• Best of the Decade: What Books Will We Still Be Reading in 10 Years?

    And You Thought Best of the Year Lists Were Intense?

    It’s mid-September, 2019, and we’re beginning to see the light (or to be slightly more accurate, the infinite pulsing darkness) at the end of the decade. In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking back at the ten years that were, as well as forward to the ones to come. To begin our descent, I proposed a staff poll, of sorts: I asked each of my colleagues in the Literary Hub office to make a list of the ten books from the last ten years that they thought we’d still be reading—for good or ill—ten years from now, circa 2030.

    The below results collate the responses of 14 people, who range in age and interest as much as possible for a group that works for a literary website. I was not surprised to see Claudia Rankine’s Citizen top the list by a wide margin—that’s a book that keeps on getting more relevant; one hopes that in ten years we’ll be reading it as an artifact, but one also doubts it. Same goes for some of the others on here, though some of course are just very good novels that people will continue to enjoy.

    Take a look, and if you’re so moved, tell us which books you think we’ll all still be reading, talking about, and studying in ten years time in the comments.

    9 votes:

    Claudia Rankine, Citizen

    Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

    *

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    6 votes:

    Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

    *

    5 votes:

    Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

    Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

    Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad (2010)

    *

    4 votes:

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

    My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

    Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (et al) (2012)

    George Saunders, Tenth of December (2013)

    Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012)

    Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

    Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015)

    *

    3 votes:

    Anne Carson, Nox

    Anne Carson, Nox (2010)

    Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson, The Complete Stories

    Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson, The Complete Stories (2015)

    denis johnson train dreams

    Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2011)

    Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (2015)

    Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

    *

    2 votes:

    Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (2017)

    Dona Tartt, The Goldfinch

    Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013)

    Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

    Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

    Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

    Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

    Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

    The Argonauts

    Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

    Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

    Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)

    jemisin fifth season

    N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)

    Men Explain Things to Me

    Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (2014)

    Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

    Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (2011)

    Tommy Orange, There There (2018)

    Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)

    *

    Also listed by at least one person:

    Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
    Andy Weir, The Martian
    Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
    Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
    Attica Locke, Black Water Rising
    Cheryl Strayed, Wild
    Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version
    David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon
    Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously
    Elif Batuman, The Idiot
    Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
    Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias
    Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
    Helen Garner, This House of Grief
    Homer, tr. Emily Wilson, The Odyssey
    Horacio Castellanos Moya, The Dream of My Return
    Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
    J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
    Javier Marías, The Infatuations
    John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead
    Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
    Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove
    Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle (et al)
    Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf
    Ling Ma, Severance
    Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
    Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
    Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
    Michael Lewis, The Big Short
    Miriam Toews, Women Talking
    Natalie Díaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec
    Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
    Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
    Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
    Patrick Modiano, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood
    Patrick Raddon Keefe, Say Nothing
    Patti Smith, Just Kids
    Paul Beatty, The Sellout
    Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
    Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
    Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
    Robert Caro, The Passage of Power
    Robert Macfarlane, Underland
    Sally Rooney, Normal People
    Sam Quinones, Dreamland
    Santiago Gamboa, Night Prayers
    Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind
    Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies
    Susan Faludi, In The Darkroom
    Svetlana Alexievich, Second-hand Time
    Tara Westover, Educated
    Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam
    Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands
    Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twenty-First Century
    Tina Fey, Bossypants
    Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends
    Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs: A Biography
    Yuri Slezkine, The House of the Government


    Emily Temple
    Emily Temple
    Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
    https://www.emilytemple.net/





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