The Aughts & The Naughts: Books Set In The 2000's & 2010's
/100 Years In Books: The Decades Series
There we were, at the precipice of a New Millennium, posed to truly comprehend what the digital age could mean. We could wipe the sweat from our brows after surviving the stroke of midnight as it hurled us into Y2K and concentrate on building our social media personalities. And it can’t be ignored that the cult of celebrity barrelled down upon us; reality television launched with a vengeance and every action of even the most remotely “famous” individual erupted in scandal.
What was happening in the book world you ask? Potter pandemonium exploded the Young Readers genre as we had known it! While some of the novels were initially released in the previous decade, this is when the fervor took hold! Setting new expectations and forcing writers to give something more to their younger audience. These decades also saw ambitious subjects tackled and creative mythos built, encouraging a new level of acceptance to a more elastic definition of the truth in our reading.
Women wunderkinds were everywhere in this glorious span of time. Tea Obreht, Jennifer Egan, Elena Ferrante, Cheryl Strayed, Jesamyn Ward and Roxane Gay; to name a few. International authors were streaming over the North American borders and Young Adult fiction allowed even the grown-ups to play. It cannot go unmentioned that this period launched the “domestic thriller” with books by Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins. A trend that shows no evidence of slowing down.
Tag along as we wander through reads set in these decades. Some will be emblematic of the times and others will play with our recollections and perceptions. All will offer up an experience that can only be found in the pages of well written books.
Books Set In The 2000’s…
My Year Of Rest & Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment in Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? She decides to embark on an extended hibernation to escape the ills of the world and figure it out.
Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
Cayce is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected.
The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner
It’s 2003 and Romy is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry with casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; all this is told with a deadpan tone that shows the absurdities of institutional living.
Snow Crash – Neil Stephanson
In reality, Hiro delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about an infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through an America so bizarre, so outrageous… you'll recognize it immediately.
Prep – Curtis Sittenfeld
Prep is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition. Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As she will learn it’s not as slick as it appears in photos.
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Steig Larsson
Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption. Incredibly atmospheric and well written!
The Emperors Children – Claire Messud
A dazzling, masterful novel about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way, and not, in New York City. A richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune; of innocence and experience: seduction and self-invention; of ambition; glamour, disaster, and promise.
Then We Came To The End – Jonathan Ferris
The characters in Then We Came To The End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."
Chronic City – Jonathan Lethem
Chase, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by banal dinner parties. A searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions.
Books Set In The 2010’s…
Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born in another time, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
The Institute – Stephen King
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents, telekinesis and telepathy, who got to this place the same way Luke did.
Slade House – David Mitchell
Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents, an odd brother and sister, extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late...
Exit West – Mohsin Hamid
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet; sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors, doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.
Olive, Again – Elizabeth Strout
The iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but also the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. Whether with a teenager coming to terms with the loss of her father, a young woman about to give birth during a hilariously inopportune moment, a nurse who confesses a secret high school crush, or a lawyer who struggles with an inheritance she does not want to accept, the unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspire moments of transcendent grace. In her uniquely snarky manner of course!
A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
When four classmates move to New York to make their way in the world, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome, but that will define his life forever.
Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. When she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.
Twelve Lives Of Samuel Hawley – Hannah Tinti
After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past; a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.
