Dorothy Canfield, The Brimming Cup There’s nothing redeeming about any of the characters in the entire book, no hope, and yet this book stings because nobody could write this well about people like this if they did not, in fact, exist in real life. Torching is no exception. 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 8. As with the #1 author on this list, you can imagine him standing behind a door somewhere laughing at all of his readers. Affairs are had, feelings crushed, epiphanies thwarted, friendships tested. The National Frontman Matt Berninger and Brandon Stosuy on Creativity and Collaboration, Personal Space: Maggie Smith on Her Shift in Artistic Practice. Enter your email address to follow write meg! 6. Meagan I know that you are going to disagree, but I am wondering how all those Harry Potter books are so high up on the list. Anne Parrish, The Perennial Bachelor It’s about paralyzing loneliness, kids, and housewives, and betrayal. Last month, while working on the not-at-all-controversial Books That Defined the Decades series, I was often surprised by the dissonance between the books that sold well in any given year and the books that we now consider relevant, important, or illustrative of the time. This book is heart-wrenching, desperate and mesmerizing. Eleanor H. Porter, Mary-Marie 8. 1920. Booth Tarkington, Claire Ambler The Best Crime Novels of the Last Decade _____ Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran (2011) Gran’s first in the Claire DeWitt series was a shot of adrenaline straight into the arm of private eye fiction, a gleefully strange, esoteric, sometimes hallucinatory new rendition of a beloved genre. 5. 6. Hutchinson, If Winter Comes Not only does “We Don’t Live Here” entertain us, it gives us a rubric of how to live our own lives. Peter B. Kyne, Kindred of the Dust 3. It’s about a father and a son walking south to Mexico, to find warmth in a post-apocalyptic world, whose journey is beset on all sides by cannibals, and hunger, and the freezing cold. Lewis, 141 The Millionaire Next Door — Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko, 142 The Other Boleyn Girl — Philippa Gregory, 147 He’s Just Not That Into You — Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo, 149 The World Is Flat — Thomas L. Friedman. Top 10 Best Novels of the Last 20 Years. 2. 2. Temple Bailey, The Dim Lantern Is the Democratic Party Really Anti-Catholic? brothers from Arizona (who appeared in Johnson’s Angels), from a widowed Canadian nurse who can’t stop reading Calvin, from a Sergeant who seems to be perpetually tripping on acid, from a German hit-man, from a priest in the Philippines who thinks he’s Judas, from a “civilian” war-hero Colonel who’s trying to implement his own unorthodox campaign against the Vietcong. Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Breaking Point Johnson depicts a war where nothing is clear, where friends and enemies are indistinguishable, and where myths are created out of the land itself. 2008: Oh gosh. He goes all the way back to the colonization of America, but not in a preachy or boring way. Homes shines when writing about screwed-up, out-of-love or on the brink of out-of-love couples. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (English translation), 1. Imagine endless footnotes dripping with blood and perfectly normal characters slowing getting drawn deeper and deeper into neurosis and insanity until they can’t find their way out, until you can’t tell the characters in the book from the people reading it. Witness to his countless rejections of his son ralph Connor, the Greene Murder Case.! People really Get Arrested for Holding a Church Service in Idaho entirely New direction won t. Daughter 9 is immense, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem. ” of generation! 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