Books of the Decade (IMH*O)

A list of the best books I read in the last 10 years (possible because of my slightly-compulsive habit of recording every single book I’ve ever read). Chosen for a variety of reasons: drawing me into the story so much that I missed subway stops, haunting me even years after, making me feel a certain way about the world (hopeful, gracious, sad, angry, and/or wistful), making me laugh, being just a good ol’ yarn.

• The Painted Veil, William Somerset Maugham (2013)

• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (2013)

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid (2014)

• East of Eden, John Steinbeck (2015)

• On Such a Full Sea, Chang Rae-Lee (2015)

• Americanah, Chimamanda Adichie (2015)

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2015)

• The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (2016)

• Beauty is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan (2016)

• The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016)

• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (2017)

• The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú (2017)

• Circe, Madeline Miller (2018)

• Little, Edward Carey (2018)

• Underland, Robert Macfarlane (2019)

• The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell (2019)

• The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave (2019)

*H = humble

The Rules Do Not Apply, by Ariel Levy

“My job is to interpret, and to communicate my interpretation persuasively to other people. The idea that in life, unlike in writing, the drive to analyze and influence might be something worth relinquishing was to me a revelation.” —p.188

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

“… it was then I recognized that my own values—the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman—they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.” —p.239

How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his name. He had saved my very flesh, taken me away from certain death. His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it. —p.374

The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell

‘Oh my god, are you ok?’ The girl stroked Thandi’s back. ‘I used to get car sick all the time growing up—’

‘Just hungover,’ Thandi croaked but the girl was already recounting her childhood and how and when and why she had vomited so much back then. The coach heaved and humped along. To stave off her nausea, Thandi fixed her eyes on the girl’s nose, the smattering of freckles like make-up she hadn’t rubbed in. What would happen if those spots grew in number, merged, crowded her skin with melanin? How different this girl’s life would be, the one she was still stitching into a tread-bare story with her patchy memories of a small town in California. When the coach finally turned onto the smooth Great North Road, it felt like an exhalation. It gave Thandi an excuse to look out of the window. After a pause, she heard the rustle of the girl opening her stiff copy of Out of Africa.’

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant, by Joel Golby

AH, SHIT, A WINE GUY

“Ah, shit. Shit. There’s a wine guy here, being a dick about wine. Shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, buttons to the top of his chest. Deep tan from a tasting tour of the South of France. That sort of thing. He’s insisting on there being a decanter. “No decanter?” he’s shrieking, folding his shirtsleeves up an extra inch. “Right: we need a clean, dry vase, or I can use that big mason jar you use for your muesli. It needs to aerate!” Is he… crying? “This is a 2014, Michael! We need to get some air in here!”

Wine guys are often the worst of all the guys because they very often talk about wine so much it actively makes drinking unpleasant, saying, “Look at the legs on that one” and making you circle your glass up in front of a naked lightbulb so you can see the residue in it. I know a girl who likes wine and I told her my wine-buying technique—I go to the shop and buy the one that is closest to $12 with the biggest punt in the bottom of it—and she nodded and looked sad for a second, then said: “Well, I mean, it’s dumb, but it’s not the worst way of buying wine.” And that’s why I don’t really try when I’m buying wine for a dinner party now.” (p.127)

— Excerpted from the essay A Can of Lager and a three-Course Meal, or A Guide To Dinner Parties, If You Are Sort of in Your Twenties"

On Writing, by Stephen King

“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? … good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” (p.37)

Severance, by Ling Ma

“I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad we couldn’t go to brunch instead…

A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else. “ (p.199)

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane

“‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland… Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments, and the drift of tectonic plates…” (p.15)

“When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seem inert… the world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” (p.16)