Keep It Going Louder in conjunction with the Slam Zuckert Institute of Cultural Opinions Present…
The Best Novels of the 2010s
“If you disagree, fight me”
#20 – The Power
by Naomi Alderman
Wickedly fun and razor-sharp; like if Camille Paglia downed three espressos, watched the Hunger Games, and decided to write her own YA adventure; Alderman brings us into a world where young women across the globe start to develop the power to emit electricity from their hands and let’s just say it does not bode well for men. An action-filled sci-fi-style novel that touches on themes of social organization, gender, corruption, and power (obviously) while keeping you on the edge of your seat the whole time, The Power is a punch in the gut and a slap in the face that takes The Future is Female to the extreme and shows us what kind of phoenix could rise from the ashes of the Patriarchy.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Greta Gerwig
Starring:
Quvenzhané Wallis as Allie Montgomery-Taylor
Saoirse Ronan as Roxy Monke
Charlize Theron as Margot Cleary
William Jackson Harper as Olatunde Edo/Tunde Edo
#19 – Long Division
by Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon has a lot on his mind. Never one to let convention hold him back, Laymon lets loose in his debut novel Long Division, a book within a book in which our protagonist, City Coldson, is also the main character of the book he finds which then time-travels him back to 1985 and 1964. Still with me? Long Division shoots its shot in every chapter and while the time travel and multiple character with the same name can be confusing at times, digging in and de-tangling the story along with the sly humor and biting racial commentary makes Long Division a rewarding read; proud, poignant, and wacky as it is wise.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Spike Lee
Starring:
Keith L. Williams as City Coldson
Jahking Guillory as LaVander Peeler
Amandla Stenberg as Shalaya Crump
Dominique Fishback as Baize Shephard
#18 – The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
There are times in all of our lives when we know that after that point, things will never be the same. Sometimes they are forks in the road that we choose which way to go (fun party game: everyone goes around and shares their “first fork”. Mine was probably deciding which college to go to, either in-state Big Ten school or a private school on the East Coast), other times they are forced upon us and we can only react. Such is the case for our protagonist, Theo Decker, when he is present during a terrorist attack at an Art Museum which change his life in immeasurable ways.
A masterfully crafted bildungsroman-opus, The Goldfinch asks us big questions about fate, love, friendship, trauma, drugs, and 17th century Dutch paintings. Over the course of many years Tartt takes us on a tour of one young man’s hope and despair, his trials and tribulations, and the things that keep him connected to the life he so suddenly lost.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Too late they blew it.
#17 – Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Blame it on the PR guys; America the symbol, America the idea, and America the reality often end up being so different to people who love stateside that it can feel like a cruel joke propagated across continents and generations.
In the era of globalization, the only thing more difficult than leaving home can be returning and our protagonist Ifemelu feels that weigh down on her the whole time she’s in the US. The mix of new opportunities, new identities to navigate, new challenges, and the longings for home create a noxious atmosphere which she can’t help but fill her lungs with. Searching through past and present she realizes that what’s been sold to her might not be what she wanted after all and through her journey Adichie delivers a powerful story of love, self, identity, and home.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Barry Jenkins
Starring:
Lupita Nyong’o as Ifemelu
David Oyelowo as Obinze
#16 – Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
The news of a new book from few authors excite me like Zadie Smith and Swing Time did not disappoint, showcasing her wry humor and sharp eye in an excellent meditation on dance, identity, and celebrity. The book centers on the unnamed narrator and her childhood friend Tracey; both have one black and one white parent, both growing up in working-class London, and both dream of being professional dancers. As the narrator and Tracey grow up and twirl in and out of each others lives, Smith ponders what it means to leave home and how relationships wax and wane when paths diverge.
Smith uses dance as a lens to view our bodies and their relation to others, engrossing us in the movement, physicality, and images of Jeni Le Gon, Fred Astaire in blackface, and Americans dressed as Africans who have nailed their feet to the ground. Swing Time takes us across decades and continents but remains intimate and personal, an elegant and brilliant novel from the literary force that is Zadie Smith.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Steve McQueen
Starring:
Tessa Thompson as Narrator
Zoe Kravitz as Tracey
Robyn as Aimee
#15 – The Instructions
by Adam Levin
Have you ever picked up a novel and felt like it was written specifically for you? Set in suburban Chicago, The Instructions follows Gurion Maccabee, a Jewish ten-year-old who attends a public middle school and may or may not think he is the messiah. The Instructions is over 1000 pages long, covers only four days of time, and feels like it was created by Adam Levin reaching deep into my id, pulling out a big, goopy mess, and putting it on the page in the style of the most skilled overeducated-white-dude-fiction novelists.
After getting kicked out of a Jewish day school for his messianic tendencies, Gurion is now confined to “The Cage” at Aptaksic Junior High, a kind of indefinite detention, where he plots his next uprising and tries to win the love of the non-caged Eliza June Watermark. What follows is a flurry of romance, intrigue, middle-school mischief, slap-slap, racial tension, and biblical warfare all jammed into four calendar days. If this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then I’m not going to try and change your mind, but if you’re picking up what I’m putting down then you won’t be disappointed. The Instructions is a wild ride that even after 1000 pages leaves you wanting more from the scriptures of Gurion Maccabee.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring:
Jaden Piner as Gurion Maccabee
Millie Bobby Brown as Eliza June Watermark
Archie Yates as Eliyahu of Brooklyn
#14 – The Vegetarian
by Han Kang
Powerfully brief, Kang spins us a withering yarn about a woman living in Seoul whose life falls apart after she decides to stop eating meat. Not a book about the ethics of animal consumption but rather a story about subverting the expectations of those around you and how quickly even those closest to you can be lost once you stop behaving as they think you should.
Yeong-hye, our newly meat-free protagonist, almost sleepwalks through her new life as her family struggles with a women they no longer know. She casts off of societal norms and reverts into essentially floral behavior, rooted in place and moved by the elements around yet free to stretch and yearn towards sustenance. Kang is brutally efficient with her language, simple yet beautiful. Not a line is wasted. As haunting as it is mesmerizing, The Vegetarian plants Yeong-hye deep and leaves the rest up to mother nature.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Bong Joon-ho
Starring:
Jeon Jong-seo as Yeong-hye
Cho Yeo-jeong as In-hye
Lee Sun-kyun as Mr. Cheong
Cho Jin-woong as In-hye’s Husband
#13 – Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
In Sing, Unburied, Sing Ward takes us back to Bois Sauvage, Mississippi where the flood water has receded but the devastation of Katrina still haunts the community’s past. The African-American residents of Bois Sauvage, left behind by the Great Migration, have been pummeled by generations of poverty and racism and the white counterparts don’t seem to be faring any better.
Ward returns to a place that the rest of our country has forgotten, lyrical and poetic in her vision of a family and community struggling with addition and haunted by their past. Through a rotating cast of narrators we follow Leonie as she takes an ill-advised journey with her two children and her friend on her son Jojo’s 13th birthday. Brutal and unflinching, empathetic without apologizing, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a modern Southern novel that merges the lyrical vision of the South’s finest with a modern urgency necessary in post-Katrina Mississippi.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Melina Matsoukas
Starring:
Shamon Brown as Jojo
Letitia Wright as Leonie
Bria Vinaite as Misty
Robert Pattinson as Michael
#12 – There There
by Tommy Orange
Orange strikes a match and lights a righteous fire on every page in his jarring debut, There There. In just over 300 pages, Orange takes us on a whirlwind tour of the lives of twelve Native American living in the Bay Area; we walk alongside them as they shoulder the weight of America’s past weighing down on all aspects of their lives.
Substance abuse is everywhere, poverty is pervasive, and the characters circle around each other, pulled by narrative gravity onto an explosive collision course. They grapple with addition, family, community, and pride on their journeys all through biting humor and striking prose. Orange is a bold new talent in (Native) American literature; There There probably won’t be added to any middle school reading lists along with Sherman Alexie anytime soon (There There covers, let’s say, adult topics) but he is an exciting new voice for our hyper-connected and historically-omnivorous times.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Director – Carlos López Estrada
Starring:
Martin Sensmeier as Orvil Red Feather
Kelsey Chow as Blue
Julia Jones as Jacquie Red Feather
Forrest Goodluck as Calvin Johnson
#11 – Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
The waves of the Atlantic Ocean carry with it the history of the modern world. Vast numbers of individuals have traveled across in search of freedom, opportunity, and profit; countless others were taken across forcibly through chattel slavery, wage bondage, or indentured servitude. The triangular trade changed the fabric of global society forever, locking us all together in the new world of technological advantages and unimaginable human cruelty.
Homegoing starts on the shores of modern-day Ghana with the two daughters of an Asante woman known as Maame and we follow her descendants as they spread across the globe, centuries removed and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean but still eternally connected to their matriarch. Gyasi’s beautiful and flowing language contrast with the brutal themes of colonial war, slavery, and racism but also underscore the tender familial and romantic love that keep the hope for a better future alive in Maame’s descendants. A powerful and moving novel, Gyasi zooms in on the individual leaves and branches of a beautiful and heartbreaking family tree.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Ava DuVerney
Starring:
Jackie Appiah as Effia
Florence Kasumba as Esi
Daniel Kaluuya as Marcus
Teyonah Parris as Marjorie
#10 – A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
Narrated by an unwieldy cast of characters, A Brief History of Seven Killings is as disorienting as it is brilliant. Spanning large swaths of time and geography, it explores a fictionalized version of the assassination attempt of Bob Marley and its global reverberations. James flexes his vocal muscles taking us through the experiences of over 75 characters, most through their own first-person narrative chapters. It takes a bit of work to get a hold of but once you do it’s one hell of a ride, weaving in and out of the worlds of reggae music, Jamaica politics, Caribbean gangsters, covert CIA operations, NYC drug wars, and music magazine.
Each section takes place on one specific day and through that day James puts all his characters in a blender and pulses them together, mixing their narratives and voices until we’re fully surrounded, only to pull the plug for a new day and start again. At each stage he peppers in a hearty dose of wealth, power, violence, drugs, lust, and love and the result is a perfectly cooked novel, crisp and seared on the outside, raw and bloody within.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring:
Jamie Foxx as The Singer
Winston Duke as Papa-Lo
LaKeith Stanfield as Josey Wales
Adam Driver as Barry Diflorio
Paul Dano as Alex Piece
Laura Harrier as Nina Burgess
Michael Peña as Doctor Love
#9 – Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
If you’re into multi-generational epics, extended kimchi preparation passages, and heavy themes of family, home, and colonialism then strap in because Pachinko has 500 pages right up your alley. Starting in 1883 on a small island village near Busan, Lee takes us from Korea to Japan to America and back again as we follow the saga of a Korean family trying to scrape out a life for themselves amidst tumultuous historical times.
Pachinko does a masterful job keeping us attached to our characters while laying bare the human cost of the Japanese occupation of Korea and inter-Asian ethnic dynamics that had such a profound impact since the Age of Imperialism. Along with more universal themes of family, poverty, and leaving home Pachinko is an enlightening work of Historical Fiction that will leave your mind satiated and your belly yearning for a bowl of kimchi.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Starring:
Yoo Ah-in as Hoonie
Kim Min-hee as Sunja
Ha Jung-woo as Baek Isak
Jang Hye-jin as Kyunghee
#8 – Chemistry
by Weike Wang
Chemistry starts with a proposal, one of marriage. It is appropriate that where most romantic comedies might end Chemistry starts because Wang is not interested in a classic tale of romance, what she gives us instead is a howling tale of post-proposal chaos and whatever the opposite of self-actualization is. Imagine a rom-com smashed to bits then fused back together with a Bunsen Burner, something like that.
Our unnamed narrator starts the book with pressure being applied all around, from her boyfriend, her lab, her parents, and above all herself. Carrying the full weight of her parents immigrant story with her, our narrator slowly retreats from her life of achievement and goals and lets the intoxicating bliss of apathy wash over her until she almost drowns. Wang writes with dry wit and crackling humor, drawing from her own personal family and collegiate experience to wrap us in the world of our narrator as she releases her grip on her life and falls back into the abyss.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Lulu Wang
Starring:
Awkwafina as Narrator
Rooney Mara as Narrator’s Labmate
David So as Narrator’s Boyfriend
#7 – Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
Set deep in the marshes of North Carolina, Where the Crawdads Sing is a beautiful exploration of loss, education, societal outcasts, and ethology. Bouncing back and forth between two timelines a decade apart, Owens gives us one of the decades most fascinating protagonists, Kya the “Marsh Girl” whose family slowly leaves her in the marshes to fend for herself. Nurtured by nature and raised by the marshes, Kya is case out of school by the town and is left to her own devices, becoming one with the flora and fauna of the marsh as she navigates her own loss and longings.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Jeff Nichols
Starring:
Brooklynn Prince as Kya (Child)
Lily James as Kya (Teen/Adult)
Dave Franco as Chase Andrews
John Gallagher Jr. as Tate
#6 – All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
Often it is the little things that can say the most. A subtle detail, a small object, or a slight twist in fate that brings two people from opposite sides of a catastrophe together. World War II has become a precarious setting for fiction, well trodden to say the least, but Doerr manages to wring something new and special out of WWII as he weaves together the stories of the blind daughter of a Parisian locksmith and a German orphan with a talent for radio engineering.
Doerr has an excellent sense of sensory balance, through the story we’re able to see, hear, and feel along with the characters as they are dragged through the brutality of the war. The writing is lucid and poetic, never does he give us a drawn out and self-satisfied paragraph when a sentence or two will suffice. As the war and the world seem to circle around our two friends, drawing them closer and closer, we see the lights on the other side even if we may not be able to reach it. As the sands of time wash away the individuals of history it can be harder to see billions of individual stories that all combine to make our present out of our past.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring:
Florence Pugh as Marie-Laure LeBlanc
Will Poulter as Werner Pfennig
#5 – 4 3 2 1
by Paul Auster
It can be unsettling to take a step back and think about how much of our lived experience is due to pure randomness. The people we meet, the education we receive, and the jobs we take all have a fundamental impact on the life we all currently live but none of it was foreordained. Our lives are permanently altered by events that may not have occurred if we took a step off that curb a second earlier, if we decided to sit at a different table during lunch, if an opportunity we didn’t know existed somehow found its way to us.
Auster explores all this in his ambitious and gargantuan 4 3 2 1, a novel about one man whose timelines diverge into four parallel paths. Archie Ferguson is born in Newark, New Jersey and from the beginning his paths start to separate based off a simple arm injury or a new fascination with newspapers. Each chapter covers a different section of his life and within each chapter are four sub-chapters, each following a particular timeline. As the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War consume America four Fergusons react in their own way, the same person genetically but vastly different based on their lived experiences. A profound exploration of randomness of life and the situations that shape us into who we are, 4 3 2 1 gives us four stories about one man through which we can view all the different roads our own lives could travel down.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Spike Jonze
Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
Starring:
Timothée Chalamet as Archie Ferguson
Chloë Grace Moretz as Amy Schneiderman
#4 – The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
An enigma wrapped in contradiction dipped in meta-fiction and deep fried till crispy, The Sympathizer offers a striking new vision of war, America, and the conflicted identity of those who live in the middle. Our unnamed narrator is the son of a Vietnamese mother and a French father who is as torn between worlds as his heritage would suggest. As a double-or-maybe-triple-or-maybe-quadruple agent during the Vietnam War he takes us through the surreal world of his home at war, his experience in the US after the war, and his time as a consultant for a Hollywood film about the Vietnam war.
Nguyen forges a new lens through which to view America’s place in the world and the impact of our actions on the countries who we have an “interest” in. Biting and sharply comic, Nguyen’s stream-of-consciousness prose melds perfectly with a narrator who is working through his own identity as an immigrant, a Vietnamese national, a patriot, and a mole. We can never really know him as one can never really know themselves, only every to catch a glimpse of our reflection as we’re dragged through the funhouse of identity when you’re left in the wake of the American juggernaut.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by The Coen Brothers
Starring:
Steven Yeun as Narrator
Dustin Nguyen as The General
Adam Sandler as The Film Director
#3 – The Sellout
by Paul Beatty
In a decade of heightened racial awareness in America many authors wrote very sober and very serious essays, novels, and non-fiction books about the current racial climate. Paul Beatty decided to take the road less traveled and gave us The Sellout, a searing racial satire that’s whip-sharp and brutally funny. Like Dave Chappelle with an MFA, Beatty skewers race in America with a relaxed and cool prose, providing a belly laugh on almost every page and something to think about after the laughter subsides.
Even compiling a list of the plot elements feels like a transgressive act; framed around a Supreme Court Case Me Vs. The United States of America, our narrator grows artisanal weed and watermelons, decides to re-segregate his hometown of Dickens, CA, and accidentally ends up becoming the owner of an enslaved aging Little Rascal. Hilarious!
But a deeper message lies beneath, Beatty takes us to task to think about our own complicity in the racism and poverty wreaking havoc on our country. It would be easy to suggest that the narrator is the sellout in question but Beatty pushes us further to explore what it means to sell our from a racial and class perspective and how we participle and enable some of the institutions that are set up to keep us down (think buying The Communist Manifesto off Amazon). Beatty said in an interview that he thought that reviewers focusing on the comic aspects of the book lets people off the hook from talking about it’s heavier elements. He’s absolutely correct that people often talk about a comic veneer to avoid uncomfortable topics, The Sellout is an indictment of modern America and many people would rather not think about their own culpability…but on the other hand, it’s hard not to talk about when the novel is as god-damn funny as The Sellout is.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Dave Chappelle & Neal Brennan
Starring:
Dave Chappelle as Me/Bonbon
Samuel L. Jackson as Me/Bonbon’s Father
Tiffany Haddish as Marpessa Delissa Dawson
Chris Rock as Foy Cheshire
Paul Mooney as Hominy Jenkins
Ludacris as King Cuz
#2 – A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
If you’re looking for a novel to give you an overwhelming and emotionally masochistic reading experience then look no further because oh boy do I have the book for you. It’s over 800 page, about trauma and recovery and male friendship and it’s called A Little Life. Pro tip: Don’t make the mistake I did and pound the last 200 pages in one sitting unless you too would like to spend an hour before falling asleep in your bed curled up in the fetal position with a pillow between your knees and tears seeping out of your eyes. But it’s excellent, trust me.
Between the emotional gut-punches packed into the plot, A Little Life is a beautiful and moving book that takes us deep into the world of four male friends living in NYC as they are broken down and built up by the world around them. We follow them from their early adult years to middle age as they succeed and fail and feel the strain that either can put on their relationships with each other. At a time when the taboos around mental health, self-harm, and disabilities are starting to fade away A Little Life offers a brave vision of characters who struggles with these issues. Sure, you’ll make the same face as the guy on the book cover every 20 pages or so and probably need to keep a water bottle near you at all times to rehydrate (from the tears), but it’s a book will deeply engage your emotions and offer you a story through which to explore them in relation to your own life and relationships.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
Starring:
Moisés Arias as Jude
Armie Hammer as Willem
Jesse Williams as Malcolm
Donald Glover as JB
#1 – The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
When making art about history, especially historical atrocities there’s usually a lot of pressure to stick to the script. New stories are fine but tweaking historical facts can be seen as dangerous, revisionist propaganda even. Whitehead doesn’t quite throw the rule book out the window in The Underground Railroad but he sure kicks it around the room for a bit and doesn’t dust it off before putting it back on the shelf. Set it the Antebellum South where the Underground Railroad is comprised of an actual train that runs underground, Whitehead gives us the story of Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, who escapes towards freedom.
The 2010s were a decade of racial reckoning in the US and there is an abundance of great art that has used the tension and torsion to look back at our country’s shameful past. More than ever, audiences are willing to wrestle with the horrors of slavery in America and our art reflects that. Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave are in many ways polar opposite films, both set in the same time and place yet they view the world through inverted lenses: Django Freeman with cinematic violence and outlandish humor, Solomon Northup with relentless dignity and sober intellect. Whitehead gives us a story about American slavery that draws from both those extremes. Cora is subjected to hellish brutality on her odyssey for freedom but on her journey she encounters an almost hallucinatory set of characters and challenges, their absurdity highlighting the suspension of disbelief most of us have to fight through to even start to imagine that kind of human suffering and pain inflicted intentionally and maliciously by others.
Meticulously crafted and written with Whitehead’s savory and honed prose, The Underground Railroad is an unflinching novel that demands to be read. America has never truly reckoned with it’s past, not the genocide of Native Americans nor Slavery nor the many, many attempts to control the politics of other countries no matter the human cost, and there is a large segment of our population who have a significant interest in us never truly engaging with our history, but books like The Underground Railroad are a shot across the bow from a writer who sees that the arc of history has no natural direction and we must fight to bend it towards justice ourselves.
Movie Adaptation Dream Team
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Starring:
Cynthia Erivo as Cora
Daniel Day-Lewis as Ridgeway
Alex Hibbert as Ridgeway’s Partner
Helena Bonham Carter as Ethel
Michael B. Jordan as Caesar
Slam Zuckert is a municipal bureaucrat. He sees a lot of movies and reads a lot of books and sometimes writes about them. His favorite movie is There Will Be Blood, his favorite mathematician is Georg Cantor, and his least favorite mathematician is Leopold Kronecker.
Keep it Going Louder 