Best Reads of the Decade
According to Goodreads, I’ve read exactly 900 books since I’ve created my account in 2011. A great majority of them being fiction. This site pre-dates the creation of my Goodreads account by eighteen months, so there probably is around 1 000 reviews available. Closer to 2 000 if you count movies and music. So, this site (originally 100% dedicated to books) turned 10 years old in september… you deserve to know what my favorite reads of the decade are before it ends.
For this exercise, I chose solely books that were written and published anywhere between 2010 and 2019. Older books have gotten their glory, it’s time to choose new immortals to celebrate. I went back through all my year-end lists for you and found about 30 books that stood out. Cutting the list to 10 was no easy task, but you deserve to know which one were truly better than the rest. Click on the titles to read the origina reviews.
Without further ado… here are your best book shopping tips of the decade:
Max Booth III - The Nightly Disease
The sweeping depth of this novel is what makes its appeal. At first funny and relatable like a Kevin Smith movie, it turns into a gut-wrenching tale of love and loneliness before finally taking an insane leap of logic, straight into Twin Peaks territory. It’s an emotional experience that reminded me of my first Haruki Murakami novels (not the 1,200 pages-long treaties about washing your butthole). It’s personal, heartfelt and alive in ways most novels aren’t.
Blake Butler - 300 000 000
Back when normal people were writing post-apocalyptic zombie fiction and getting rich, Blake Butler was writing apocalypse-as-it’s-happening-right-fucking-now fiction. People are frantically killing one another without second thought, institution are collapsing, accounts of the events happening are wildly different from one another. 300 000 000 is a horror novel for people who hate horror novels and all the mine field of clichés the genre demands. It has become one of my favorite books and the only novel I’ve read more than twice since Fight Club.
Joe Clifford - Give Up the Dead
A bleak, harrowing meditation on loss, brokenness and second chances. What makes Joe Clifford’s protagonist Jay Porter better than most is his inability to heal himself and to see the tremendous human being everybody else sees in him. This is the third novel of a series of 5 and all of them are wonderful, but Give Up the Dead is special because of its sheer commitment to explore the power and the dignity of flawed human beings.
Jordan Harper - Love & Other Wounds
Some writers are stylists. Others are storyteller. Those who do both are extremely rare and Jordan Harper is one of these wild unicorn. His debut short story collection blew me away by the sheer originality of its paradigm. It’s full of soulful characters looking for love and meaning on the fringes of existence. Dirt roads that lead to nowhere. Deserts that mirror the barrenness of the soul. We’ve been given a new Denis Johnson before Denis Johnson was even gone.
Jennifer Hillier - Wonderland
A brazen, clinical mystery trapped in the soul of a horror novel. What makes this novel so wonderful is its sheer inpredictability. While the form is rather traditional, the plot such byzantine turns that it’s absolutely impossible to outwit. I often compare Wonderland to Veronica Mars meets Rob Zombie movies, which is pretty accurate. But this novel is also everything I wanted Stephen King’s Joyland to be. It’s nasty, brutal and insanely witty.
Gabino Iglesias - Zero Saints
What. A. Novel. This book does many, many thngs well, but Gabino Iglesias’ portrayal of a character burdened by loneliness and remorse is incredibly vivid and powerful. He also tackled the erosion of reality someone suffers when traveling between world with great precision and originality. Border novels have become a dime a dozen in recent years and most of them are bad and melodramatic, but this one gracefully communicates how it feels like to start over a new world.
Dennis Lehane - The Drop
The last hurrah of an author who lost a lot of his luster over the last half of this decade. In The Drop, Dennis Lehane keeps it really simple and inside his comfort zone: it’s a straight shooting, understated character driven crime novel with a lonely narrator tired of people around him trying to make the world worse and worse every day. The Drop has a poignant, personal edge to it that gives it an haunting personality. Movie was pretty great, too.
J. David Osborne - A Minor Storm
It’s hard to explain exactly what made this book click for me. I just immensely related to the journey of a young man leaving normalcy behind and embracing a quest for enlightenment. It paints masculinity is a very positive lights, despite all its built-in imperfections and jagged edges. Being a young man in 2019 doesn’t necessarily means being stupid or selfish. It means making difficult choices and deciding who you want to be.
Tom Piccirilli - The Last Kind Words
Tom Piccirilli had this one thing that he did better than anyone: neo-noir with undertones of emotional emergency. Existential crisis. The Last Kind Words is exactly that, but at its most refined and polished. The tale of a brother looking to innocent his sibling from a murder that he’s going to pay for anyway is more of a family tragedy than an all-out mystery, but it’s a testatment to what make great characters click together and make genre fiction more than the sum of its parts.
Tiffany Scandal - Jigsaw Youth
This one blindsided its way unto this list. Simplicity. Straightforwardness. Raw emotional honesty. I’ve never thought I’d be interested in the life of a young american girl from Mexican descent, there I was… pacing myself through this book because I didn’t want it to end. Tiffany Scandal really tapped into these emotional levers that not only define who we are, but that also bind us to one another. These fragments of life will burn bright inside your soul long after you’re finished.
Honorable Mentions (they were cut last, but mostly due to technicalities)
Chuck Klosterman - I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains Real and Imagined
Easily one of my top 3 favorite books of this decade. Since it’s technically not fiction, I had to cross it off the list, though. But if I had been an asshole, my top 10 could’ve had like..5 or 6 Chuck Klosterman books. Thank God I’m a nice guy.
Pedro Proença - Benjamin
Ugh. It was a difficult choice to leave this one out. Anyone who treats a sphere of rubber with such humanity and philosophical consideration deserves many, many awards. Not even 100 pages long, it’s more of an enticing enigma than an emotional experience, though.
Iain Ryan - The Tunnel Island Novels
My favorite series of the decade. I couldn’t single out one to make the list, though. They were all awesomely brutal in their own way, filled with disgusted cops doing horrible things to people in order to keep a bogus sense of peace in their false paradise. There could’ve been at least two titles in the top 10,
