Time - Top 10 Fiction Books 2011
1. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
It was, famously, six years between the last Song of Ice and Fire book and this one. What was George R.R. Martin doing all that time? Was he wandering in the wilderness? Was he sunning on the beaches of Dorne? No: he was girding his loins and rallying the banners, and he has come charging back with one of the strongest books of the series, and the year. Dance with Dragons puts us back in the main narrative stream of A Song of Ice and Fire: we go into exile with the black-humored dwarf Tyrion, raise dragons with Daenerys, walk the wall and brood with Jon Snow. The artistry and savagery of Martin's storytelling are at their finest: he has seized hold of epic fantasy and is radically refashioning it for our complex and jaded era, and the results are magnificent. It's anyone's guess who will wind up ruling the Seven Kingdoms, but in the realm of epic fantasy, there is only one true king, and it's Martin.
2. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
No one knew what to expect from the half-finished manuscript that David Foster Wallace left behind when he died. What we got was the best we could have hoped for: a construction site of a novel, to be sure, hard hats required, with the barest skeleton of a plot, but also some of Wallace's most direct and personal and eloquent writing. The opening section of the book includes a dozen pages set in the head of a junior accountant on a regional jet, just sitting and thinking, and it's riveting. Nobody writing now can pull off that kind of a literary MRI job. It's a vivid reminder of what Wallace had, and what we lost, but it's also half a great novel, and that's a good half more than what most novelists ever write.
3. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
This is a strange, complex and triumphantly confident reimagining of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a different age. Marina Singh, a docile lab rat, must follow her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson into the sweaty and uncomfortable depths of the Amazon jungle, whence Swenson has vanished in search of the secret to a mysterious fertility drug. Singh finds her living with a bizarre indigenous tribe, but from there the mystery only deepens — Swenson's methods are, as the saying goes, unorthodox. It's an extraordinary pleasure to go on a journey like this, into the verdant chaos of the Amazon with an orderly, sane, exquisitely sensitive observer like Ann Patchett as your companion. The stakes are different from what they were in Conrad's day, but now, as then, the journey is as much an inner one as an outer.
4. Open City by Teju Cole
5. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
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