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10 Essential Books of the Last 25 Years

Jill

As interpreted by A Total Dude who would like to emphasize how much of a Total Dude he is. I mean really, Cormac McCarthy is #1? Then Fight Club? The Beach made your Top 10? JAMES FREY? Even putting aside the fact that eight of the ten books on the list were written by white men, half of these books aren’t even that good.

Thanks for the Zadie Smith, I guess.

26 thoughts on 10 Essential Books of the Last 25 Years

  1. I just glanced at the list. What is missing from it? As a total dude who wants to have more options, I’d appreciate others input as to what books should be considered on this list.

  2. So your method for evaluating literature consists primarily of determing the authors’ race and gender? Feminism should be applied more intelligently than that.

    1. So your method for evaluating literature consists primarily of determing the authors’ race and gender? Feminism should be applied more intelligently than that.

      Um, what? No. More reading comp, please.

  3. Well, he’s a man, so the books that speak to him will probably be written by men and focus on male concerns. This is a problem?

    1. Well, he’s a man, so the books that speak to him will probably be written by men and focus on male concerns. This is a problem?

      It’s a problem when the list isn’t “These are my favorite books” but “These are 10 essential books from the last 25 years.” “Essential” implies that they’re key to our culture, and to being a well-read person. When the most essential books to make someone well-read — the books that are considered the best — are all written by white guys, yes, that’s a problem.

      Also Keith/Jeff, we don’t like sockpuppeting. Pick a handle and stick with it.

  4. Andrew, off the top of my head, I would recommend work by Jhumpa Lahiri, Roberto Bolano, Nicole Krauss, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yiyun Li, Haruki Murakami… let me keep thinking, but the list is a long one.

    The two non-write-male writers on the Flavorpill list (Junot Diaz and Zadie Smith) are also two greats.

  5. Ten books geared toward a mainstream white androcentric experience of pop culture, specifically. Only “essential” if you are mainly interested in things like understanding references to “This is Jack’s complete lack of surprise.” And also why everyone loved and then hated and is now either ambivalent or totally apathetic toward James Frey.

  7. Emily, I’m glad to see they created another list, but 1) its title suggests that white males dominate the contemporary literary scene, which isn’t true (neither in prestige, nor, for that matter, bulk sales), so 2) the fact that they had to be prodded into acknowledging reality only indicates their initial myopia was that much more severe. I mean, the scandal around Frey’s novel is more important to understanding contemporary literature than Beloved? I don’t even think Frey outweighs Morrison in terms of Oprah’s influence on contemporary literature.

  8. FUCK YEAH ENDER’S GAME. That book created my childhood, man.

    I can’t actually name a lot of books that should be on the list instead. My reading is restricted mainly to sci-fi and fantasy, and most people would never include those books on such a list.

    I’d argue “essential” books capture a feeling or time and create a miniculture. In that sense, Fight Club is a good choice. On the other hand, I’m sure much more non-mainstream books did this for non-mainstream populations–books that touched people of color, or GLB youth, or trans youth.

  10. Was I the only one who kind of winced seeing Ender’s Game on the list? It barely passes the 25 year mark since it was published in ’85. Science Fiction is a genre that’s supposed to be on the cutting edge of culture and technology but with all that’s happened in the last few decades the most relevant theory of our future is a quarter century old? I guess this was this dudes favorite book when he was sixteen before he moved on to college and “serious literature.”

    Personally, I’d switch it with some Gibson or Stephenson. If the internet is the most significant invention of our era then it’s cyberpunk roots are most essential.

  11. A list of “essential” lit for the past 25 years that does not include Marilynne Robinson is inherently and terribly, terribly flawed.

  12. I like Junot Diaz and Zadie Smith. Whatever those two are putting down on paper I’m picking up, though I’ve never read Drown. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was the first American novel that I’ve been able to finish since high school. The first Zadie Smith novel I read was actually On Beauty. I received it from a Belgian gynecologist who was on a working vacation in a Senegalese village where I also happened to be working, I only had to give up my copy of A People’s History of the United States in trade. Ultimately, it was quite a steal.

  13. The Beach, Alex Garland’s modern twist on Lord of the Flies, fillets the post-college urge to “discover” uncharted third-world countries while simultaneously illustrating socialism’s inherent failings.

    Gee that sounds swell.

  14. 1. I liked “The Beach,” but not because of its comments on “socialism’s inherent failings.” I read it more as a commentary on the inherently faulty nature of supposedly utopian societies. Social psych ftw!
    2. Why wasn’t “Blindness,” by Jose Saramago, on the list? It’s a gripping and insightful look at the fluidity of morality. (Trigger warning: it contains a graphic rape scene; it’s done in a way that illustrates the boundaries some people cross when they know they won’t get caught. Also, there’s a graphic self-defense scene related to rape.)

  15. I also don’t understand this description of The Beach. “Socialism’s inherent failings”? Did we read the same book? I mean, by all means, if Alex Garland would like to critique socialism, then yeah, he ought to critique socialism – except I highly doubt that The Beach has much to do with that.

    The Beach is a terrifying book and I love it for many reasons (but mostly because it’s so terrifying) – and it would definitely be on my top 10, meanwhile. James Frey, on the other hand…? Um, no.

  16. I really love “lists of books that maybe you should read.” I really hate “lists of books you MUST read or else you are an uneducated ignoramus,” because there’s also a strong implication that you must LOVE those books, or at least recognize their “genius,” to be a really cultured person.

    It’s not just that the authors are all male. . . it’s that the characters and the worlds they create are all male or male-dominated. I read “Ender’s Game” as a kid, when theoretically it would have been most appealing — and I remember few books that alienated me so thoroughly. Lack of characters that I identified with possibly/probably was the cause.

    @Andrew: Two of the books I particularly recommend on the second list mentioned is “The God of Small Things,” by Arundhati Roy, and “Persepolis,” by Marjane Satrapi. Also Kiran Desai and Julia Alvarez. A really great discussion happened in the comments of this post on Tiger Beatdown specifically dealing with authors who create fully-formed female characters. I also really loved this post and the follow-up because it didn’t deal solely with “GREAT LITERATURE” but rather books that individual people had read and loved.

  17. I found A Million Little Pieces one of the most overrated books ever. I mean, I won’t deny that just about anything that is hyped that much is bound to be a let-down but seriously, top ten? For a book that was published due to a shoddy ethical process, no less? No. Just no.

    I would add Push by Sapphire, Fall to your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald (though I’m not sure if that book has much international popularity outside of Canada, so I’ll give the Total Dude the benefit of the doubt).

    I also find it really weird that he talks about these books as defining masterpieces of Generation X but he doesn’t even list the book that actually coined the phrase as it applies to his generation: Generation X by Douglas Coupland. And that book needs to be on this list.

  18. *Fall on your knees. On. My apologies Ms MacDonald for misnaming one of the few books that touched me more deeply than I could have thought possible.

  19. Anyone else really, really sick of white doods pretending not to understand what the problem is with promoting only white doods? Seriously, boys, we know you’re feigning ignorance. Now, “man up”, and stop making everything about yourselves.

  20. Science Fiction is a genre that’s supposed to be on the cutting edge of culture and technology

    Well, I’d argue that Ender’s Game crossed over pretty well into the consciousness of non-sci-fi readers, which might earn it a place on an “essential book” list if not on an “essential (science fiction) book” list.

    Cutting edge-wise, I just read Blindsight and that struck me as downright emo amounts of cutting edge. (‘S also got vampires, of a sort, so it’s cutting edge pop culture too in a slightly odd way… :p)

  21. pardon my language, but how the fuck is Margaret Atwood not on there, and not even in the shortlisted section.

    I’m sorry, I would say that if this is in fact an “essential” especially compared to genre pieces like Enders Game (which I never understood why everyone loved so very much).

  22. @Jill

    You object to the presence of Cormac McCarthy on the list? Why? If there is any real problem it is that The Road was chosen over Blood Meridian.

    @sarah

    Of Atwood, I have only read her most famous book “The Handmaid’s Tale” but it didn’t lead me hungry for any more. A bad knockoff of 1984 infused with second wave feminist anxieties.

  23. @MonkeyShines – I completely disagree with your assessment of The Handmaid’s Tale. 1984 was alright, but its totalizing view of complete control through top-down power is completely archaic and I don’t think it’s very descriptive of how fascism would happen in a Western democracy in the present-day. Huxley’s Brave New World was better, because it accounted for the roles of pleasure and technology in maintaining popular ambivalence to social control. But The Handmaid’s Tale is better than both because it demonstrates an understanding of how hierarchal, coercive social norms operate hand-in-hand with law. She explicitly accounts for the use of religion, gender, and class in stratifying society in a way that’s descriptive of a much more plausible route to modern fascism, to the point that I seriously worry about the US turning into Gilead sometimes. How can you look at Palin, Bachmann, Coulter, or any right-wing celebrity anti-feminist with out seeing at least a little “Serena Joy”?

    That said, The Handmaid’s Tale is not quite my favorite Atwood novel. It’s the most politically relevant, but the nested storytelling of The Blind Assassin shows off her deft literary prowess much more elegantly.

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