Looking Back on the Decade

Doesn’t that sound incredible, but we are coming to the end of the first decade of the 21st century. There are all kinds of sites online that are lining up to list what they consider the best or most worthy book titles written during the past ten years.

The Times Online lists their 100 choices, with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road taking first place.

Good Reads took a reader’s poll and came up with their own list. The first five places went to The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling, Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, and A Thousand Splendid Suns, also by Khaled Hosseini.

Salon.com chose a few different titles than most lists. Their top fiction and non-fiction titles were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Amazon.com makes a stab at the best books and includes The Life of Pi (“a boy stuck on a raft with a large Bengal tiger) by Yann Martel, John Adams by David McCullough, and the Harry Potter series.

I can think of several titles that were personal favorites of mine. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire Harry Potter series and the Deathly Hallows was a fitting finale for a series that may have changed the world of children’s book publishing forever.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion said much to me personally about grief and loss and living the life you have been given to the fullest. I am not a Joan Didion afficianado, but this title was truly a work of magic. I also really loved The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman, The Knitting Circle by Ann Hood and Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

As you probably realized, I love a good mystery and recently I discovered two series that were excellent: the Julia Spencer-Fleming series with the Reverend Clare Ferguson and Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne and Steig Larssen's soon-to-be trilogy about Lisbeth Salander.

So, looking back on what you have read over the past ten years, what are your favorites? What do you think influenced you the most, or was the most meaningful? Meg