A Decade of Reading: The 10 Most Significant Books, 2012 to 2021

Top 10

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Silence by Shūsaku Endō

Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

The Evenings by Gerard Reve

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

Honorable Mentions

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Children of Men by PD James

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor 

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

The Trial by Kafka

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Old School by Tobias Wolff

Significant Authors Who Somehow Didn't Make the First List But Deserve Mention Because They Wrote a Lot of Books I Read and Loved Over the Past Ten Years

Tobias Wolff

Haruki Murakami

C.S. Lewis

Ron Hansen

Toni Morrison

Evelyn Waugh

Flannery O’Connor

W. G. Sebald

Some Final Thoughts & a Tentative Rubric

When I label a book a "favorite," what do I mean?  Is it different if it's a "favorite" of a particular year or of "all-time"?  In short, how do I determine the significance of a book to me?

Below is a two-criterion rubric for answering exactly these questions.  To be honest, for most years and most books, I distinguish between "significant" and "not significant" ─ or somewhere between these extremes ─  on a gut-level.  In fact, I created this rubric as an attempt to formalize my unconscious (or at least unreflective) responses to books.  The relationship between the two (the gut-response and rubric) might not be perfect; but after creating it, I've used it to reflect on other books, and it seems accurate, even if not perfect. 

Rubric

1.1.  A book is significant if and when the reading experience was powerful.  By experience, I mean emotional experience, as well as physical, psychological, or even spiritual.  But the root of this is phenomenological: the felt experience when I was reading was powerful.  1.2  A book is significant if and when the memory of the reading experience echoes, in some shape or form, the power and/or form of the initial reading experience.  The very thought of when I read the book (not just the thought of the book, but the thought of when I read the book) is enough to encourage a return to that experience.  (In this way, I both want to reread these types of books but am simultaneously afraid to do so.  My desire is rooted in an attempt to replicate or even deepen the original experience; the fear comes from the potential that neither will happen.)

2.  A book is significant if and when it changes me, if and when it speaks truth to me.  I bow to the words of Tobias Wolff here because he speaks exactly what I believe, but he said it first ─ and he said it a hell of a lot better: "I was changed by literature, not by cautionary or exhortatory literature, but by the truth as I found it in literature. I recognize the world in a different way because of it, and I continue to be influenced in that way by it. Opened up, made more alert, and called to a greater truthfulness in my own accounting of things, not just in my writing, in my life as well."  From a young child, what Wolff says is true for me.