One hundred ways to cook an egg.Originally Posted by BlackCat
One hundred ways to cook an egg.
thx for all the info provided, Vielen Dank.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace almost made it (1996) but really a 21st century book in many ways.
There are many - contemporary fiction is better than you imagine, once you filter out the vampires. I haven't checked exact dates on the following, so some might be late 20th C, but some recommendations follow:
Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
Theodora, State of Happiness - Stella Duffy
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel
C, Men in Space, Remainder - Tom McCarthy
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
In A Strange Room - Damon Galgut
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
Cosmopolis, White Noise - Don DeLillo
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Cave, Death at Intervals, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago
Lost Paradise, Rituals - Cees Nooteboom
The Angel's Game - Carlos Ruis Zafon
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Room - Emma Donoghue
Heart's Wings and other Stories - Gabriel Josipovici
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
Hawthorn and Child - Keith Ridgeway
Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson
Rape: A Love Story - Joyce Carol Oates
The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa
Mr Golightly's Holiday, Miss Garnet's Angel, Instances of the Number 3 - Salley Vickers
Want to know what I think about books? Check out https://biisbooks.wordpress.com/
I would have read the thread title this way
''great 21st Century and great books to go with it''. That would be the manisfesto of any great era which is reflected in its books.
No point in a book telling it is snowing in June or he just turned eighteen when it is bluntly a war zone outside my house.
Just a thought there.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
I don't think we can really decide what the best books of the twenty first century will be because we don't have any critical distance from it. We could possibly judge the books on the cusp of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st but we can't place anything post-2010 in any canon yet.
I'd also recommend;
Johnathan Lethem- Chronic city
Neal Stephenson- Snowcrash
Jeffrey Eugenides- The marriage plot
Barbara Kingsolver- Migrations
Douglas Coupland-Microserfs
Chuck Palanhiuk- Invisible monsters
In fact I've never read abad book by any of these authors. Thanks for a bunch of good tips!
I have to agree with you.
White Noise is 20th cent.; Cosmopolis I didn't much care for. I thought Delillo's Falling Man (2007), his 9/11 novel, was much better: main character Keith wanders out of the rubble, hitches a ride to his estranged wife's apartment, is caked w/ someone else's blood, & is carrying someone else's briefcase. One of Keith's Fri. night poker buddies winds up inert in a Vegas casino.
Delillo was peculiarly prescient on the Twin Towers in his work (Underworld) B4 9/11, characters often citing the Towers as some source of spiritual mystery.
No American troops were harmed during the Watergate cover-up.
Europe Central by Bill Vollmann has my vote.
Home by Marilynne Robinson
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani
Excuse me, this is extremely important. The president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, has publicly recognized the Holocaust as historical and has said he knows the what the Nazi's did in the extermination of Jews. However, he said he's not a historian and he's ignorant of the details, which he would leave to historians to tell us about. This is probably the most important news of this decade. Take heed.
We need the great political books, to help us take heed
1984
Animal Farm
Brave New World
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Enemies by Isaac Bashevis Singer
What are the great books on modern Iran/Israel?
Wowzers, Adam Zagajewski- Without End? I'm glad that someone knows this guy, because Polish literature isn't as popular as it could be.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi immediately comes to mind. It's a graphic novel - like Maus by Art Spiegelman - set in Iranian around the Revolution.
Other 21st Century literature which comes to mind includes:
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill
And of course...Pastoralia by George Saunders (collection of short stories)
I agree with others though that we can't really judge what's been great this century till some time has passed.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote