20 Best Books I read in this decade - Part One

The current decade, the 20-teens, comes to an end in a month and, following the lead of the New York Times, it's time to take a brief look at what I've read over the past 10 years. I can't really post on the best works of fiction I've read since 2010; that list would consist of many truly monumental novels - Moby-Dick, Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Don Quixote, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Invisible Man, In Search of Lost Time, et al. - but the list would probably be the same or similar in any decade and would not offer any insight into this decade per se. With that in mind, here is part one of the 20 best books from the 20-teens that I have read:

7 Best Short-story collections from the 20-teens:

Gryphon, by Charles Baxter. 2011. This collection of new and previously published stories shows novelist and old friend Baxter's great skill and broad range in short fiction.

The New Yorker Stories, by Ann Beattie, 2011, gives a complete overview of Beattie's remarkable contribution over so many years to American short fiction.

Can't and Won't, by Lydia Davis. 2015. Very short stories from a completely unique stylist (and excellent translator) - some are moving, some hilarious.

Dear Life, by Alice Munro. 2012. Though she seems to have retired from writing, Munro is without question the greatest living English-language writer.

Tenth of December, by George Saunders. 2013. Saunders is our most imaginative, funny, and disturbing short-story writer, and this collection measures up to his best work.

Selected Stories (2010) and Last Stories (2014), by William Trevor, make it clear that without a doubt Trevor was one of the greatest writers of our time.

3 best Works in Translation I read in the current decade (these are works of fiction published in English for the first time in the 20-teens):

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing. 2006, tr. from the German 2018, which has everything a reader of literary fiction could want or hope for in a book: historical veracity, family and human drama, fully rounded characters, crisp pacing, highly dramatic action, excellent writing line by line without excess or flourishes.

Lucky Per, by Henrick Pontoppidan. 1904, tr. from the Danish in 2019. This book gives us all we'd want in a major novel: complex and fully rounded characters - particularly the central character - who interact with one another and grow over time, set against a well-realized socio-historic background.

The Door, by Magda Szabo. 1987, tr. from the Hungarian in 2015. Through the course of the narrative, we begin to see how rivals, antagonists with strong and wilful personalities, can clash but also can come to depend on each other. 

In tomorrow's post: The best novels I've read from the current decade (2010-2019)