Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a throwback freebie, so I looked back to a topic from my first year of motherhood, when TTT was not even on my radar, and picked books from this century I think will become classics. This was HARD to winnow down, there are so many excellent books, but here are the ones that really stand out to me!
The Corrections: I personally liked rather than loved this book, but there is no denying its place in the modern canon. There’s the Jonathan Franzen of it all, the imbroglio about its inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, the midwestern setting, the family conflicts, suburban discontent. It fits the bill.
Atonement: This one’s profile was helped by the well-regarded movie adaptation, but was on its own a smash-hit bestseller that just feels like a classic (maybe it’s the English country house).
Wolf Hall: I will freely admit that I liked the sequel more (and haven’t yet read the third in the trilogy), but there is no denying that this is a tremendous work of historical fiction about the Tudors, an era that has been written about extensively but never like this.
Gilead: Honestly an underdiscussed contender (at least to me) in the eternal debate over The Great American Novel: an elegantly-written story of family and love, slavery and the Civil War, and religion.
The Year of Magical Thinking: An absolutely devastating and razor-sharp insightful examination of grief. One of the very greatest memoirs.
Americanah: An examination of America through African eyes, wrapped together with a love story and bound with Adichie’s incredible prose.
The Goldfinch: I like The Secret History more, but this one is more accomplished and feels more like a classic in its scope, including in its allusions to established classics like Great Expectations.
Between the World and Me: “Short” and “an easy read” are not always synonyms, and they certainly aren’t here. But Ta-Nahesi Coates’s book, written as a series of letters to his son, is vital, devastating reading.
There There: A dazzling display of talent, this book and its interwoven perspectives will challenge anyone’s pre-existing notions of what Native American stories look like.
Gone Girl: This book changed the entire trajectory of marketing for domestic thrillers, a genre that had seemed relegated to supermarket checkout lane impulse buys and exploded into the mainstream. Plays with a lot of the classic tropes of the genre but doesn’t feel stale, in part because of Gillian Flynn’s razor-sharp writing.
