If you’ve been counting – and even if you haven’t – the 21st century has ticked over 25 years. In fact, if we’re marking the year 2000 as the first year of the new century and millennium, as per convention, this milestone was passed at the end of last year. Some literary-inclined publications have used the occasion to publish “best of” lists for the past quarter century. The books below represent my attempt at organising and ranking my favourite reads – fiction and non-fiction – published since 2000. It is not a list compiled after considerable rumination, late-night teeth gnashing or references to past notes. Rather, the first place I consulted was my bookshelf: which books published in recent times have been revisited – and enjoyed on re-read? Which had me admiring the craft on display, the storytelling? Which brought me pleasure? These were the criteria.
Empires of the Plains, by Lesley Adkins
Providing insight into the origins of written language, Empires of the Plains is an extraordinary true story, excellently told, of a real-life Indiana Jones, one Henry Rawlinson, who used an amazing facility for ancient languages and a taste for adventure to make enormous strides during the 19th century in the understanding of cuneiform, a type of written language that predates hieroglyphics. The “plains” of the title are those that exist between the Tigris and Euphrates, the site of many cultures that rose and fell over the past 10,000 years. Rawlinson’s efforts were focused on a monument carved into rock vertiginously high on a cliffside at Behistun in western Iran. There, Darius the Great ordered a tribute to his conquests, carved in three ancient languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. With grit, nous, bravery and determination, Rawlinson led a charge to decipher the text and shed light on a chapter of history little was known about. This is an edifying yet rollicking read.
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantell
What an incredibly evocative wordsmith Hilary Mantel was. A two-time winner of the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel was perhaps unfairly denied a third bauble for the final book in the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light. Wolf Hall tells the story of the murderous Henry VIII, but with Henry’s major domo, Thomas Cromwell, front and centre. In the past Cromwell has typically been depicted as a villain, but here he is a family man, working behind the scenes to minimise the damage from Henry’s impulses, and to (of course) maximise the profit.
The Year of Reading Dangerously, by Andy Miller
After graduating with a degree in literature from prestigious Cambridge University, aspiring writer Andy Miller finds his professional life on a limited, predictable trajectory of customer service in a high street bookstore, literary ambitions on permanent hold as a grinding daily commute exacts its toll. Deciding that something must be done, Miller sets out to reignite his love of words and books, by dedicating his quotidian train time to consuming the great tomes of the Western Canon that he claims at parties to have read, but never actually got around to. There hasn’t been a book this exciting about one man’s reading adventure since Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily.
The Havana Room, by Colin Harrison
The plots and characters (apart from the city of New York) vary from tome to Harrison tome, but often it’s a case of rearranging the ingredients: a generous helping of shady/dislikeable characters trying to cut corners and get what’s theirs, a past that can’t be outrun, a soupcon of sex, a dollop of power, a central character dealing with challenges beyond his control – all told in Harrison’s high style and hung around a propulsive plot. After losing his high-paying job, luxury house and then his family, untethered Bill Wyeth finds himself drawn daily to a chi chi Manhattan steakhouse whose denizens seek a taste of forbidden pleasure in the exclusive eponymous space. But just what exactly is going on in the Havana Room?
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, by Clive James
Polymath, writer, critic, aphorist, cad, genial TV talk show host, fierce intellectual – Mr Clive James must surely be one of the sharpest minds to have emerged from the colonies. This is a book that James spent a professional lifetime preparing to write. It’s an A–Z of cultural, scientific and political figures prominent, as the subtitle suggests, in the margins of James’ version of the 20th century. He was keeping detailed notes. Some of these individuals are prominent, iconic even. Titans. Others would doubtless have been consigned to more obscure compendiums had they not been included here, or perhaps forgotten altogether. There are chapters dedicated to such towering souls as Albert Einstein, but others to names such as Zinka Milanov, an opera singer who was once said to have uttered, “Either you got the voice, or you don’t got the voice: and I got the voice”. A chapter might start as an exploration of a historical figure, but veer off in a different direction, settle certain points, reference a bunch of names or works with which I might only have been vaguely familiar, and then return to the original narrative strand and conclude in James’ satisfyingly heady style.
Strange Bodies, by Marcel Theroux
You might recognise the surname of writer Marcel Theroux, the eldest son of renowned scribe Paul Theroux (Mosquito Coast), brother of documentary maker and podcaster Louis, and cousin of Hollywood actor and scriptwriter Justin (who has Tropic Thunder among his scriptwriting credits). Marcel’s oeuvre is the unsettling, clever and compelling literary novel. Yes, that is a thing. And perhaps it’s the best way of describing Strange Bodies, which is as unnerving as it is moving. The novel opens with a knock on a woman’s door by an odd-looking stranger claiming to be academic Nicholas Slopen, one of her old beaus, despite bearing no physical resemblance to him. A carefully concealed memory stick left behind turns out to be the story we have in our hands – and what a page-turner it is!
Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey
As the progeny of a former nun and former monk, writer Catherine Nixey has some bona fides for writing about religion. In this, her second book, Nixey does a deep dive into the many alternative versions of Christianity that proliferated in the centuries following Jesus’ life and death. The Ophites, for example, believed that Christ had appeared on Earth in the form of a serpent. They therefore celebrated mass by encouraging a snake to crawl over the altar on which loaves had been placed, consecrating them in the process. Another sect dating from the first century AD believed that King Herod rather than Jesus was the Messiah for whom they had been waiting. There are, in fact, plenty of conflicting tales about Jesus to be found, and apparently more than one charismatic bearded young man performing miracles and collecting acolytes while roaming around the Middle East in the first century. Certainly, more than enough for Nixey to start asking questions and looking through files, synthesising the findings into this fascinating read.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
How prescient and well timed was this take from Canadian scribe Emily St. John Mandel, which depicts a near future in which a potent virus wipes out vast swathes of humanity. In such challenging circumstances would we rise to the occasion by forming into cooperative communities to feed, clothe and defend ourselves, or would we descend, a la Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, to our base instincts?
Soon, by Andrew Santella
In my small library there are some fantastic non-fiction and reference books published in the past 25 years that have become cherished resources or often-returned-to reads. The Field Guide to Typography by Peter Dawson is one I love flicking through even though I can’t help but think focusing on getting to know a handful of typefaces would probably serve me better that being exposed to them all. I was impressed by Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century by Simon Kuper. It is as informative as it is engaging. Another Gallic tome, The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard by Ollivier Pourriol, provided some nuggets (or petit four, perhaps) of wisdom. Morning by Allan Jenkins made we want to (one day) start setting my alarm earlier. But a book that spoke to me and my life-long proclivity for scheduling a better (i.e., later) time for tasks was Soon, an exploration of procrastination throughout history. Beautifully written by Andrew Santella, the book sets out to find out why the will to delay has been the signal habit of such luminaries as Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles Darwin and Frank Lloyd Wright, and what, if anything, can be done to overcome it.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
There is one remaining slot on the list of 10, which has allocated five each of fiction and non-fiction (my self-imposed rules for this compilation). It could easily have been taken by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, or The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I also inhaled Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner and was thoroughly entranced by The Empusium by Olga Tokorczuk. The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz was a most excellent addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon. The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano Da Empoli, inspired by Vladimir Putin’s major domo Vladisav Surkov, was consumed in a few short sessions. Yet at a time when inspiration rather than darkness and grimness was called for, A Gentleman in Moscow answered this call. The novel tells the story of the charming and stoic Russian aristocrat Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who is deigned by the Bolshivik authorities to live out his days in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, where he remains under house arrest for 30 years. Rather than succumbing to self-pity, he finds pleasure in reading and food – it is a luxury hotel in which he is ensconced, after all – and in cultivating friendships with staff and guests. His life becomes one of service. A former financier, Mr Towles has an authoritative but engaging writing style, and has our main character share many useful aphorisms, such as “Imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.” Perhaps it is time to read A Gentleman in Moscow again.
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