My Ten Favourite Books of the Past Decade

As we near the year 2020 there have been a lot of ‘best of the decade’ lists coming out and here’s another one! Many such lists seem top heavy with more recent titles. So I wanted to challenge myself to pick only one book from each year of the past decade and it has to have been published in that year. This naturally forced me to consider what books have meant the most to me in the long term and which continue to resonate for me personally long after reading them. You can also watch me discussing these books in this video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kPlIpLHj7Q

It made me reflect on how we’ve lost a great talent this year with author Andrea Levy who died at a relatively young age. I felt a bit melancholy opening my copy of “The Long Song” and seeing her signature which she inscribed when I went to see the Booker shortlisted authors read in 2010. If she’d have won that year (rather than Howard Jacobson) she’d have been the first black woman to win the prize. So it’s a shame she didn’t live to see Bernardine Evaristo win this year’s Booker.

Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” didn’t make much of an impression on me when I first read it but (now that I’m a bit older) rereading it made me realise just how its story is so poignant. Other favourite authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Ali Smith have produced a number of books in the past decade, but the stories in “Lovely, Dark, Deep” and the novel “Artful” feel especially meaningful to me and show these brilliant writers at their most formally daring and innovative while still retaining emotional resonance. Maybe there’s something to be said for the length of a book deepening its impact because the novels “The Luminaries” and “Ducks, Newburyport” are both massive. They still vividly reside in my imagination and I’d gladly go back to reread their hundreds of pages.

Probably the most obscure book on my list is “The Parcel” which also stands as one of the most heart-breaking novels I’ve ever read. It challenges the reader to consider many difficult moral questions, but it also made me fall dearly in love with its characters. Choosing this list made me consider how it’s not always book prize winners who should be most noted, but the books which receive multiple prize nominations. “Mrs Engels” was listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, the HWA Goldsboro Debut Crown, the Guardian First Book Award and the Green Carnation Prize (which I actually helped judge that year.) It sadly didn’t win any of these awards, but its inclusion by a wide range of judges certainly testifies to its quality. Finally, I was also reminded how there are accomplished and much-respected writers such as Colson Whitehead and Sarah Moss whose back catalogue of books I still need to explore.

Obviously I had to make some tough choices when limiting myself to a list of only ten books. Some years included many extraordinary new publications which I also loved such as “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing”, “H is for Hawk”, “Lila”, “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, “Almost Famous Women”, “Under the Udala Trees”, “Dinosaurs on Other Planets”, “A Book of American Martyrs”, “Lincoln in the Bardo”, “Sight”, “The Years” and many many more. But the whole point of lists like this is to provoke discussion and get readers to chide me for making some obvious omissions while championing their favourites. So I’d love to hear in the comments below about some books from the past decade that you consider to be the greatest!

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

I approached this novel with some trepidation – not because of the 800+ page length necessarily (with the right book I love to get stuck in for a good long time in order to really live with the characters) – but because of the structure. Catton frames the book’s sections with the stellar and planetary positions of the time. I had a fear that this book would be based a lot on astrological signs, personalities based on planetary positions and the sort of new-age sign reading that I don’t know anything about or have any interest in. It seems to me anyone who makes judgements on people based on star signs are working with generalities which bear no relation to the unique qualities of the individual. If one were a geek on this subject matter I’m sure this book could be fruitfully read with astrology in mind as the characters are closely aligned with certain planets and discover how their paths cross based on celestial alignments. However, this isn’t necessary because more than anything it’s an engaging, intelligent, complex, great big thrilling yarn of a read. As I got really into the thickness of the book’s plot and its fascinating array of characters I was enthralled by its story of a New Zealand gold-mining town in the mid-1800s. Deceit, greed, ambition, sailing adventures, hidden fortunes, familial strife, swapped identities, reinvention of the self, wacky séances, dirty deals, murder, prostitutes, opium. This book has all that and more.

What’s most impressive is that Catton is able to write such a many-paged incredibly intricately plotted narrative with such a huge cast of characters while balancing them all at the same time and keeping the reader alert to who is who and what is happening when. That takes serious talent. Each character is richly described so as to make them distinctive and she leaves markers along the way to remind you who that character is and their place in the plot even if they drop from the narrative for a while. The author creates a fascinating array of well-realized distinct characters. However, the only character which I think she fails somewhat is Te Rau Tauwhare, a Maori guide and gem-stone hunter. When he comes on the scene I feel like some of her research shows itself a little too plainly as she describes his connection with his native New Zealand culture and she lapses somewhat into stereotype. However, the rest of the (predominantly male) cast are shown to have varied interesting personalities – especially Quee Long with his painful past and his determination to get revenge.

This is a fiercely intelligent book as well as being a really engaging read. Along the way the author sometimes drops in really intelligent concepts about human nature and the complex working of psychology. For instance at one point she ruminates that “although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done – a judgement that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.” The author is, of course, speaking of men and women but I think she writes “a man” because this novel is written in the style of a novel in its time period using lots of parochial turns of phrase. This quote suggests to me a really complex interplay between how we are seen externally from how we view ourselves from the inside and why we are always so continuously and unfairly harsh on ourselves.

Another fascinating quote I tripped on and read over and over was this thought about the power of desire in motivating our actions. “Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.” Surely this explains why so many of our actions make no logical sense when viewed externally. But when they are driven by the burning desires we harbour within they take on their own unavoidable power.

The story is richly rewarding as the mystery of what happened to a dead hermit, a drugged prostitute, a missing affluent miner, a mysterious widow and a suspicious scarred captain is gradually revealed – mostly through the stories of a group of individuals gathered together for a secret meeting in a pub at the start of the book. I’m sure I missed out on some of the connections, but most of the novel’s intriguing questions are answered by the end in a series of succinct well-paced chapters. I can just imagine taking this book with me to my dream cabin in Maine to reread when I’m much older and getting even more out of the story. It is a door-stop of book so I was glad I read the kindle version as my wrists would probably be sore from the strain of holding it up for so long if I didn’t. Whether it will win the Booker prize this year I don’t know. I’m reading my way through the shortlist right now. But this book does stand as a monumental achievement in writing – especially as it’s only the author’s second published novel.