100 cuốn sách hay nhất thế kỷ 21 - phần 2 (The Guardian - 2019)

Dưới đây là những cuốn sách được xếp hạng từ số 21 đến số 40:

21. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), translated by Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (2014)

In his Olympian history of humanity, Harari documents the numerous revolutions Homo sapiens has undergone over the last 70,000 years: from new leaps in cognitive reasoning to agriculture, science and industry, the era of information and the possibilities of biotechnology. Harari’s scope may be too wide for some, but this engaging work topped the charts and made millions marvel.
Read the review

Chart-topping history of humanity … Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: Olivier Middendorp

22. Tenth of December by George Saunders (2013)

This warm yet biting collection of short stories by the Booker-winning American author will restore your faith in humanity. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are employed as a status symbol – in these surreal satires of post-crash life Saunders reminds us of the meaning we find in small moments.
Read the review

23. The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (2001)

Emerging from Solomon’s own painful experience, this “anatomy” of depression examines its many faces – plus its science, sociology and treatment. The book’s combination of honesty, scholarly rigour and poetry made it a benchmark in literary memoir and understanding of mental health.
Read the review

24. A Visit from The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)

Inspired by both Proust and The Sopranos, Egan’s Pulitzer-winning comedy follows several characters in and around the US music industry, but is really a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection.
Read the review

25. Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018)

Rooney’s second novel, a love story between two clever and damaged young people coming of age in contemporary Ireland, confirmed her status as a literary superstar. Her focus is on the dislocation and uncertainty of millennial life, but her elegant prose has universal appeal.
Read the review

Sally Rooney focuses on the uncertainty of millennial life. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

26. Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty (2013), translated by Arthur Goldhammer (2014)

The beautifully written product of 15 years of research, Capital made its author an intellectual star – the modern Marx – and opened readers’ eyes to how neoliberalism produces vastly increased inequalities. Full of data, theories and historical analysis, its message is clear, and prophetic: unless governments increase tax, the new and grotesque wealth levels of the rich will encourage political instability.
Read the review

27. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (2001)

Canada’s observant and humane short story writer, who won the Nobel in 2013, is at her best in this collection. A housekeeper’s fate is changed by the pranks of her employer’s teenager daughter; an incorrigible flirt gracefully accepts his wife’s new romance in her care home. No character acts as at first expected in Munro’s stories, which are attuned to the tiniest shifts in perception.
Read the review

28. Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

A moving, book-length poem from the UK’s first female poet laureate, Rapture won the TS Eliot prize in 2005. From falling in love to betrayal and separation, Duffy reimagines romance with refreshing originality.
Read the review

29. A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009), translated by Don Bartlett (2012)

The first instalment of Knausgaard’s relentlessly self-examining six-volume series My Struggle revolves around the life and death of his alcoholic father. Whether or not you regard him as the Proust of memoir, his compulsive honesty created a new benchmark for autofiction.
Read the review

30. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

A thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south, this Pulitzer prize-winner combines extraordinary prose and uncomfortable truths. Two slaves flee their masters using the underground railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped slaves out of the south, wonderfully reimagined by Whitehead as a steampunk vision of a literal train.
Read the review

View image in fullscreen

Uncomfortable truths … Colson Whitehead. Photograph: Ramin Talaie

31. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (2015)

An electrifying memoir that captured a moment in thinking about gender, and also changed the world of books. The story, told in fragments, is of Nelson’s pregnancy, which unfolds at the same time as her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is beginning testosterone injections: “the summer of our changing bodies”. Strikingly honest, originally written, with a galaxy of intellectual reference points, it is essentially a love story; one that seems to make a new way of living possible.
Read the review

32. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)

“Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.” In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey.
Read the review

33. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)

The American cartoonist’s darkly humorous memoir tells the story of how her closeted gay father killed himself a few months after she came out as a lesbian. This pioneering work, which later became a musical, helped shape the modern genre of “graphic memoir”, combining detailed and beautiful panels with remarkable emotional depth.
Read the review

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

34. Outline by Rachel Cusk (2014)

This startling work of autofiction, which signalled a new direction for Cusk, follows an author teaching a creative writing course over one hot summer in Athens. She leads storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She hears from other people about relationships, ambition, solitude, intimacy and “the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women”. The end result is sublime.
Read the review

Outline by Rachel Cusk

35. The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (2010)

In this exquisite family memoir, the ceramicist explains how he came to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke – small Japanese ornaments – from his great-uncle. The unlikely survival of the netsuke entails De Waal telling a story that moves from Paris to Austria under the Nazis to Japan, and he beautifully conjures a sense of place. The book doubles as a set of profound reflections on objects and what they mean to us.
Read the review

36. Experience by Martin Amis (2000)

Known for the firecracker phrases and broad satires of his fiction, Amis presented a much warmer face in his memoir. His life is haunted by the disappearance of his cousin Lucy, who is revealed 20 years later to have been murdered by Fred West. But Amis also has much fun recollecting his “velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” youth, and paints a moving portrait of his father’s comic gusto as old age reduces him to a kind of “anti-Kingsley”.
Read the review

Martin Amis recalls his ‘velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted’ youth. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images

37. The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015)

A reunion dominates the Irish novelist’s family drama, but the inpidual stories of the five members of the Madigan clan – the matriarch, Rosaleen, and her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna, who escape and are bound to return – are beautifully held in balance. When the Madigans do finally come together halfway through the book, Enright masterfully reminds us of the weight of history and family.
Read the review

38. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)

Oxford graduate Nick Guest has the questionable good fortune of moving into the grand west London home of a rising Tory MP. Thatcher-era degeneracy is lavishly displayed as Nick falls in love with the son of a supermarket magnate, and the novel records how Aids began to poison gay life in London. In peerless prose, Hollinghurst captures something close to the spirit of an age.
Read the review

39. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)

Set around the unlikely bond between two wartime friends, Smith’s debut brilliantly captures Britain’s multicultural spirit, and offers a compelling insight into immigrant family life.

40. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

With cold, clear, precise prose, Didion gives an account of the year her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in their home. Her devastating examination of grief and widowhood changed the nature of writing about bereavement.
Read the review

Xem các phần khác tại đây: 

100 cuốn sách hay nhất thế kỷ 21 - phần 1 (The Guardian - 2019)

100 cuốn sách hay nhất thế kỷ 21 - phần 3 (The Guardian - 2019)

100 cuốn sách hay nhất thế kỷ 21 - phần 4 (The Guardian - 2019)

100 cuốn sách hay nhất thế kỷ 21 - phần 5 (The Guardian - 2019)

100 cuốn sách hay nhất thế kỷ 21 - link gốc (The Guardian - 2019)