Over on the Pair of Ragged Claws blog I heard that the UK Times had published a Top 100 Best Books of the Decade list and, being a real sucker for such lists, I went over and had a good prowl. I’d already been warned to be a bit disgusted by some of the rankings, but at least the #1 pick, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is a well-deserved winner (and if you haven’t read it, make sure you do before you see the movie).

But looking up from the bottom of the list now (as that’s how the Times has, quite clumsily, arranged it), I see that Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I always considered not quite so wondrous despite winning the 2008 Pulitzer, only ranks at #97. Fair enough. Various books of (in my opinion) varying quality follow, some literature,  some a bit more on the trashy side (yep, I’m a book-snob), and then Haruki Murakami’s newish short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman shows up at #73, which pleases me, a big Murakami fan. (I swallowed his fiction collection practically whole while I was living in Japan, where more of it seemed to make more sense!)

I should mention that not all of the books on this Top 100 list are fiction – after all, it’s just the Top 100 books, not novels. So it’s a pretty mixed up list, but that allows one of my favourite non-fiction books of all time, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, to appear at #54. If you’re a punctuation stickler like me but haven’t read this, it’s a must. I read it on commuter buses in southern Germany and laughed out loud multiple times, a real no-no on a German bus, yet I was grateful for the fact that my fellow passengers wouldn’t have realised I was reading what essentially is a book about grammar. But a really, really funny one.

One of my favourite books of the decade, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, whose lilting accent I fell in love with earlier this year at the 2009 Perth Writers Festival, makes a very respectable #41 on the list. Mark Haddon’s gorgeous The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is at #25, just behind Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, an excellent book I read just a few months back, at #24.

Things go a bit pear-shaped from there – one of the worst books I’ve ever endured, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, actually lands at #10 (I mean seriously. Did an editor actually check that book?) (And I only endured it because I was on a backpacking trip somewhere with no access to any other books). But the list redeems itself, as I said, with a good number one choice. It might make an interesting reading list, but the choices are so mixed that I really don’t feel I can rely on it. And it’s also a little bit scary to see lists suggesting that this decade is already over. I guess I’ll be published thisdecade.