ABC Radio National ran a survey in October of the top 100 books of this century, as voted by listeners. You could vote for up to 10 books. My votes are shown in the image. Five of them are definitely science fiction (The Dark Forest, Oryx and Crake, The Passage, Terra Nullius and Klara and the Sun), one is apocalyptic fiction (American War), another is speculative fiction (Meanwhile in Dopamine City), one is historical fiction (The True History of the Kelly Gang), while two, for want of a better term, are literay fiction (The Slap and The Corrections).
Three are by Australian authors (Peter Carey, Christos Tsiolkas, and Claire G. Coleman), although the much-travelled DBC Pierre (Mexican/British?) is sometimes claimed as Australian as he was born here. Four authors are American (Cronin, Franzen, Akkad and Ishiguro) one author is Canadian (Atwood), and one is Chinese (Liu).
The Corrections made my list because one of its main characters had dementia, and I was looking after my father with dementia at the time. It had a real emotional impact on me. I live in Kelly country, so I was very interested in Peter Carey’s fictional account of Kelly and his gang in The True History of the Kelly Gang. Nearly every day, I walk past a railway bridge in Wangaratta, where, near it, Carey had the gang crossing the Oven’s river on horseback. Terra Nullius has a unique way of telling the story of how badly Indigenous Australians were, and continue to be, treated. The Slap is a fascinating book that goes behind the facade of a number of characters, showing their lives are just tenuous fronts. It makes you wonder how much bullshit the people around you are putting on. The Passage turns it back on pretty boy vampires that are so common these days on television and in books, and displays them as vicious monsters they would be. Meanwhile in Dopamine City is a hilarious and clever send-up of where our social media-dominated world is heading. Oryx and Crake is a very interesting take on mad scientists and their attempts to shape the world. It is the first book in a fantastic trilogy. American War is set after a second civil war, where skirmishes still occur, and one of its many factors is showing how a refugee whose relatives died and were persecuted in the war can be transformed into a terrorist. Its scenario for the civil war is very believable. The Dark Forest is the second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy and, among other things, it investigates the reason we have not found any civilisations beyond Earth. Klara and the Sun is different science fiction as it is told from the point of view of an uninformed android who is trying to make sense of the world.
The list of the top 100 is here. Two of the books I voted for, The True History of the Kelly Gang and The Slap, made the top 100. I have only read eight of the books on the list. Many of the others I have no interest in reading.