Hilary Mantel with her book 'Wolf Hall' in 2009 after she won the Booker Prize.
The New York Times has been gradually revealing its picks for the best 100 books of the 21st century, the complete list is now here, and Hilary mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ is Number 3!
More than 500 writers, critics, and others weighed in, with Italian author Elena Ferrante getting top honors for My Brilliant Friend of 2012.
"Reading this uncompromising, unforgettable novel is like riding a bike on gravel: It's gritty and slippery and nerve-racking, all at the same time," reads the Times explanation.
It was hard choosing the books for my list, but the first and easiest choice I made was “Wolf Hall.” (“The Mirror and the Light,” the third book in Mantel’s trilogy, was the second easiest.)
We see the past the way we see the stars, dimly, through a dull blurry scrim of atmosphere, but Mantel was like an orbital telescope: She saw history with cold, hard, absolute clarity. In “Wolf Hall” she took a starchy historical personage, Thomas Cromwell, and saw the vivid, relentless, blind-spotted, memory-haunted, grandly alive human being he must have been. Then she used him as a lens to show us the age he lived in, the vast, intricate spider web of power and money and love and need — right up until the moment the spider got him. — Lev Grossman, author of “The Bright Sword”
The Top 10 on the list:
・My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein (2012)
・The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
・Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (2009)
・The Known World, Edward P. Jones (2003)
・The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
・2666, Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer (2008)
・Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald; translated by Anthea Bell (2001)
・Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro 2005
・Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
Read the full list, going back to No. 100—Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson in 2007—along with brief descriptions of each book and explanations of why they made the cut.
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She deserves better. I thought My Brilliant Friend was nothing spectacular. It dragged. It was a DNF for me. Whereas, as we all know, Wolf Hall is utterly extraordinary.
She deserves better. I thought My Brilliant Friend was nothing spectacular. It dragged. It was a DNF for me. Whereas, as we all know, Wolf Hall is utterly extraordinary.
Wow!