Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog: The decade in review

The best book I read from the past decade was a Great American Novel, in the all-caps sense, even though very few people seem to call it that just because the author is originally a Brit. Even though it fails to top my list, I see no need to insult Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which topped The Million's best books of the decade list. It was very good, and written in the serious-story-about-a-troubled-family mode that invites being called a "Great American Novel", but it just doesn't top my list. No, my favorite book written in the past decade is undoubtably Neil Gaiman's America Gods, published in 2001.





Gaiman's story, which basically casts Norse mythology onto modern-day American society is a fantastic rea, as all Gaiman's books are. More importantly, the perspective he brings to American Society as an outsider seems to have leant him a much better understanding of what makes this country tick. America is big, and it's strange in a lot of places, and many towns in Illinois and the rest of the Midwest are a little depressing for reasons that are hard to name but involve some combination of flatness and economic stagnation. Gaiman manages to somehow make a comic book out of middle America without turning it into an out-and-out caricature, identifying the quirks of the culture and the fact that our values are often centered not so much upon the God who created us in his image but rather the gods that we created to transmit images. Part fantasy, part road novel, and part musing on the nature of modern identity, it captures the spirit of the contry right before the Bush era that could have easily served as an afterword to the novel.

Others deserving mention that I've read:

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones: Set in Virginia in the decade before the civil war, this story of a black slaveowning family is a slice of history about which I knew nothing. Fascinating, and the parallels to modern society aremore than thoughtprovoking.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz: One of the best new writers out there, this tale of life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic has a strong narrative voice and a real joy for language.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon: Chabon is a much better writer when he writes about Jewish theme, and this counterfactual novel about a Jewish state set up in Alaska is his most complete work to date. His novella Gentlemen of the Road is also fantastic, for the same reasons.

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri: Another novel in which seeing both India and America as an outsider has leant the author real insight into one's place in the world and the difficulty in establishing it. Her short story collections, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, show her mastery of the genre, too.

Radiance, by Carter Scholz: The best book about scientists I've read in possibly forever, this talk of bureaucratic malfeasance at a national lab does a great and frequently hilarious job of contrasting the big pictures we all dream of with the more humdrum aspects of modern life.

Just to clarify the quote, Grouho Marx quipped that "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

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