Hamlet and Indecision are kind of apples and oranges, though. Not so much b/c it's Shakespeare vs. Kunkel, but b/c it's a play vs. a novel. And a novel narrated in first person at that (assuming I remember correctly). If Hamlet were being published today as a first-person narrative from Hamlet's p.o.v., not a play,…

What's going on with her cover designs, though? They're clearly following the same sensibility with each book she publishes, but they keep getting more frilly. White Teeth was pretty plain. The Autograph Man had a border around it. Then On Beauty had a more frilly border and there were some curlicues in the…

Apollo, I didn't even look before I wrote that. I was assuming it was a group effort like a lot of these lists. Whoops.

The movie was a bit of a travesty, but The English Patient is my favorite.

A Prayer for the Dying was a gut punch. Absolutely beautiful. Or was that this decade? One of the few times I've seen a second person narration pulled out and done well.

Oscar and Lucinda is amazing. The only time he's put it all together for me. But then I still haven't read Illywhacker, Kelly Gang, or his last two books yet.

I can't defend Indecision or The History of Love. Indecision was a bunch of navel-gazing and The History of Love . . . well, actually I can't remember the specifics of why it annoyed me. Maybe it was a little too Foer-esque? I know Krauss and Foer are married so that's too easy a comparison to make, but still. I…

What about Christopher Logue's ongoing retelling of The Iliad in All Day Permanent Red and Cold Calls?

Still a kick-ass film, though.

I noticed. I was glad to see it. But given the nature of the books the AV Club included, it does seem like an odd omission on their part. Or did The Corrections kind of take that realistic, slice-of-life, state-of-our-current-culture slot on the list?

Prep was a great read, but I'm not sure it belongs on the short list for best of the decade. It was a little too . . . I dunno, flat for that? I imagine that may be one reason a lot of people take issue with The Corrections, even though I disagree with them. They apparently believe Franzen just wrote a book about a…

Will do.

Sometimes it was engaging, but wasn't it a little . . . well, self-consciously precious? Kind of like Me and You and Everyone We Know.

A Brief History of Nearly Everything—I'm with you there. The Magicians, though . . . I know it got a lot of love here and it was a tremendously fun read, even insightful in its own way. But I think people are building it up into something more meaningful than it is. It always felt a little thin to me, like Grossman…

I quite liked Downtown Owl, but best of the decade?

TomWaits, did you mean Franzen?

I really enjoyed The Autograph Man even as it drove me up the wall as a completely self-indulgent writer's conceit. It was a very weird experience. On Beauty was good and I could even see why it might be her best, but it still wasn't as involving and just full of life as White Teeth.

So is We Need to Talk About Kevin better than The Post-Birthday World? I only ask b/c TPBW is on my to-read shelf.

Actually, I almost included Fortress of Solitude in that list, but I never finished it. I think more because I wasn't in the mood for it at the time, so I don't feel qualified to say anything about it. And I loved everything Lethem did up to it. But then I couldn't finish it and found his next one, You Don't Love…

We'll have to part ways on Strange and Norrell, then. I loved luxuriating in Clarke's world, and I found the narrative very coherent, if not necessarily propulsive. It definitely left me hungering for the next volume (not counting the short story collection she published), though who knows when that will come out.