this list and that’s what sits at the top? Why even bother with the whole exercise? One thing has been made definitely clear though: what most professional writers want, more than anything, is not to be the best writers they can be, but the best that the market wants them to be, to be rich and famous. Yawn. So the best example of fiction writing so far this decade is an enormous, encyclopedic novel written by a very tall white guy who wears glasses. The more things change the more they stay the same. I think this comment should end with a cliched statement like that in honor of your cliched, safe, zeitgeist-approved choice.

  10. I’m surprised at how _Kafka on the Shore_ did on the reader’s list. I felt like it was one of Murakami’s weakest novels ever (and maybe that’s a testament to his skill and ability).

    Both _White Teeth_ and _Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell_ were excellent books. Definitely among my favorites of the millennium.

  11. The whole point is to spur debate, right? Now’s when the fun begins. My personal quibble: no Aleksandar Hemon? I nominate Nowhere Man. (Oh, by the way, Hemon is also a tall white man with glasses. Oh well.)

  12. I personally love tall white guys who wear glasses. Sexy!

    And is anyone really surprised that the top book is one that’s been a commercial and critical success? In order to get the #1 spot, a book had to have the most votes, and it would be difficult for a less well known book to win, simply because the fewer people who have read a book means fewer people voting for it.

    I know people who hated The Corrections or thought it mediocre, and that’s fair. But I also know people who hate a book simply because lots of other people like it…

    That said, I enjoyed The Corrections very much, I had fun nominating my favorite books, and I loved reading the write-ups for all the ones that made the list. I can’t wait to get my hands on American Genius and Mortals, two books I knew very little about before the list was published.

  13. Pingback: Las obras de Roberto Bolaño » The Millions List (revised)

  14. Where oh where is China Mieville? As far as I’m concerned, he’s the tops–at least in fantasy/science fiction. But THANKS for excluding the author of Angels and Demons, whats his name!

  15. EUROPE CENTRAL should be among this august list, but I can only assume few of the Millions voters have read it. It’s long and difficult, don’t you know, and its subject matter is not trendy. Vollmann’s execution of his great ambition is intimidating — few of the authors here (Bolano, perhaps a couple of others) could conceive of such a project, let alone complete it. And following its example will not make you a more marketable young writer.
    Sorry to be so snarky, but, really….

    Also, KAVALIER AND CLAY, TREE OF SMOKE, and OMEGA MINOR

  17. The stand-out quality of The Corrections, and the reason it deserves a spot at least near the top (if there has to be a list at all), is that it’s a genuine novel of social criticism (that is, not social criticism masquerading as a novel, or vice versa). Franzen deserves praise for revitalizing the form. It’s more Jane Austen than John Updike.

  18. Interpreter of Maladies did come out in ’99, and as such, should be disqualified. (That’s not to take away from its quality or the quality of Lahiri’s writing. Just that it doesn’t meet the criteria for inclusion.)

    I think both of these lists are full of great novels and story collections. The comments are focusing largely on what wasn’t included and the consensus seems to be that the big, difficult novels got the shaft. I’m not sure this is entirely correct, as 2666 placed pretty highly on the list. Perhaps a book like Tree of Smoke lost out because it’s taking a while for readers to digest it, but again, 2666 puts the lie to that theory. To suggest that a book like Europe Central didn’t make the list because nobody must’ve read it is nutty. I read it. It wasn’t in my top 5. It’s an incredible book and it digs into consciousness in a way I’d never seen before, but I happen to think The Corrections is a better novel. Big and difficult doesn’t always equally better and more impressive, despite what the commentors on this site so often suggest.

  19. While I agree with Tom, I still wouldn’t give it anywhere close to the top spot. I thought it was pretty middling, and I don’t necessarily think we need any sort of “return to form” in an era where new voices, traditionally kept out of mainstream publishing, are finally coming to the forefront.
    I think Junot Diaz deserves that number one.

    But hey, great list! It’s nice to just have a compiled list of suggested contemporary reading, which – for some reason – is difficult to come by. (But I’ll take suggestions) .

  20. Dang it – several sources I looked at said 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, but I guess that’s just when she won the Pulitzer… So, Unaccustomed Earth got several votes – how about we swap that in (and counting the combined votes she got for her three books, Lahiri deserves to be on there.)

  22. Oops, I was one of the people who nominated Interpreter of Maladies on my reader’s choice list, and somehow also convinced myself it came out in 2000. But Unaccustomed Earth is great! I’m curious, did The Namesake get many votes? I’ve never liked it as much as her short stories.

  23. Actually, Laura, it looks like The Namesake didn’t get any votes, but Unaccustomed and Interperter got almost the same number, and combined would have moved Lahiri up the list a few spots (it seems like most folks agree with you that Lahiri’s short stories are where it’s at).

  24. Garth:

    I think “professorial” has become a synonym for “intellectual.” On the one hand, I understand how someone would criticize a writer for this trait. Some writers, like many professors, can take the soul out of a story. The heady language, the “ideas,” obfuscate the feelings and emotions.

    But, for the most part, the label of “professorial” is lazy. I’ve heard the tag thrown at Pynchon and DFW, for example, but I’ve encountered some of the most beautiful, well written, emotion-filled passages in both of their books.

    I understand the criticism some readers have about “The Corrections.” The language, at times, does seem to take on the self-pity and cynicism of its characters. I too struggled with this, and I think it’s fair to call attention to it– as many notable critics have. But, overall, I’m certain Franzen was well-aware of this. So the questions should be why does he write like this and, secondly, is he successful? In all, Franzen has an incredible talent for family drama, and the book is incredibly well-written and challenging– two traits any great novel should have.

    What I don’t agree with are the knee-jerk reactions to the book. Franzen tends to catch the same lazy criticism as Pynchon and Wallace and Delillo. And you are right to challenge the term “professorial” in this case, which, in essence, is a cynical attack on ambition. These attacks, many of which come from those who haven’t read the books in question, stem from a misunderstanding about the writing process and, in general, irreverence for authors who experiment and try to push the form.

    Most writers, to counter W.S., aren’t out to be famous. To accuse Franzen of this is ridiculous because “The Corrections” is an anomaly. Serious writers with literary ambitions don’t make the long dollar– most artists without a mind for entertainment aren’t the ones living in luxury.

    And irreverence: this is a trend I don’t understand. Many like to bash “high-art” as pretentious and elitist and snobbish. It’s as if great art is all a facade, a hoax. The people who make it are intellectuals and the people who consume it want to look smart. No, great art is ambitious, challenging, and requires a finer taste.

    And to “The Millions” crew and the writers who participated: thanks for the list. I don’t agree with some of the books, but who cares? The numbers game is a matter of preference, and there isn’t a dud on the list. Thanks for sparking conversation, reminding me of books I’ve read, and encouraging me to read the books I haven’t.

  25. I have to agree with PJ about Aleksandar Hemon. Nowhere Man didn’t make a big splash when it was published, but it is (I hope) one of those books that will keep growing in stature as the years pass. Few writers have ever captured the dislocations of the refugee/exile experience as vividly as Hemon. The book is structurally dazzling, and the way Hemon reinvigorates the English language puts native speakers on notice that their mother tongue has grown tired of being taken for granted and has found herself a new lover.

  26. I’m okay with the White Teeth snub because, though it’s a fantastic book, the ending’s pretty damn lame. I wonder if Tree of Smoke didn’t make it because, well, it’s massive, and it’s hard to vote for something you can’t finish.

  27. “Most writers, to counter W.S., aren’t out to be famous. To accuse Franzen of this is ridiculous because “The Corrections” is an anomaly. Serious writers with literary ambitions don’t make the long dollar– most artists without a mind for entertainment aren’t the ones living in luxury.”

    Right. Most writers long to live in penury and anonymity. Especially writers like Franzen, which would explain his habitual need to tell other people why whatever it is he is working on at any given moment is exactly what the publishing world, and the reading public, needs.

    I think the problem with your argument is your example. Franzen is a middlebrow novelist working with traditional material to make what amounts to more of the same. The Corrections is just another in a long line of novels that flatters its audience into thinking that their lives have some kind of universal truth to them, as if a Chef, a Writer and a Businessman are avatars for all of humanity. The Corrections, to me, said nothing new about anything and did it in a way that was neither innovative nor exciting. I guess that it was picked number one by the panel shouldn’t really come as a surprise when you see who made up the panel.

  28. I too think Oscar Wao deserves the top slot (and agree about Hemon and would have loved to see Colum McCann somewhere) but as some have observed the rankings are pretty subjective anyway.

    On a separate note, while I am amused at some of the sharp rhetoric flying around, I also think it’s great to see so many so passionate about books and reading. Three cheers to the Millions for sparking such lively conversation!

  29. The lists are very solid top to bottom, but am I the only person surprised by the lack of love on either list for Atwood’s Blind Assassin? Seems like a rather prominent omission.

    I’m also curious if any of Philip Roth’s books from the decade got any votes.

  30. I voted for the Blind Assassin, PScott! That was the one I felt sad about.

    W.S., there are undoubtedly things to be said against The Corrections, but you’re getting a touch personal there.

  31. PScott,
    I considered a couple of Roth books — namely The Human Stain — but in the end, they didn’t make my top 5. If we did this same thing for the 90s, I might have picked American Pastoral #1 overall. There were actually quite a few authors whose best work seemed to happen in the late 90s, and as such, just missed the cut.

  32. Pingback: Friday Bookshelf Hofer + Hemingway, Orlean & Eisenberg | teresashenswingler.com

  33. It’s interesting that The Corrections has been labelled “professorial,” considering that the occupation and the ivory tower are the target of some keen (and hilarious) satire in Franzen’s novel. Also, evidence for Franzen’s beliefs in the pleasures of writing and reading is all over the place. Alas, the suggestion that something is trying to be intelligent does leave the impression of elitism. As readers, though, it’s up to us to enter a dialogue with the writer and not just approach art as a cheap fix, but as a means of communicating something of value. I think Franzen does this well.

  34. I love Oscar Wao and Jhumpa Lahiri! I got two copies of The Known World for m birthday years ago and COULD NOT FINISH IT! I just lost interest in the plot around page 300, and did not feel like slogging through to the end.

    I actually read Middlesex last week and loved it. I read Cloud Atlas earlier this year and enjoyed it qute a bit (except the longest story in the middle). The Road I was forced to read by my book club and thought it was okay.

    I have read 9 of the top 20 “readers choices” (6 of the top 10) but almost none on the critics list.

    I look forward to reading The Corrections soon.

  36. I’m very surprised that “Life of Pi” did not make the list. Regardless of what you think of Yann Martel’s other work, this one should stand the test of time.

  37. Life of Pi? Really?

    Went searching for Norman Rush’s Mortals, found it in the remainders at Book City in Toronto for six bucks. Not bad.

  38. Pingback: Love my lists « Scribbly Jane
  40. Pingback: Top novels from “The Millions” « The displaced Kiwi
  42. Pingback: Links for 2009/09/26 | ChrisKinniburgh
  43. Pingback: The Millions: best fiction of the new millennium « Books to the Ceiling

  44. “The Corrections” is the best novel of the millennium, so far? C’mon. Seriously?

    How utterly boring.

    That choice is more a reflection of a writerly clique than the book’s worthiness.

  45. Pingback: 5th Estate · The best book of the millenium
  46. Pingback: Hundred Pockets» Blog Archive » e-books – the revolution is here
  47. Pingback: My Favorite Lit-Blog Things: September 30, 2009 « Hungry Like the Woolf

  48. For the record, I have read six of the twenty critics’ choices and seven of the twenty readers’ choices. The Corrections is one of those. I was underwhelmed. Franzen can write a sentence, but the book lacked depth.

    As one example of a flaw, the scene with the talking poo is derivative of Mr. Hanky of South Park fame. Mr. Hanky has been around since 1997, so South Park gets credit. And, I guess, my biggest problem with the book was that Franzen seemed primarily interested in zaniness (like the fish down the pants which seemed for all the world like a Seinfeld (Kramer) bit.) rather than saying anything new about the human condition. And, no, his one-dimensional shots at big pharma, the cruise industry, etc. do not qualify.

    Still, the two lists are outstanding and provide the spur I need to catch up on some of the millenium’s best (if sometimes overrated) writing.

  49. Pingback: A Frightening Vision of Nabokov’s Ghost
  50. Pingback: My Best of the Decade: Are We Laughing Yet?
  51. Pingback: Listmania vs. Lake Woebegone

  52. I was so pleased to see Austerlitz make both lists; I admire Sebold so much and I’m planning on starting The Emigrants soon. What is it with our need to “rank” in order, by number? I like the idea of bounded sets or intersecting circled sets of favorites instead of lists. With a list, where do I start…at the top? I’m interested in the intersections and what else is being read. I’m probably gonna start with Gilead, Cloud Atlas, and Never Let Me Go, based on how near they were on the list to other favorites that I’ve read. It’s all so…whacked. But what a great load of fun.

  53. Pingback: Prodavinci » Archivo de: » ¿Cuáles son los mejores libros del milenio? Por ahora…
  54. Pingback: The People Have Spoken « Meanderings

  55. I contributed titles, but none of mine made it in the top 20…I figured they wouldn’t, but I’d love to see the entire list of submitted titles if that exists somewhere! It’s fun to see which titles got chosen the most, but I’d be more interested in seeing everything that was nominated and how many votes each title received. Max, would that be a possibility?

  57. Pingback: A melhor ficção da primeira década do milênio « Autores e Livros
  58. Pingback: First of all… « a home between the pages
  60. Pingback: “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, Junot Diaz | Blogging the Bookshelf
  61. Pingback: Best Books of the Millenium? | BOOK CLUB CLASSICS!
  62. Pingback: Os melhores livros da década « Animal Civilizado
  63. Pingback: To kindle or not to kindle, ho ho ho lists for Books 2009 | Okie Reads
  64. Pingback: ‘Bulo Remembers 2009 (And the Noughts): Book It, Bulo : Delaware Liberal
  65. Pingback: Lists upon lists for the 2000s « Aesthetics of Everywhere
  66. Pingback: Books & Authors » Daily Lit Links for 12/10: Best of 2009

  67. Very high on my top 20 list would be Kathryn Davis’s “The Thin Place,” Kate Walbert’s “A Short History of Women,” and Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth.”

  68. Pingback: Top Books of 2009 lists « Dusty Hum
  70. Pingback: Making the List | Like Fire
  71. Pingback: Whatchya reading? « Naptime Writing
  72. Pingback: My Best of the Decade: An Idiosyncratic List » Novel Readings - Just another WordPress weblog
  73. Pingback: » “Atlas chmur” Davida Mitchella Trystero: Niezależny blog finansowy
  75. Pingback: Out Stealing Horses « The Wrong Empire
  76. Pingback: Chick lit and Franzenfreude « Naptime Writing
  77. Pingback: Grāmatu listes: kāpēc vajag? « burtkoki
  78. Pingback: Jonathan Franzen me sonaba de algo | MJ en Vancouver
  79. Pingback: Лучшие книги XXI века « Капитошкина библиотека
  80. Pingback: Литературные итоги XXI века
  81. Pingback: Deivids Mičels „Mākoņu Atlants” | Andris lasa
  82. Pingback: 20 лучших книг XXI века | Калейдоскоп
  83. Pingback: 20 лучших книг XXI века
  84. Pingback: Best of the Millennium?
  85. Pingback: Alise Manro “Meiteņu un sieviešu dzīves” (2005) | burtkoki

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

● ●
Notable Articles The Future of the Book

The Assimilation of the Book Blog

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
February 23, 2007 | 15 books mentioned 5 2 min read

I happened to notice recently, in my daily online wanderings, that the nominees have been announced for “The Seventh Annual Weblog Awards.” As usual, the organizers have listed a couple dozen categories, and as usual the same handful of blogs, more or less, are in the running. Many of the usual suspects are there, Boing Boing, PostSecret, Dooce, Gizmodo, Instapundit, Daily Kos, Lifehacker, and the rest – blogs that are now big business, some of which are owned by big businesses.The omission of “literary bloggers” from this long list of nominees naturally seemed glaring to me, having had a front row seat for the last four or so years as an amorphous and very loosely affiliated movement of bloggers has greatly expanded the realm of literary discourse in the U.S. and elsewhere. And though there has sometimes been an unhealthy “us against them” mentality between bloggers and professional critics, in many ways this friction has melted away as critics have become bloggers themselves and as a number of talented bloggers have begun to invade the book pages, providing a pool of talent and a new voice to book review sections that were shrinking and stultified.This is a big deal. Bloggers have helped create a new literary discourse that benefits readers, writers, and critics – a place where reading and discussing books for pleasure can augment the sometimes joyless drudgery that newspaper criticism has become. (Note how Jerome Weeks, now of book/daddy, jumped from his regular newspaper gig: “So it’ll be a relief to read for pleasure again. One reason it’s particularly appealing these days is that it’s so counter-culture — so counter to our prevailing techno-bully rapid-response profit-margin mindset.”).Yet we need those sometimes bullying newspapers. As Kassia wrote in a post in the early days of the LBC, “Books don’t have endless windows opening for them.” This sentiment was echoed in an Orlando Sentinel essay by movie critic Roger Moore late last year: “Reviewers, in general, are canaries in the print journalism coal mine, the first to go. Classical music, books, visual arts and dance are dispensed with, or free-lanced off the bottom-line. That’s happened everywhere I’ve ever worked.” But as the big windows close, and criticism sections shrink or disappear, hundreds of smaller windows have opened.In Kassia’s LBC essay, she went on to write, “It’s interesting to me that readers are leading the charge to discover and promote new, often overlooked fiction. Traditional avenues of literary coverage are necessarily limited in scope, even with the Internet.” I have come to believe, and I hope people agree with me, that book blogging is more than just a hobby. I say this not in a self-promotional or self-aggrandizing way (so many others are better book bloggers than I), but looking at how the public discourse about books has changed over the last few years. So, the truth is, having thought about it, I’m not disappointed that not a single book blog – not even some of the best (TEV, Ed, Bookslut, Conversational Reading… I could go on and on) – was singled out for recognition by the Weblog Awards. Litblogs have somehow gone too far down the path of assimilation to be considered for such distinctions, I think. Book blogs and traditional book criticism have intermingled sufficiently that they are now, except in a few remaining dusty corners, one.My declaring it doesn’t make it so, but perhaps now, the us versus them mentality between the bloggers and the professional critics is mostly behind us. Which is good, because there are so many more books still to write about.

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
| 15 books mentioned 5 2 min read
Books as Objects Notable Articles

Deckle Edge in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Books as Objects Notable Articles
February 5, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 42 4 min read

One might think that physical books are on the verge of extinction, given all the consternation over ebooks of late. There’s a faction in this debate that predicts that physical books will become something of a rarity as the ebook market matures and the technologies involved become ubiquitous.

In a sleek, shiny, distant future, books may feel old and impossibly large, with too much physical mass and all these fussy pages put to use for the simple task of storing a tiny amount of data, data that is not searchable or copy and pasteable or malleable and interactive in the ways we expect of our data. These devices, one imagines, might seem incredibly blunt to our future selves, unitaskers in world where our gadgets and machines can do all.

And yet there is and will always be some beauty in books. And there will always be people who appreciate that beauty. Even if books eventually become the province of collectors and the peculiar few who fetishize them as objects, there will be attractive qualities to them. They are something like snowflakes or at least stamps, so many and so few alike.

Even now, books revel in their oldness. Rough-cut, or deckle-edge pages are popular flourishes on many editions. And beneath dust jackets are canvas covered boards, often with embossed lettering and archaic-looking monograms.

The deckle edge dates back to a time when you used to need a knife to read a book. Those rough edges simulate the look of pages that have been sliced open by the reader. The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds.*

Paper knives, variants of letter openers, were used for this purpose. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which speaks directly to the reader and describes the reader’s experience reading the novel, makes extensive reference to these literary knives:

This volume’s pages are uncut: a first obstacle opposing your impatience. Armed with a good paper knife, you prepare to penetrate its secrets. With a determined slash you cut your way between the title page and the beginning of the first chapter.

Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden beneath the folds, it becomes something more, “a penetration of its secrets” and an act of discovery, shot through with a suggestion of violence and danger or of the painful gestation of the words themselves.

This act of cutting open pages to read a book has been lost (one imagines the paper knife arrangement wouldn’t go over well with the TSA), and right now, all over the world, people are reading their books on screens and the idea of even opening a cover and turning pages may one day seem odd as well.

This idea of the book as an anachronism may explain the persistence of the deckle edge, which is now created not by the reader with a knife but by leaving one edge of the page untrimmed during the printing and binding process.

Peggy Samedi, an associate production manager, told me that at Knopf where she works the deckle edge is part of the publisher’s “house style” along with certain other flourishes and fonts. It is typically used for more literary-oriented books and they see it as “something that harkens back to an older way.” It rises from the idea, she says, that “not everything has to be smooth and slick.”

Nonetheless, the production department at Knopf regularly fields calls from readers who complain about the ragged edges, assuming they are a mistake.

If you look closely at a deckle edge, even if you are looking at two copies of the same book, you’ll see slight variations in the edges. And from title to title and publisher to publisher, the quality and pattern of the edges varies more extensively, from a tight saw-tooth, when looking from the top of the book down the edge of the pages, to a more free-form ragged look. The deckle edge varies, not because it is made by hand, but because the machinery for making books varies slightly from factory to factory.

Perhaps this deckle edge is a way for publishers to prepare for the inevitable. As ebooks and ereaders contrive to make the reading process as simple as pushing a button, physical books will regress to older and older forms, so as to appeal more to the antiquated among us who still prefer them to their digital doppelgangers. Deckle-edges will prevail, uncut pages will re-emerge, embossing will become more elaborate.

In time it will be said, to own a book is to be a purist, and these are the books that purists will prefer.

*A reader wrote in with a correction/clarification to the above:

“There are two kinds of rough edges one can find in older books.

The deckle edge is an artifact of papermaking, in which the paper fiber seeps under the “deckle” (the wooden frame placed on top of a screen used to drain the slurry of fiber and water). Even before machine-made paper, the deckle edge was sometimes trimmed, sometimes not. From what I can tell, there wasn’t a sensibility about it before the advent of machine-made paper.

The separate issue of “unopened” (not “uncut”) pages has to do with the folding of a printed sheet, the signature, into the final book. Printers could, and often did, trim the edges and remove either the folded part of the signature there as well as the deckle edge. Or not. I’ve talked with book historians, and I can’t find a reason why some books had unopened pages and others not.

In any case, it results in two kinds of rough edges. The deckle edge as a result of the artifact of papermaking; and the unopened edge after being cut with a knife, which results from a decision made during binding. You can see the difference in examining a book, as the deckle edge is feathered and soft, while a knife-cut edge is rough and can be jagged. (It also depends on the “grain,” or the predominant direction in which the fibers are oriented, which affects how paper curls or stays straight, too. Books are usually printed with the grain perpendicular to the spine, so the pages don’t curl inward, but that results in a very jagged edge when the pages are cut.)”

[Image credit: Horia Varlan]

Books as Objects Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 42 4 min read
Essays Notable Articles

Every Day I Open a Book

Essays Notable Articles
April 8, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 10 5 min read

I remember the moment, the slow walk across the second grade classroom, to one of those bookshelves that could be pushed around on wheels.  This one was parked, though, and I was heading for it.

What was I thinking at the time?  That, I can’t remember now, I can only recall the purposeful walk, as if something about that bookshelf called to me.  And when I got there, I found a book that would change my life.  Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary.

I don’t know why I picked it.  I shouldn’t have.  I was one of the worst readers in the class, and I can remember tearful sessions with my parents at home as I tried to make my way through the simplest of texts.  This book was far more difficult than anything I’d ever attempted to read before.

Perhaps it was the story, of Henry Huggins determined to take a stray dog home, the uncooperative bus driver indifferent to the delivery of Henry’s heart’s desire.  At the time I had no dog myself.  Did I want a dog, was that it?  I can’t remember.  Perhaps it was Henry’s quiet insistence in keeping this companion, his inventive persistence at achieving his goal.  Maybe Henry’s example inspired me, helped me to teach myself how to use the dictionary so I could to make my way through this book filled with difficult words.

Because I needed a companion too.  Outside the closed door of my room, my parents’ inexhaustible battles played themselves out, arguments I could further muffle by entering the world of a book, though I couldn’t have put this into words back then, I’m sure.  But I must have understood that I needed to learn how to read, in order to open the invisible door I sensed was there.  Once I’d navigated Henry Huggins, other books easily followed, other companions: Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and then, as I grew older, a succession of adventure books set on fantastic worlds, packed with swords and gunplay.  I wonder now, as I write this, was all that drama a way of domesticating the domestic warfare still waged by my mother and father, a way to ease the sting of conflict?

Or was some form of escape the secret desire, the traveling to the distant worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, following John Carter to Mars, Carson Napier to Venus and David Innes to the center of the earth.  Even now, I can’t believe that I can remember their names, or that Mars was called Barsoom.

Whatever the desire, I read so much that eventually my parents forced me to go outside and play, and they talked to each other—and I overheard—of taking me to a child specialist to see if there was anything wrong with me.  And still I devoured books, increasing the real estate inside me where I could find a place of my own, where my heroes always managed to slip away from disaster.

But no book could prevent the disaster that occurred when I was eleven, when arguments seemed to serve no further purpose, when my mother tried to stab my father with a knife, when on another occasion she strangled him with a towel around his neck, his head stuck between two rungs of a banister.  In both cases I worked my way between my struggling parents, and at this moment as I write I’m struck by a new thought, that perhaps all those years of reading adventure stories had given me a vocabulary of action, a means to save my father’s life, as if I’d been preparing, through books, for those charged moments without knowing it.

Some poison had been leached by that violence, and in the months and years that followed my parents reverted back to the rituals of verbal sparring.  What had set all this in motion, the steps to that terrible brink, and then the retreat?  I couldn’t know.

A change had occurred in me, too.  My beloved adventure books had somehow lost their adventure.  I would still read obsessively, but now dutifully, because the literary rituals of crisis and escape felt somehow empty—what I read no longer gave me what I wanted, though I didn’t yet know what I wanted.

One day in seventh grade I ordered my usual stack of books from the Scholastic Books Service; one of them was an abridged version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  A little skeptical, I figured I could skip past the peace parts if they proved too boring.  When the nine or so books I’d ordered finally arrived I saved Tolstoy’s novel for last—even abridged, the book was 500 pages long, longer than any book I’d ever read before.  But its length was not the challenge, not in the way the vocabulary of Henry Huggins had been for me years ago.  The challenge was of an entirely different order.

I can remember the moment I realized I’d stumbled into new territory.  I was sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard, beneath the clothesline, in the shadow of a tree.  I set Tolstoy’s novel on my lap, then picked it up and checked the page number.  Page 73.  I can actually remember the page number.  And what most struck me was that, after reading 73 pages, of a novel titled War and Peace, nobody had died yet, there was none of the action that I’d come to expect from all my previous reading.  And most surprising, I didn’t care.  Because I knew that this was already the best book I’d ever read.  And nobody had died yet.  Now how could that be?

Here was action of a different sort: the action of the heart, the revelation of interior lives, the drama of inner conflict, all of which gave voice to my growing awareness of my own secret self.  Here was a vast world that wasn’t Mars, or Venus, or the center of the earth.  What had once been the pleasure of escape was now a pleasure of a different sort—that of a journey, a way to map inner landscapes.  And a way, perhaps, to make sense of the tangled knots of my family, what we’d tied ourselves into.

But never quite to make sense, never to completely unravel, because the books I read now offered no easy solutions, and that was the confounding joy of them, the messy truth no matter how elegant the prose or canny the structure.

Such books gave me my future, not so much my future as a writer, though of course there is that, but my future as a human, a fallible human engaged in the futile attempt to know oneself and others. Each new book, like Zeno’s arrow, gets closer to but never hits the target.  There is no easy or final understanding, but without the attempt, who can bear to live the isolation that is the alternative?  And the more I read, the more I think that all readers have secret histories connected to the books they love, the books that have served for them as havens, or interventions.

So every day, I open a book.  Its words were once the thoughts of another human being, thoughts that could have remained private but are instead lined up in row after row on each page.  An invitation to begin, to take the first steps into another mind, to step and step until there are no steps but instead the blessed drama of art’s illusion delivering the pith of human contradiction, the greatest gift of one mind offering itself to another, the foreign air we best breathe.

Essays Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 10 5 min read
● ●