A while back, we invited you to tell us the best book you read in
the first year of the new millennium. We were thrilled
with the response. Literally thousands of you cast your vote for
the 2002 Puddly Awards. So who did you choose to wear this year's
Golden Galoshes? Actually, you chose over a thousand different titles.
We consolidated this list down to the fifty titles that received
the most votes.
The
Harry Potter Series
by J. K. Rowling
#1
The
Harry Potter Series
by J. K. Rowling
What
is there to say about the phenomenal Harry Potter series? J. K.
Rowling's ongoing fantasy series about a mischievous boy making
his adventurous way through Hogwarts School for Witchcraft has done
for the world of books what John, Paul, George, and Ringo did four
decades ago for pop music. Pottermania is this generation's British
invasion — without the moppy hair.
harry
potter boxed set
harry
potter No. 1, No.
2, No.
3, No.
4
visit
our harry potter page
#2
The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon
"I'm
not sure what the exact definition of a 'great American novel'
is, but I'm pretty sure that Michael Chabon's sprawling, idiosyncratic,
and wrenching new book is one."
Daniel Mendelsohn, New
York Magazine
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more about this title
read
the powells.com interview
winner
of the 2001 pulitzer prize for fiction
#3
The Lord of the
Rings Trilogy
by J. R. R. Tolkien
"No
imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious
and so true....Here are beauties which pierce like swords and burn
like cold iron."
C. S. Lewis
visit
our lord of the rings page
#4
The
Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
"Yes,
there are a million novels on just this theme, but none move so
perfectly between black comedy and tragic pathos; none are written
with such swooping lyric intensity; none make so overt the link
between the kitsch — the junk food — of Middle American
dreaming (turkey in the oven, the kids all home playing touch
football) and the unhappy realities it tries to stave off and
cannot. What this man writes is true, and what is true indicts
us."
Sven Birkerts, Esquire
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more about this title
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the powells.com interview
read
the entire esquire review
#5
Prodigal
Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
"A
complex web of human and natural struggle and interdependency is
analyzed with an invigorating mixture of intelligence and warmth....Kingsolver
doesn't hesitate to lecture us, but her lessons are couched in a
context of felt life so thick with recognition and implication that
we willingly absorb them. This deservedly popular writer takes risks
that most of her contemporaries wouldn't touch with the proverbial
ten-foot pole.
Prodigal Summer is another triumphant vindication
of her very distinctive art. "
Kirkus Reviews
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#6
The
Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
"With
the publication of
The Poisonwood Bible, this easy, humorous,
competent, syrupy writer has been elevated to the ranks of the
greatest political novelists of our time. She is something new:
a political novelist who is careful not to step on anyone's toes.
Barbara Kingsolver does not finally give a hoot about Africa."
Lee Siegel, The New Republic
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more about this title
#7
The
Red Tent
by Anita Diamant
"Diamant
vividly conjures up the ancient world of caravans, farmers, midwives,
slaves, and artisans...her Dinah is a compelling narrator that
has timeless resonance."
Merle Rubin, The Christian Science
Monitor
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#8
The
Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
"[An]
absorbing new novel, of all the author's books to date, The Blind
Assassin is most purely a work of entertainment — an expertly
rendered Daphne du Maurieresque tale that showcases Ms. Atwood's
narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic."
Michiko
Kakutani, New York Times
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more about this title
winner
of the 2000 booker prize
read
an excerpt
#9
John
Adams
by David McCullough
"Given
that your average American learned much of his country's history
at that show at Disney World with the scary automatons in goofy
Amadeus-era tights, it's no small feat that this narrative succeeds
so marvelously well at rendering all these players of early American
history human....Here is a book that's so good it'll make you
shiver."
Adrienne Miller, Esquire
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more about this title
read
the entire esquire review
read
an excerpt
#10
American
Gods
by Neil Gaiman
"...
American
Gods is a crackerjack suspense yarn with an ending that both
surprises and makes perfect sense, as well as many passages of
heady, imagistic writing."
Laura Miller, Salon.com
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more about this title
read
the entire salon review
read
a letter from Neil Gaiman to powells.com
#11
A
Painted House
by John Grisham
"John
Grisham's
A Painted House is the best kind of book. By the
time you turn the last page, you're so involved with the characters,
you want to know what happens to them afterward."
The Denver
Post
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more about this title
#12
His
Dark Materials Trilogy
by Philip Pullman
"Philip
Pullman is a writer I very much admire. I think he can write most
adult authors off the page....I think he's amazing."
J.
K. Rowling
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more about these titles
read
the powells.com interivew
#13
White
Teeth
by Zadie Smith
"Clearly,
Smith does not lack for powers of invention. The problem is that
there is too much of it....At her best, she approaches her characters
and makes them human; she is much more interested in this, and more
naturally gifted at it, than is Rushdie. For a start, her minor
Dickensian caricatures and grotesques, the petty filaments of this
book, often glow....[H]er book lacks moral seriousness. But her
details are often instantly convincing, both funny and moving. They
justify themselves."
James Woods, The New Republic
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more about this title
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the entire new republic review
#14
Fast
Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser
"Forget
the urban legends about rats in chicken buckets and bodily fluids
in the deep-fryer. Eric Schlosser's new Extra Value Meal of a tome
is Anthony Bourdain's
Kitchen Confidential with twice the
heart and one-tenth the budget. Incomprehensibly svelte (from the
neck up, anyway, in his jacket photo), Schlosser ate 'an enormous
amount of fast food' during the two fry-soaked years he spent researching
Fast Food Nation, and fortunately for us, he lived to tell
the tale."
Rebecca Schuman, Esquire
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more about this title
read
the entire esquire review
read
an excerpt
#15
A
Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
"Those
who continue to harp on the inevitable decline of the novel ought
to hold off for a while. The unique task of the genre, after all,
is truthfulness to human experience in all its variety, and thanks
to the great migrations of population in our time, human variety
is to be found in replenished abundance all around us....Consider
Rohinton Mistry....Rhoninton Mistry needs no infusions of magical
realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is
quite magical enough."
A. G. Mojtabai, New York Times Book
Review
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more about this title
#16
Empire
Falls
by Richard Russo
"Richard Russo first made his reputation with a series of blue-collar
novels that suggested a more antic and expansive Raymond Carver.
But by the time he published
Straight Man, in 1997, Russo
was clearly interested in breaking new ground, and that foray into
academic farce showed off his comic timing and sneaky construction
to superb effect. Now comes
Empire Falls, the author's most
ambitious work to date."
James Marcus, Atlantic Online
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more about this title
read
the powells.com interview
read
the entire atlantic online review here
#17
Me
Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
"The joy of each piece is in the reading itself….Each
essay is a delight, and explores the different worlds of family,
city, and foreign countries in a consistent voice and rhythm....Some,
in fact, are among the best things Sedaris has written."
The
Boston Book Review
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more about this title
read
an excerpt
#18
Peace
Like a River
by Leif Enger
"I'm urging this book on you because it is written in prose
tart and crisp as a Minnesota Autumn.
Peace Like a River
is seductive and chatty and deliciously American and there are passages
so wondrous and wise you'll want to claw yourself with pleasure."
Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis
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more about this title
read
an excerpt
#19
The
Fiery Cross
by Diana Gabaldon
Diana Gabaldon mesmerized readers with her award-winning Outlander
novels, four dazzling
New York Times bestsellers featuring
18th-century Scotsman James Fraser and his 20th-century time-traveling
wife, Claire Randall.
Now, in this eagerly awaited fifth volume, Diana Gabaldon continues
their extraordinary saga....
read
more about this title
#20
Bel
Canto
by Ann Patchett
"This is a story of passionate, doomed love; of the glory of
art; of the triumph of our shared humanity over the forces that
divide us, and a couple of other unbearably cheesy themes, and yet
Patchett makes it work, completely."
Laura Miller, Salon.com
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more about this title
read
the entire salon review
read
the powells.com interview
#21
Girl
With a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
"Tracy Chevalier has so vividly imagined the life of the painter
and his subject that you say to yourself: This is the way it must
have been."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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more about this title
read
an excerpt
#22
Seabiscuit:
An American Legend
by Laura Hillenbrand
"Seabiscuit was a great horse, perhaps the best ever, running
in one of the worst decades ever, the Great Depression, bringing
excitement and pleasure to millions of Americans when they needed
those emotions desperately. This is more than a fine piece of writing
about the sport of racing; it is also about our history. I wish
all sportswriters could write like this."
Stephen Ambrose,
author of Undaunted Courage
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more about this title
#23
Black
House
by Stephen King & Peter Straub
"Like much of King and Straub's previous work, this novel contains
innocent, sorrowing children, adults in search of redemption, and
a cast of sharply drawn townspeople. The measured pace of the prose
and the authors' careful descriptions of the characters' interior
lives make this as much a novel about the fragility of happiness
and normality in middle-class communities as a novel about monsters,
alternate worlds, and madmen."
Book Magazine
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more about this title
read
an excerpt
#24
The
Bible
The bestselling book in all of history.
visit
out bible section
#25
Children
of God
by Mary Doria Russell
"...a tragic, haunting parable about moral justice that miraculously
avoids all of the usual clichés and even subverts some of
them. Here, for a change, is a sequel that counts."
Tom
De Haven, Entertainment Weekly
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more about this title
#26
Ahab's
Wife: The Star-Gazer
by Sena Jeter Naslund
"
Ahab's Wife is an epic tour de force, and deserves
its rightful place next to Melville's classic. Ambitious, powerful,
heartbreaking, and transcendent at once, Una Spenser's tale of a
life fully lived gives us what we crave: a compelling story beautifully
told. This is a great American novel."
Brett Lott
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#27
Bridget
Jones's Diary
by Helen Fielding
"Newspaper columnist Fielding's first effort, a bestseller
in Britain, lives up to the hype. This year in the life of a single
woman is closely observed and laugh-out-loud funny....Fielding's
diarist raises prickly insecurities to an art form, turns bad men
into good anecdotes, and shows that it is possible to have both
a keen eye for irony and a generous heart."
Kirkus Reviews
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more about this title
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the powells.com interview
#28
A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
"It's James Joyce, back from the dead!....And he's got some
Proust in him, the little 29-year-old-jerk, he's got the trammeling
thoroughness of Proust's observation, his honest observations of
artifice. The book is fine and different for earnest reasons, too....How
generous of him to write this for us, to reveal all this so fearlessly,
like Joyce, like Proust."
Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los
Angeles Times Book Review
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#29
Nickel
and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
"We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news
of America's working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying
with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives
as lived. As Michael Harrington was, she is now our premier reporter
of the underside of capitalism."
Dorothy Gallagher, New
York Times Book Review
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more about this title
#30
Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
"[T]he temptation to transcribe long passages is strong, so
strong.
Cryptonomicon is compulsively readable (with the
Read This Part Out Loud alarm sounding every few pages), very smart,
very funny, and just as often very grim."
Russell Letson,
Locus
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#31
The
Hobbit
by J. R. R. Tolkien
"Seventeen years ago there appeared, without any fanfare, a
book called
The Hobbit which in my opinion, is one of the
best children's stories of this century."
W. H. Auden, The
New York Times Book Review, 1954
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more about this title
visit
our j. r. r. tolkien page
#32
Motherless
Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem
"The best novel of the year....Utterly original and deeply
moving."
Esquire
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more about this title
winner
of the 1999 national book critics circle award
read
an excerpt
#33
House
of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus III
"Elegant and powerful...an unusual and volatile...literary
thriller."
The Washington Post Book World
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#34
Dreamcatcher
by Stephen King
"King supplies enough spooky effects and space aliens
to meet his usual quota of weird frissons... But beneath all that,
there is also a new urgency....It makes for great midnight reading."
Janet Maslin, New York Times
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more about this title
#35
A
Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
"What a delight, what a roaring, rollicking, footstomping
wonder this book is! I laughed until my sides ached, and then I
laughed on....[Ignatious J. Reilly is] huge, obese, fractious, fastidious,
a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His
story bursts with wholly original characters denizens of New Orleans'
lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest
series of high and low comic adventures."
Henry Kisor, The
Chicago Sun-Times
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more about this title
#36
Bee
Season
by Myla Goldberg
"There is such joy and pain thrumming inside Myla Goldberg's
spelling bees! She delicately captures one family's spinning out
by concentrating equally on the beauty and the despair. Bee Season
is a heartbreaking first novel."
Aimee Bender, author of
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
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more about this title
read
an excerpt
#37
Memoirs
of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
"A scholar of Japanese art and history, Golden is intimate
with his material, and it shows in his reconstruction of Gion in
the 1930s and '40s....Sayuri's voice never falters — it is,
to the end, utterly consistent.
Memoirs of a Geisha is a
breathtaking performance twice over, once by its bewitching central
figure, and once by the masterful puppeteer who has given her life."
Janice Nimura, The Washington Post Book World
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more about this title
#38
The
Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
by Michael Pollan
"A lovely book that succeeds in attaining that most
elusive of states: grace."
Adrienne Miller, Esquire
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more about this title
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the entire esquire review
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an excerpt
#39
The
Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan
"Amy Tan [has] done it again....
The Bonesetter’s
Daughter tells a compelling tale of family relationships; it
layers and stirs themes of secrets, ambiguous meanings, cultural
complexity and self-identity; and it resonates with metaphor and
symbol."
The Denver Post
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more about this title
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an excerpt
#40
Cold
Mountain
by Charles Frazier
"This novel is magnificent — in every conceivable
aspect....
Cold Mountain is one of the great accomplishments
in American literature."
Rick Bass
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more about this title
winner
of the national book award for fiction
#41
The
Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
"
The Shipping News is alive in every sense of
the word...Proulx has George Eliot's gift of loving observation
— her vision is wise and generous."
The Boston Globe
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more about this title
#42
The
Onion Girl
by Charles de Lint
"To read de Lint is to fall under the spell of a master
storyteller, to be reminded of the greatness of life, of the beauty
and majesty lurking in shadows and empty doorways."
Quill
and Quire
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more about this title
#43
Shopgirl
by Steve Martin
"Readers should be grateful to have such an elegant
and insightful guide to the human heart. That it is wrapped in such
a tender and enchanting story makes it all the more valuable."
Georgie Lewis, Powells.com
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more about this title
read
the entire powells.com review
#44
Carter
Beats the Devil
by Glen David Gold
"...Gold's material is utterly irresistible — flappers,
bootleggers, Secret Service goons, beautiful magician's assistants,
icky mobsters — and it's impossible not to be engrossed."
Adrienne Miller, Esquire
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more about this title
read
the entire esquire review
#45
The
Left Behind series
by Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins
"Though full of diatribes and unflattering portrayals of
women, liberals, Jews, Californians and the media,
Left Behind
is suspenseful and surprisingly well written."
John D. Spalding,
The Christian Century
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more about this title
#46
Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
"Those perverse truths and urges you prefer to forget,
[Palahniuk] jots down on cocktail napkins – and turns them
into fictions that are as darkly comic and starkly terrifying as
your high school yearbook photo."
GQ
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more about this title
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the powells.com interview
#47
Kitchen
Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
by Anthony Bourdain
"The guy is hysterical…in a style partaking of
Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and a little Jonathan Swift, Bourdain
gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors."
The New York Times Book Review
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more about this title
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the powells.com interview
#48
Interpreter
of Maladies: Stories
by Jhumpa Lahiri
"In these stories she exercises fine judgment in cutting
out each precise narrative shape; but her hand is hidden in her
sleeve, so that her narratives, like Alice Munro's, seem to have
found their natural, sinuous, organic form."
Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books
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more about this title
winner
of the 2000 pulitzer prize for fiction
read
an excerpt
#49
Pride
and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
"A little aloof, a little inscrutable and mysterious, she
will always remain, but serene and beautiful also because of her greatness
as an artist."
Virginia Woolf, Times Literary Supplement, 1913
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more about this title
#50
'Tis
by Frank McCourt
"McCourt's
prose is still distinguished by his perfect pitch. His dialogue
is second to none, precise, evocative....Powerful and haunting,
this second book will cement his reputation as an accomplished and
important writer."
Caitlin Flanagan, San Francisco Chronicle
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more about this title
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