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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
John
Adams
by David McCullough 
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
#2The 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 interviewwinner
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
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our lord of the rings page
#4The 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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the powells.com interviewread
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 titleread
an excerpt
#6The 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 titleread
an excerpt
#8The 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
read
more about this titlewinner
of the 2000 booker prize
read
an excerpt
#9John 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 titleread
the entire esquire review
read
an excerpt
#10American 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 titleread
the entire salon review
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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
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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 titleread
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 titleread
the entire esquire reviewread
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
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the powells.com interview
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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
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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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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....
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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 titleread
the entire salon reviewread
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 read
more about this titleread
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 titleread
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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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 titleread
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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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 read
more about this titleread
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 titlevisit
our j. r. r. tolkien page#32 Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem "The best novel of the year....Utterly original and deeply moving." Esquire read
more about this titlewinner
of the 1999 national book critics circle award
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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 titleread
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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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 titleread
the entire esquire reviewread
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 titleread
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 titlewinner
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 read
more about this titleread
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 titleread
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 titleread
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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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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winner
of the 2000 pulitzer prize for fiction
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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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