Simply the Best

The New York Times asked, and I answered.

How, on earth, do you pick the best ten books of the last twenty-four years?

When the New York Times asked, I honestly had no idea, and the paper didn’t give me any guidance. The deal was, every person who got a ballot had to define ‘best’ for themselves. Did it mean most enjoyable? Most beautifully written? Most immersive? Funniest? 

I ended up answering the question in two ways: best as the books that have stayed with me the longest; and best as in the series I turned to when my mother was dying, and I wanted to be in a different world. 

Actually, I answered the question three ways: best, as in book that made the biggest change in my own life. That was my first pick, which was my first book, GOOD IN BED.

Do I really think Good in Bed is one of the best books of the last quarter of a century? I do not. I’m not even sure it’s the best book I’ve written. But GIB was the book that got me an agent, and a publishing deal, the book that let me spend the last twenty-plus years of my life as a full-time writer of fiction. That, in my mind, gives it a spot on my list, if no one else’s. I chose it for that reason, and because I want to normalize women being able to say that their work has value. And because – full disclosure – I love the idea of something I wrote getting a vote, and, thus, bedeviling the NYT critic who’s been vocal in his scorn for books like mine. Petty but true. 

On to the most memorable books; the ones I find myself thinking about, years and sometimes decades after I’ve read them. In that group, we’ve got Lionel Shriver’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, which tells the story of a mother of a kid who kills his classmates. 

The book does a brilliant job of describing the contradictions of motherhood; how a child’s arrival can cleave a woman right down the middle; how love and resentment can live, side by side. 

Does nature or nurture win in the end? Is Kevin a bad seed, or is Eva that most unspeakable of creatures – a bad mother? No spoilers, but, if you haven’t read this book, 10/10 recommend. 

I have a lot of respect for writers who start with the unthinkable and turn it into a story. What if your kid murdered nine of his classmates? What if you were kidnapped and imprisoned, repeatedly raped and forced to bear your captor’s child? That’s the premise of Emma Donoghue’s ROOM, another book that’s stuck with me for many years. I read it when I was in the thick of parenting small children, and the challenges that Ma faced, teaching her son about the world, keeping him curious and engaged, all within the confines of a single, tiny room – which, by the way, you’re not allowed to leave – felt almost like a parody of attachment parenting, and the nonstop enrichment modern-day mothers are expected to provide. Donoghue writes from a five-year-old’s point of view, a feat only the most skilled novelist could pull off, and her prose has the propulsive drive of a thriller, with the slow-motion reveal that Room isn’t the wonderland that Jack perceives, but is, instead, a prison. Will Ma and Jack escape? And what happens when their world expands beyond Room’s confines?  Think of this novel as a companion to Shriver’s, a different story about mothering at the extremes. 

Sigrid Nunez’s THE FRIEND is a short book, with a simple-sounding plot: novelist commits suicide, leaves friend in charge of his grieving 180-pound Great Dane. Introducing a dog into a plot is sort of like Chekhov putting a gun on the mantel. If you’ve had a dog, you know how the story will end. But, even though I saw it coming, I found myself full-on sobbing on an airplane as I read the book’s last chapter. I’ve read all of Nunez’s books, and I greatly admire her skill, her sentences, and her scathingly satirical look at the publishing world. If you want a book that will have you snickering about the ridiculousness of the literary landscape on one page and will tear your heart wide open two pages later, this one’s for you. 

Amy Bloom’s A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU could make the list on the strength of its title alone. This is a short story collection, and each story will sneak up on you and surprise you, like a cut, or a kiss, that you didn’t see coming. Bloom’s a therapist as well as a novelist. Her protagonists are damaged and clever, guarded and funny. They are smart, and realizing that smart, sometimes, isn’t enough to save them. Bloom’s people feel like they exist in three dimensions, not two: fully realized, fully human. 

Ditto Olive Kittredge, the eponymous Everywoman heroine of Elizabeth Strout’s OLIVE KITTREDGE. If I ever get to teach a writing class, I’ll use Strout to show the mastery of setting, of place. Her small towns in Maine, the ocean and the harbors, the fisherman and pharmacists trying to make their lives there – all fully, flawlessly realized. I’d also talk about how Strout plays with readers’ expectations. The book’s named for Olive Kittredge, but she shows up only briefly, as a barely-glimpsed supporting character, the stoic, self-contained wife of a man who finds himself with a crush on his younger employee. There are secrets and lies and infidelity; petty theft and disordered eating and drug use, all the signs of our fraught, modern times…but, somehow, these stories feel timeless; and Olive herself feels both archetypical and typical; larger than life and like the woman sitting beside you on the bus or waiting behind you at the supermarket. 

And now we move on to the immersive all-stars, the series whose stories run to thousands of pages and earn gold stars for world-building. You’re probably familiar with Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Maybe you’ve seen the TV show, or heard the bare-bones outline: British nurse in the 1940s travels back in time to hook up with Scottish hunk in the 1740s. Sounds dopey, and in lesser hands it probably would have been. But Jamie and Claire are both incredibly well-drawn, the history is well-researched, and the plot is fast-paced and banging (in every sense of the word). And there are nine books! Nine! I read all of them, back to back to back, when I was in Connecticut in April and May of 2021, and my mom was dying, and I so desperately wanted to be somewhere else, even if it was just an imaginary somewhere else. These books did the trick. 

Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS are also a triumph of imagination and plot. Quentin Coldwater’s a depressed Brooklyn teenager, bound for the Ivy League, when he slips through a magical portal and ends up at Brakebills, a school for magic. Think Hogwarts, but with sex and drugs, was how people talked about the books when they first came out…but there’s more going on than the familiar Chosen One trope. Grossman skillfully builds out a universe that owes more to Narnia than Hogwarts. The details are delightful (shout-out to Humbledrum the talking bear!). The plot is crackling (the heist scene in THE MAGICIAN’S LAND is chef’s kiss perfect). The takeaway – wherever you go, there you are --  is depressing. How does Quentin learn to live in a world where the gods are trickster and authors have feet of clay; where the heroes are flawed and occasionally craven and not even love and magic are enough to make you happy? How can any of us? 

Maybe you think you are anti-dragon. Maybe you think you are just anti-talking-dragon. Maybe you think there is no place in your life for a rewrite of Napoleonic history with dragons supplementing the armies and the ships-of-the-line. I, too, foolishly thought that I was all those things! And then I met Temeraire, the draconic hero of Naomi Novik’s series of nine (!) books about a dragon, his human companion, and their globe-spanning adventures. These books are decidedly less sexy than Gabaldon’s, but just as deftly plotted and thoroughly researched, and, I swear, Temeraire and Will Laurence, plus the various people and dragons they meet as they visit Africa, explore Australia and the Aztecs, make enemies and allies and, finally, face down Napoleon’s Armée de l’Air are just as fun to spend time with as Jamie and Claire.    

Finally, we’ve got Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series, another sprawling fantasy quest. I’ve watched Stephen King’s place in the literary world shift from mocked schlockmeister to respected storyteller, winner of prizes, published in the New Yorker, and I believe he’s one of our great storytellers. These books are his magnum opus, and the characters who join the gunslinger Roland on his quest have kept me company from my preteens to my teens to my twenties and thirties and forties and beyond. I remember happening upon THE WASTE LANDS, the third book in the series, in a bookstore, in 1991, in State College. I’d just graduated from college and started my first job as a newspaper reporter, and had no idea that another Dark Tower book had come out. Seeing that book, and knowing I’d get to spend time with Roland and Eddie and Susannah, felt like unexpectedly meeting three old friends. 

All things serve the beam. 

I hope my ballot gave you some books to add to your TBR pile. And now, a question: which books would make your top 10 list?