When I think about the books that are honored as the top reads in a given year, I usually find that I haven’t read even a tiny percentage of the “best” books listed. I’m a decent reader; I have an annual goal of 25 books in a year, and I usually get fairly close to that number. But my reading depends on whatever books I decide to borrow from the library, or buy for a couple of bucks on sites like Bookbub or Early Bird Books. Or even Amazon. I can find a lot of books that way, but this strategy misses some of the most important books that come out in a given year, judging by those end-of-the-year lists, as well as by annual national literary awards.
So I decided to set a target. I’ve made a list of 50 award-winning books from the last decade that I will read in the current decade. Ten years gives me plenty of time to read 50 books.
Then, at the end of 2029, I’ll make a new list, of books from the ’20s.
Now, of course, this is an arbitrary exercise. There are a lot of different book awards presented each year. I’ve chosen two sets of awards—the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Awards. Within those sets, there are subcategories. For the Pulitzers, I chose Fiction, General Nonfiction and Biography/Autobiography. For the National Book Awards, I chose Fiction and Nonfiction.
One might think there would be a lot of overlap in the lists—that the experts on the Pulitzer committee and the National Book Awards committee might actually agree on what is the best novel or the best nonfiction book in a given year. In fact, though, over 10 award cycles, there were only three books that appeared on more than one list. I guess that’s just a demonstration of the broad array of books that are published in a given year, as well as the room for different opinions on the best or most important books written that year.
Before we get to the list, a few caveats.
First, you’ll notice that the Pulitzer and NBA awards seem to operate on different time frames. The Swerve, for example, won a National Book Award for 2011, and a Pulitzer for 2012. I’m sure this is just a matter of different cutoff dates and is not significant.
Second, even though these books are award winners, they’re not necessarily the “best” books for any given reader. Me, for example. Of the 50 books you’ll see listed below, I had read only two before this year—The Goldfinch and Salvage the Bones. So I’ve picked exactly 4 percent of the award winners. You can see for yourself my expertise in this matter.
(Since I created this list at the beginning of the year, I’ve read two more: The Round House and Between the World And Me. Four down, 46 to go!)
Third, you’ll notice three titles in red; those are the ones that are the duplicates. At the bottom, I have four more books—which I arbitrarily chose chosen from the short-list finalists in the same categories as those three duplicates, plus the one year that the Pulitzer committee somewhat controversially declined to select a winner in the Fiction category. That’s the only bit of subjectivity in this list.
Fourth, I’ve created this same list as a “shelf” in my Goodreads account, although I don’t know how useful that is because I don’t know if anyone else can access it, or, for that matter, if anyone would want to. Anyway, it’s called “Books-From-The-Teens” and maybe, or maybe not, this link will take you there.
And finally, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve gotten past the inherent nerdiness of the exercise. You are welcome to copy the list and use it for your own purposes. Hey, if you want, you can keep the same list for yourself and follow the same reading strategy for the 2020s. Keep me posted on your progress, if you’d like.
OK, without further ado, here’s the list. Happy reading!
Fiction
Pulitzer Prize
2010 – Tinkers by Paul Harding
2011 – A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2012 – (no award given)
2013 – The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
2014 – The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
2015 – All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
2016 – The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
2017 – The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
2018 – Less by Andrew Sean Greer
2019 – The Overstory by Richard Powers
National Book Award
2010 – Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
2011 – Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
2012 – The Round House by Louise Erdrich
2013 – The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
2014 – Redeployment by Phil Klay
2015 – Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson
2016 – The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
2017 – Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
2018 – The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
2019 – Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Nonfiction
Pulitzer Prize – General Nonfiction
2010 – The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold Warm Arms Race by David E. Hoffman
2011 – Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2012 – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2013 – Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King
2014 – Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Don Fagin
2015 – The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
2016 – Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick
2017 – Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
2018 – Locking Up Our Own by James Forman
2019 – Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold
Pulitzer Prise – Biography/Autobiography
2010 – The First Tycoon (Cornelius Vanderbilt) by T.J. Stiles
2011 – Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
2012 – George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
2013 – The Black Count (Count of Monte Cristo) by Tom Reiss
2014 – Margaret Fuller: A New American life by Megan Marshall
2015 –The Pope and Mussolini by Daniel I. Kertzer
2016 – Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
2017 –The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
2018 – Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser
2019 – The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
National Book Award
2010 – Just Kids by Patti Smith
2011 – The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
2012 – Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
2013 – The Unwinding by George Packer
2014 – Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth & Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
2015 – Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehishi Coates
2016 – Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
2017 – The Future Is History by Masha Gessen
2018 – The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
2019 – The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Substitutions
Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson (for Pulitzer no-award in 2012)
The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder (for The Underground Railroad duplicate)
One Hundred Names For Love by Diane Ackerman (for The Swerve duplicate)
We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler (for The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke duplicate)
Featured photo credit: Pexels
