Which are the best 5 novels you have read in the last 5 years?

Cafe Society
1

I’m starting this thread mainly for the fun of it, and perhaps to learn a thing or two as well.

So fellow dopers, which 5 books have lingered in your memory during the last 5 years?

I’ll start:

  1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
  2. The Gone-Away World by Nick Harckway
  3. Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin
  4. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
  5. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

All these books I can remember quite vivdly, and to deny they’ve had an impact on me would be an understatement.

So fellow Dopers, which 5 novels (in 5 years), would you say have been the most impressive or best for you?

2

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
The Rook - David O’Malley
Child of Fire - Harry Connoly
Hounded - Kevin Hearne
Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay

3

Brother to Dragons - Charles Sheffield
Speaker for the Dead- Orson Scott Card
Mother of Demons - Eric Flint
Inside Job - Connie Willis
Singularity Sky - Charles Stross

4

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (also The Kite Runner, and The Mountains Echoed by the same author.)
House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III
The Odds - Stewart O’Nan
The Headhunters - Jo Nesbo
Sunset Park - Paul Auster

5

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke
The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich
The Terror, Dan Simmons
The Son, Philipp Meyer

…Cinnamon & Gunpowder, by Eli Brown is rising in the Best Books of the Last Five Years firmament, but I’m not quite finished reading it yet, so I can’t say for sure.

6

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski

7

Oh, forgot The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. That was indeed amazing, and sad, and triumphant. I’m only a little way into Greg Ile’s Natchez Burning and I am utterly hooked. Apparently it’s the first in a planned trilogy. I went through a phase of reading black authors earlier this year (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Alex Hailey, Walter Mosely) and this book fits that same theme very well.

8

Master of Hestviken Sigrid Undset
***Independent People Halldor ***Laxness
Gunnar’s Daughter Sigrid Undset
Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens
The Dwarf Par Lagerkvist

9

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Didn’t see the movie)
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Children of God by Maria Doria Russell
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell

And I just finished The Golem and the Jinni by Helen Wecker and I absolutely loved it. It’s got some magical realism going on, so if you don’t like that kind of thing, avoid it. But otherwise, very unusual story and characters. I hated for it to end.

10

The last 5 years? Oy. I need to do two genre lists for this.

Fiction
Nicholson Baker: The Anthologist
Michael Cunningham: Specimen Days
E. L. Doctorow: Homer and Langley
Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

F&SF
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
Michael Flynn: Eifelheim
Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods