The Century So Far: Books

We welcome online suggestions regarding the myriad important books we left off our list. And please don't worry about us taking offence; any thin skins have long since been shed around here.

Perhaps no single work of fiction was more widely read and summarily dismissed over the past decade as Dan Brown's unstoppably popular airport lounge staple. Critics of the thriller, which tells of a conspiracy to keep the truth about Christ's relationship with Mary Magdalene a murderously guarded secret, complained about everything: the pedestrian nature of Brown's prose; the preposterous nature of Brown's plot; the plastic nature of Brown's characters; the porous nature of Brown's theological history. As if it mattered.

  (RENE JOHNSTON / TORONTO STAR)

Folks gobbled this book up because it packed intricate puzzles, propulsive plotwork, clammy paranoia, cheeky irreligiousness and armchair globetrotting into one teasingly easy-to-read brain snack. Within three years of publication, the book's sales had vaulted beyond 60 million copies; in 2006, all four of Brown's then-available novels hit the New York Times top-10 bestseller list in a single week. The onslaught of imitators includes The Mozart Conspiracy, The Lost Temple, The Alchemist's Secret, The Lost Throne, The Mark of Atreus, The Alexander Cipher ... It's a new century, but pulp still prevails.

Geoff Pevere

God has been making a comeback this year, with a slew of books reaffirming faith in the deity's existence. But those books probably wouldn't be nearly as prevalent if they didn't represent a backlash against Richard Dawkins' influential, anti-theist, um, bible.

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Dawkins, a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinian who doesn't suffer agnostics any more gladly than he does believers, can sometimes seem a little too convinced of his own certitude. But anyone who can command a long run on bestseller lists by taking on the Big Guy Upstairs is not to be underestimated. For evidence of Dawkins' impact, check out the veritable Da Vinci Code cornucopia of titles that riff on the author or his thesis: Deluded by Dawkins?; Is God a Delusion? (two books by different authors with that title); Is Richard Dawkins the New Messiah? And so on.

Mind you, there were plenty of writers willing to ride Dawkins' coattails as well, including Christopher Hitchens, whose God is Not Great (2007) fell short of Dawkins' scientific scholarship but surely had more laughs.

Vit Wagner

Eric Schlosser started the decade by warning us of the perils of junk food in Fast Food Nation, but it was Michael Pollan's personal and highly readable investigation into the sustainability of the human diet that spawned a slew of like-minded titles.

Several friends of ours have described the author's thesis as "life changing." It surely was responsible for encouraging supermarket consumers to be more reflective than reflexive about what they buy, even to the point of making the case that organic – if that means big organic farms that ship produce across continents – is not intrinsically good.

There is no enjoyment in eating if you have to season every mouthful with a grain of guilt. Along with its followup, In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Pollan demonstrated that we can have our meat and eat it too.

Vit Wagner

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Al Gore is to be heartily applauded for his efforts to raise global awareness of the gathering threat of climate change. But for all the reach that the former U.S. vice-president's An Inconvenient Truth (2007) has enjoyed, there is little evidence that the book, the lecture series or the film have persuaded his own government to take more initiative. Not so with Flannery. His rigorous The Weather Makers had such an impact in his homeland that Australia's formerly skeptical Conservative Prime Minister John Howard did a re-think, allowing that Flannery had "encouraged Australians into new ways of thinking about our environmental history and future ecological challenges." Putting policies into place was a tougher sell, but the grudging recognition that a problem existed was a baby step that former U.S. president George W. Bush was unwilling to take.

Vit Wagner

If sensation and crisis are the lifeblood of contemporary politics and popular culture, context is the stuff of journalism and history. That's what made Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower such a groundbreaking and gratifying work. Five years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Wright offered a painstakingly researched and eloquently told account of the events that led to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

In the process, he not only illuminated the hitherto patchy history of Islamic terrorism, but also provided a chillingly convincing explanation of why the U.S. remained so vulnerable to attack, despite ample prior evidence that something terrible was simmering. By making the events of 9/11 seem inevitable yet preventable, and by providing a clear context in which the militancy of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda could be understood, Wright's book became one of the first to see through the smoke and ruin of the tragedy to the circumstances that led to it.

While 9/11 and its geopolitical aftermath generated enough volumes to mark a kind of 21st-century boom in non-fiction – see also Against All Enemies, The Dark Side, Hubris, Fiasco, The One Percent Doctrine, etc. – The Looming Tower stood apart for the clarity of the big picture it provided.

Geoff Pevere

Monica Ali's engrossing debut, about the lives of Bangladeshi immigrants in London, was among the trailblazers of a still-flourishing immigration-fiction genre in which the collison of cultures in the new (read Western) country, not the affairs back home, is the enervating focus. It truly is a global setting for fiction now – think of White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith and The Question of Bruno (2002) by Aleksandar Hemon. The trials and tribulations of Nazneen's battle to determine her self-identity in Brick Lane, and its portrayal of the émigré community in England, were edifying and yielded a most entertaining read. We're also impressed that Ali's two subsequent novels, while also dealing with identity and community, have very different contexts, settings and storylines.

Dan Smith

The most phenomenal Canadian book of the decade and the only one to win the Man Booker Prize. By phenomenal, we refer not only refer to the novel's soaring international sales, but also the fact that it was eventually embraced by a younger generation of readers. How often does a teen get excited about a really great novel that doesn't feature wizards or vampires? Yann Martel's fantastical yarn did include an unlikely alliance between a young boy and a 450-pound Bengal tiger, but that read less like narrative sleight-of-hand than an imaginative way into mirroring our relationship with our fellow species. Martel also deserves credit more recently for using his fame to lobby Stephen Harper to become more widely read by sending the Prime Minister a new book every two weeks. No evidence has yet emerged that this has taken, so we're guessing Life of Pi has been easily the bigger success.

Vit Wagner

If there's a kind of genius to Malcolm Gladwell's brand of pop intellectual journalism, it's best understood as a two-way process. On the one hand, the effortlessly readable New Yorker writer is enviably adept at making complex ideas as munchable as Smarties. On the other, he's a master at rendering the obvious as revelatory.

Both skills are brilliantly displayed in The Tipping Point, a book about "viral culture" that is at once an explanation and a example of the phenomenon by which seemingly random ideas and events become ubiquitous. By streaming his arguments into specific narratives divided according to smartly branded conceptual categories – Connectors; Mavens; Salesmen – Ontario-raised Gladwell hitches the piecemeal nature of magazine-style journalism to a larger argument that's the page-turning version of a Power Point presentation.

But there's more to it than mere packaging, as the reader of any of Gladwell's other books (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005; Outliers: The Story of Success, 2008) and journalism can attest. It's also a matter of tone. What Gladwell does better than just about anyone is play the role of curious, look-what-I-found everyman. This is crucial, especially to the putting over of the otherwise obvious: by so gamely convincing us that he's just noticed something for the first time, Gladwell sidesteps any suspicions it might have been there all along.

Geoff Pevere

We adored the first three Harry Potter books, but this fourth volume in the series is where poor Harry started slipping off his broom, in our humble opinion. At 636 pages, it showed that J.K. Rowling's publishers would no longer dare to edit their money-making author's work, resulting in the increasingly overwrought doorstoppers that followed. (We should note, however, that some of our younger friends insist that Goblet of Fire remains their favourite of the seven.)

This book confirmed children's lit as a real growth area in publishing. But what makes Goblet of Fire particularly notable is the marketing frenzy that accompanied its release. The first Potter book to be released in a strictly enforced embargo on a weekend at midnight, it gave rise to the subsequent Fort Knox-style secrecy that surrounds the release not just of the subsequent Potter tales, but of many another bestsellers besides, including Stephenie Meyers' Twilight vampire series and Dan Brown's upcoming The Lost Symbol. This is a dubious achievement, in our view, but it sure changed the book marketing game, with other media outdoing one another in frenzied efforts to scoop release details.

Dan Smith

Even though Maus: A Survivor's Tale won Art Spiegelman a special Pulitzer for his anthropomorphic Holocaust fable in 1992, the current decade confirmed the movement of graphica into the publishing mainstream – not just as entertainment, but as an effective mass-market vehicle for the treatment of serious subjects. Just look at the size of the ever-expanding graphic and manga shelves at the big-box stores: along with children's lit, this is one of the few growth areas in book publishing.

Our graphica standard-bearer is Chester Brown's rich, character-driven biography of Louis Riel, the Manitoba Métis martyr who lives on as an unsung Father of Confederation. To see such a pivotal historical figure and tortured soul rendered so effectively and accurately was more evidence that comics are powerful literature.

Dan Smith

Geoff Pevere: While political history may have had a hard time looking back fondly on the first decade of the 21st century, literary history tells another story. As is customary with troubled and uncertain times, the turbulence knocked a lot of good work out of the atmosphere. While this was perhaps most obvious in the surge of worthy non-fiction generated by the shifting geopolitical realities, and was evident in the profusion of novels written by young authors seeing the world through newly multicultural spectacles, the impact of the New World Order on established writers proved especially fascinating.

Witness how British author Ian McEwan, long a boutique favourite among Anglo-oriented literati, became one of his country's most pre-eminent novelists with Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005). And note how Cormac McCarthy, already a boutique favourite among American fiction readers, found himself becoming something of a household name with No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006).

What was most fascinating about the belated popularity of both writers is the contrasting manner in which they finally nabbed the spotlight: McEwan, by carefully shifting his writing in ever more conventional directions, slowly steered himself toward the mainstream of public and critical favour. With McCarthy, by contrast, the trajectory was reversed: the world finally seemed a dark enough place that even he seemed the centre of it.

Had it been written even a decade before, The Road probably would have ended somewhere long short of where it did on this side of the century.

Personal favourite novel of the decade: Fortress of Solitude (2003) by Jonathan Lethem. Why? Simple. No other new work gave me more pure reading pleasure.

Dan Smith: Dave Eggers began the decade with a book, the family memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which ushered in two decade-long shifts in the publishing world: A breaking down of the fourth wall to present both non-fiction and fiction with open winks and nods to the reader, and the emergence of the McSweeney's collective of like-minded smarty-pants writers as a cultural force. Staggering Genius was also a dandy, moving read.

A second choice is Neil Gaiman's Coraline (2003). We share the adventures of 10-year-old Coraline and the spooky Other Mother every fall with a new crop of petrified but delighted Grade 4s, and for all its commercial success – the animated film, illustrated version, even a Stephin Merritt musical version in New York – Coraline is still a wonderful thrill. We also loved the Richard Price novel Lush Life (2008), in which class and colour clash on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Vit Wagner: The decade has yielded a treasure trove of incalculable riches for history lovers, the bar being continually raised by historians who aren't willing to sacrifice readability for scholarship or vice versa.

Any order of merit would have to include Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2002), Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2003), Richard J. Evans' three-volume history of the Third Reich, published between 2004 and 2009, and Ian Kershaw's mammoth, two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, the first of which was published in 1999 and the second in 2001.

The best of all – and perhaps the most astonishing feat of synthesis ever achieved – was Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2006), which somehow managed to weave every country and every major political and cultural trend into a seamless narrative.

The novel that had the most enduring impact was Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a short, unnerving, post-9/11 yarn set in Lahore that plays out as a one-sided monologue by a Pakistani man who may or may not intend harm to his foreign listener.

While not always seduced by memoir writing, Brother, I'm Dying (2007), Edwidge Danticat's story about the relationship between her father, who left Haiti, and her uncle, who stayed behind, was as absorbing as anything I've read in the past 10 years.

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