10 Most Important Books of the 2000s

When future readers look back at the dawn of the 21st century, what books are they going to read first? Below is a curated selection of written works published between 2001 and 2009 that should stand the test of time, and should be regarded one hundred years from now as peak literature. A few things to know about the entries here before getting started. Each book had its moment during the 2000s, achieving critical and/or commercial significance. Each has a lasting legacy to this day, but not all of them are nearly as widely read as they should be. There are six novels here, two memoirs, and two works of non-fiction. There are some obvious choices, and some surprising ones. And there are some noticeably absent titles. (For those of you interested in the methodology of these lists, we'll pull back the curtain a little bit at the end of the article.) The goal here is to try to create a map of the 2000s in books. A selection readers can turn to in order to catch a small sense of what it was like to be alive, and be reading, in the first decade of the 21st century. Erasure Written By Percival Everett; Published In 2001 Erasure is the defining work of early 21st-century literary satire. Now, that doesn't necessarily make it the greatest. "Greatest" is subjective, and open to interpretation. By "defining," we're talking about a book that is undeniably great, but which also came at precisely the right time to set the tone for an era. That's what Percival Everett's Erasure is. The tone-setter for the 2000s. Erasure follows a black author of highbrow literary fiction, struggling to make it as a writer, who unwittingly finally finds success with a parodic caricature of a racist novel. Everett's novel is maddeningly funny, but it is also potently critical of how black art is treated in a predominantly white culture. Erasure is challenging, especially during its novel-within-a-novel sections, but worth it for how profound it is, and how much of an influence it had on the subsequent quarter-century of satire. The Known World Written By Edward P. Jones; Published In 2003 The Known World is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the 21st century. It is also representative of an essential literary genre: historical fiction. If we could only select one historical fiction from the 2000s to preserve for posterity, The Known World would be a consensus pick, though it would be a real "kill your darlings" decision to make. The known world takes place in 1855, and centers on the life and death of Henry Townsend, a freed slave who later became a slave owner. The Known World doesn't flinch away from its exploration of the racial history of America, on the thematic level, while Edward P. Jones' prose and storytelling are fiction at its most flawless. Jones' novel was another milestone work of early 2000s fiction, one of the books that set a high bar for what literary achievement looks like in the 21st century. The Kite Runner Written By Khaled Hosseini; Published In 2003 Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini's debut novel The Kite Runner came at a critical juncture in history. It was published less than two years after the United States' invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and just two months after the U.S. went to war in Iraq. The Kite Runner's coming-of-age story, set against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent rise of the Taliban struck a chord with readers, and the book became a major bestseller. Literature's greatest power comes from bridging gaps. Gaps between individuals, gaps between eras, and gaps between cultures. The Kite Runner gave readers worldwide a direct line into Afghan culture, and proved to be an essential and emotionally intense book that bridged cultures at a time when it was desperately needed. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Written By Jonathan Safran Foer; Published In 2005 Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredible Close is an essential work of 2000s literature because it spearheaded the first generation of novels to reckon with the trauma of 9/11. Set in 2002, the book is narrated by Oskar Schell, a boy whose father died in the World Trade Center, a lens through which Foer reckoned with the generational impact of the attacks. For readers around Oskar's age, even those who didn't lose someone directly in the attacks felt the gravity of realizing they would come of age in a completely different world. Extremely Loud embodies that in a literary adventure that can only be described as "rollicking." Foer's prose, told from Oskar's precocious POV, is joyously overzealous even when it is gutwrenchingly sad. Few books are as aptly "of their time" as Extremely Loud & Incredible Close, which has made it a challenging book for many, but also makes it undeniable as one of the aughts most important works. Olive Kitteridge Written By Elizabeth Strout; Published In 2008 To understand Olive Kitteridge's place on this list, it is important to note that the 1990s and 2000s were a kind of "short story revolution." Short stories have always been a vital form in contemporary literature, but short story "cycles" and collections have become increasingly popular and prestigious over the past several decades. Olive Kitteridge rode the crest of that wave; the book collects stories published by Elizabeth Strout in the '90s and aughts, featuring the eponymous Olive in major and minor roles while exploring life in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Strout's book won 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and paved the way for the generation of linked story collections to come in the 2010s and 2020s. Beyond that, Olive Kitteridge is also a brilliant portrayal of modern American life, making it a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the turn of the century, if they weren't around yet, and for those who were who want to revisit it. A Mercy Written By Toni Morrison; Published In 2009 Toni Morrison's A Mercy is impossible to avoid on a list like this, and for good reason. Morrison is one of America's greatest writers, of any era, and it is a joy that her career lasted into the 2010s. A Mercy is generally cited as her late-career masterpiece, her best work since between recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. A Mercy bounces between perspectives to tell the story of a slave named Florens and her owners, the Vaarks. Morrison's prose is as lyrically powerful as ever in the novel, and there's also a poetic sparseness to A Mercy, a slim novel that can be read in a single day. Toni Morrison wrote just one other novel in the 2000s, '03's Love, which would beat out most other novels for inclusion here, just by virtue of the author's virtuoso status. Yet A Mercy edges out Love, if only slightly, as the best Toni Morrison book of the decade. Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books Written By Azar Nafisi; Published In 2003 Reading Lolita in Tehran came out the same year as The Kite Runner, and it served the same critical purpose: to humanize people in the Middle East for readers worldwide. Azar Nafisi's memoir does so immersively, deftly taking readers inside her journey as a woman and an academic before and after Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. Nafisi recounts her formation of an unofficial book club, which gathers to read banned Western texts including Vladimir Nabokov's controversial Lolita, but also The Great Gatsby, and Jane Austen, and more. Interspersed with her story are meditations on power, religion, extremism, and modernity, equally emotionally compelling and intellectually thought-provoking. Reading Lolita in Tehran was a bestseller and commercial success, but its cultural impact is its true footprint in the shifting sands of 20th-century literary history, and that print remains evident to this day. Fun Home Written By Allison Bechdel; Published In 2006 Fun Home, subtitled A Family Tragicomic, is another can't-miss memoir from the aughts. Allison Bechdel's pioneering work of graphic memoir is a brilliant portrayal of both burgeoning sexuality and the complications of modern American family life. Much of the "tragicomedy" of Fun Home centers around Bechdel's father, and her questions about sexuality and family history provide the emotional and critical throughlines of the book. Fun Home has attracted significant attempts to ban it from school curriculums and libraries, due to its content, but at the same time, it has been critically lauded by just about every literary metric. Fun Home is a monumental work of 20th-century queer non-fiction, and also a boundary-pushing work of illustrated literature. Like other books listed here, it merits inclusion as an important work because of the outsized influence it has had on the next generation of graphic memorists. The Smartest Guys In The Room Written By Barbara McLean & Peter Elkind; Published In 2003 The collapse of Enron happened in the shadow of 9/11, in December 2001, but it still stands as one of the turning points of the nascent century. It was a massive scandal and had lasting consequences for the landscape of American business. It is also an epic tale of hubris and folly, which has been the subject of multiple books and movies. One of the first of these, and one of the best, is Barbara McLean and Peter Elkind's The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, which traces the company's history from regional to global powerhouse, and eventually to bankruptcy and disgrace. Most of the entries here have been examples of books that capture the vibe and the spirit of the 2000s, but Smartest Guys is for readers who want to understand the on-the-ground, nuts-and-bolts details of the 21st-century's first and greatest financial scandal (so far.) Freakonomics Written By Stephen J. Dubner & Steven Levitt; Published In 2005 Freakonomics was a huge, bestselling phenomenon in the mid-2000s. It was also a pivotal work of nonfiction that changed the game moving forward. Subtitled A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, the book did the heaviest lifting possible by making its subject exciting and engaging for average readers. Freakonomics helped raise awareness for a generation of readers that they live inside an economic system, helping them understand the invisible hand that guides so much of modern everyday life. On the level of prose, Freakonomics was a feat of popular writing, putting a highly technical and potentially "boring" subject into terms readers could not just understand, but enjoy. As far as a literary portrait of the aughts goes, Freakonomics is absolutely a must-read in the non-fiction category, though some of its findings have been supplanted and updated in subsequent years. Final Thoughts: "Important" is a tricky word. Important to who? Important to what? To when? One way of going about putting together this selection would have been to take a broad approach and consider the books from the 2000s that helped shape popular culture as it is today. That list would have been dominated by Harry Potter, a couple Song of Ice and Fire books, a couple Hunger Games books, Robert Kirkman's zombie comic series The Walking Dead, Marvel and DC superhero stories. Things like that. It would have been a testament to the hegemony of genre entertainment in today's media landscape. This list takes a more narrow focus, looking at book culture specifically. The entries above were milestone works of literary fiction and non-fiction in the 2000s. Books that had an impact at the time, and still have an influence on today's writers, critics, and readers. Book that are crucial to understanding the history of 21st-century literature. What does your list look like, readers? What are your picks for the 2000s' most important books?