The next two months I am going to do a little something different. I was inspired by an English book shop to take a look back at the last 20 years of what was popular in the bookstore world across different genres, including children’s books. Because it is a pretty long list of books, I thought I would divide it into the next two months. Some of these I have read and reviewed and some I have not, but it’s interesting to remember what we were reading and what we may have missed. My list from 2000-2009 follows:
2000
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
- His Dark Materials: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
- Storm Breaker by Anthony Horowitz
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- Persepolis 1& 2 by Marjane Satrapi
- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
- London by Peter Ackroyd
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
- Experience by Martin Amis
- The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
- Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
- English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
- Arthur: The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley Holland
2001
- Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
- Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
- Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
- The Magicians’ Guild by Trudi Canavan
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
- My Name is Red by Orphan Pamuk
- True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
- According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge
- Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
- The Wind Singer by Willliam Nicholson
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
2002
- Coraline by Neil Gaiman
- Any Human Heart by William Boyd
- Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
- Eragon by Christopher Paolini
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
- Spies by Michael Frayn
- White Mughals by William Dalrymple
- The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
2003
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- Dissolution by C. J. Sansom
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell
- Stasiland by Anna Funder
- We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- Empire by Niall Ferguson
- Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
- Brick Lane by Monica Ali
- Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- Vernon Good Little by DBC Pierre
- A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly
- Thursbitch by Alan Garner
- Property by Valerie Martin
2004
- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
- Watching the English by Kate Fox
- Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver
- Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce
- Gillead by Marilynne Robison
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill
- Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan
- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
- Attention All Shipping by Charlie Connelly
- The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinhurst
- Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke
- The Spook’s Apprentice by Joseph Delaney
- Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski
- Old Filth by Jane Gardam
- Fleamarket Close by Ian Rankin
- 2666 by Roberto Bolano
- How I live Now by Meg Rosoff
2005
- Never let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief by Rick Riordan
- Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince by J. K. Rowlings
- Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
- Kafka on the Shore by Murakami
- Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
- The Island by Victoria Hislop
- Looking for Alaska by John Green
- The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith
- The Sea by John Banville
- Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy
- Magyk by Angie Sage
- Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
- Postwar by Tony Judt
- Hitler’s Canary by Sandi Toksvig
- Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
- March by Geraldine Brooks
- Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
- Stuart by Alexander Masters
- A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marine Lewycka
- 1599 by James Shapiro
- Marley and Me by John Grogan
- Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
- Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathon Coe
2006
- The Secret- 10th Anniversary Edition by Rhonda Byrne
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
- Once by Morris Gleitzmann
- Eat, Pray, Love by Eizabeth Gilbert
- The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
- The Arrival by Shaun Tan
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
- Fun Hoe by Alison Bechdel
- The inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
- The Audacity of Hope by President Barrack Obama
- Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
- The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
- Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan
2007
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowlings
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
- Ottoline and the Yellow Cat by Chris Riddell
- The Gathering by Anne Enright
- Born to Run by Michael Morpurgo
- The Shack by William P. Young
- Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer
- The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
- The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Discovery of France by Graham Robb
- Darkmans by Nicola Barker
- Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass
- The We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
2008
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stroud
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
- The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows
- Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
- The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
- Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyers
- Leviathan by Philip Hoare
- The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
- Homicide by David Simon
- A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
- The Road Home by Rose Tremain
- The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
- Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer
2009
- Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- One Day by David Nichols
- A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- The City and The City by China Mieville
- Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson
- The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
- Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
- The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
- Open by Andre Agassi
- Home by Marilynne Robinson
- The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey
- The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
- Let the Great World Spin by Colum Mccann
- A Gambling Man by Jenny Uglow
- The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings