It’s mid-September, 2019, and we’re beginning to see the light (or to be slightly more accurate, the infinite pulsing darkness) at the end of the decade. In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking back at the ten years that were, as well as forward to the ones to come. To begin our descent, I proposed a staff poll, of sorts: I asked each of my colleagues in the Literary Hub office to make a list of the ten books from the last ten years that they thought we’d still be reading—for good or ill—ten years from now, circa 2030.

The below results collate the responses of 14 people, who range in age and interest as much as possible for a group that works for a literary website. I was not surprised to see Claudia Rankine’s Citizen top the list by a wide margin—that’s a book that keeps on getting more relevant; one hopes that in ten years we’ll be reading it as an artifact, but one also doubts it. Same goes for some of the others on here, though some of course are just very good novels that people will continue to enjoy.

Take a look, and if you’re so moved, tell us which books you think we’ll all still be reading, talking about, and studying in ten years time in the comments.

9 votes:

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

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6 votes:

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

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5 votes:

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad (2010)

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4 votes:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (et al) (2012)

George Saunders, Tenth of December (2013)

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012)

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015)

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3 votes:

Anne Carson, Nox (2010)

Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson, The Complete Stories (2015)

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2011)

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

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2 votes:

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (2017)





Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013)





Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012)





Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)





Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)





Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)





Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)





N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)





Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (2014)





Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (2011)





Tommy Orange, There There (2018)





Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)

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Also listed by at least one person:

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

Andy Weir, The Martian

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

Cheryl Strayed, Wild

Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version

David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon

Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Helen Garner, This House of Grief

Homer, tr. Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

Horacio Castellanos Moya, The Dream of My Return

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Javier Marías, The Infatuations

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle (et al)

Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Ling Ma, Severance

Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

Michael Lewis, The Big Short

Miriam Toews, Women Talking

Natalie Díaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Patrick Modiano, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

Patrick Raddon Keefe, Say Nothing

Patti Smith, Just Kids

Paul Beatty, The Sellout

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Robert Caro, The Passage of Power

Robert Macfarlane, Underland

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Sam Quinones, Dreamland

Santiago Gamboa, Night Prayers

Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

Susan Faludi, In The Darkroom

Svetlana Alexievich, Second-hand Time

Tara Westover, Educated

Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twenty-First Century

Tina Fey, Bossypants

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs: A Biography

Yuri Slezkine, The House of the Government