THE 2000s: THE DECADE IN POP CULTURE
Reading the signs
The biggest publishing phenomena of the decade
Last Updated: Thursday, November 5, 2009 | 11:04 AM ET
By Lee Ferguson, CBC News
Canadian-raised journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell has become an influential voice thanks to books like The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. (Hachette Book Group Canada) As the decade draws to a close, and a beleaguered publishing industry tries to survive economic downturn, there is much debate about the impending demise of the printed word. But looking at the books and publishing trends that shaped the 2000s tells another story. For much of the turbulent oughts, it was tough for jaded readers to believe in much of anything — but they never lost faith in books. Here are the 10 biggest publishing phenomena of the decade.
Making connections
One of the byproducts of the digital age is information overload. Thankfully, a number of writers took it upon themselves to wade into the morass of ideas and tease out some meaningful connections. Thomas Friedman outlined the "flatteners" that make the global market a level playing field in The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005), while Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner applied economic theory to everything from a Chicago crack gang to abortion rates in Freakonomics (2005). New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell is arguably the master of this curious sub-genre. Scoring hits with Blink (2005) and Outliers (2008), the author's poppy, accessible take on everything from Sesame Street to Hush Puppies made him as infectious as the fads he outlined in The Tipping Point (2000).
(Anchor Books) The Da Vinci Code
Salman Rushdie declared it "a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name." More than 80 million readers disagreed. Published in 2003, Dan Brown's intricately plotted page-turner about a symbology professor who attempts to solve a murder at the Louvre tapped into everything readers hungered for in the 2000s: mystery, religion, exotic locales and conspiracy theories, with the Holy Grail and Mary Magdalene thrown in for good measure. The Da Vinci Code gave everyone something to talk about, and went on to become the single most popular book of the decade.
The God debate
God was front and centre in a handful of books this decade. A clutch of atheist writers denied his existence: there was Sam Harris's The End of Faith (2005), Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006). (The latter sparked a mini-industry of angry rebuttals that included titles like The Deluded Atheist: A Response to Richard Dawkins and Dawkins' Dilemmas: Deluded Or Not Deluded?)Two of the decade's most rigorous, thoughtful books on spirituality came courtesy of noted theologian Karen Armstrong (The Case for God) and Giller Prize-winning author David Adams Richards (God Is). There is no clear winner in this religious debate, only an unshakeable sense that everyone in the 2000s was having a crisis of faith. Even so, sales of the Bible skyrocketed.
Fact or fiction?
As Joan Didion and Dave Eggers can attest, the 2000s were a great time to be a memoirist. But after James Frey's Oprah-approved bestseller A Million Little Pieces was revealed to be a heartbreaking work of highly exaggerated events, the queen of daytime delivered a televised smackdown heard 'round the world. Autobiography was suddenly suspect, and authors from JT Leroy to Herman Rosenblat were called out as fakes. David Sedaris, one of the decade's genuine literary superstars, was one of the few memoirists to emerge unscathed, perhaps because he always had the good sense to admit he mixes fiction with his facts.
(Dial Press) Chick lit
Riding into the 2000s on a wave of Bridget Jones-mania, a handful of female authors created a new crop of best-selling characters. Confessions of a Shopaholic, The Nanny Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, the Candace Bushnell canon: the heroines were largely neurotic, held harrowing Manhattan jobs and were always in search of a martini and a good pair of shoes. Since books with pink covers proved surprisingly lucrative — Shopaholic spawned a franchise — it seems likely that chick lit's toned legs will carry it well into the 2010s.
The new (global) vanguard
When White Teeth, Zadie Smith's multi-layered, multi-ethnic novel about life in north London, was published in 2000, it signaled one of the decade's most exciting new trends: truly global fiction. A cacophony of diverse voices soon followed, with Khaled Hosseini's Afghan tragedy The Kite Runner and Monica Ali's ode to Bangladeshi immigrants Brick Lane arriving in 2003, and The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga's look at India's underbelly, netting a Booker in 2008. In between, Lebanon-born Montreal author Rawi Hage dazzled us with De Niro's Game (2006) and Cockroach (2008), proving that literary greatness was no longer turf reserved solely for middle-aged white men.
Everything's gone green
He didn't become president, but Al Gore still made his mark when he released a 2006 book (and accompanying film) called An Inconvenient Truth. His was one of many impassioned books about the effects of global warming in a decade that saw titles like Hell or High Water andField Notes from a Catastrophe. But maybe the most compelling voice on this issue is Tim Flannery, an Australian scientist whose book The Weather Makers: The Past and Future Impact of Climate Change (2006) landed in bookstores with the force of a tsunami. Through urgent, clear writing and meticulous research, Flannery's bestseller convinced readers that the time for change was now.
(Anchor Books) Unconventional narrators
A murdered girl speaking from the afterlife (The Lovely Bones); an autistic boy wrapped up in a seemingly pointless mystery (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time); a hermaphrodite caught between genders (Middlesex) — these were some of the fictional characters who mesmerized us with their eccentric stories this decade. Somewhere along the way, protagonists moved from being strange to downright untrustworthy. The vaguely sinister Pakistani monologist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the shipwreck survivor who spent seven months on a boat with a 450-pound Bengal tiger in Life of Pi forced readers to question their perceptions of events in a decade where tall tales and unreliable narrators abounded.
Food for thought
Thanks to Eric Schlosser's alarming Fast Food Nation (2001), many of us began the decade realizing we would never look at Chicken McNuggets the same way again. An overwhelming all-you-can-eat buffet of food books followed, with writers exploring everything from the eco-friendly diet to organic living to the merits of fat. It took engaging journalist Michael Pollan to make meals feel "happy" again. Championing simple, real ingredients instead of "edible foodlike substances" in both The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defence of Food, Pollan helped us put some thought back into our food.
Harry Potter/Twilight
If non-fiction books were ubiquitous in the oughts, another genre cast an even more powerful spell over readers: fantasy. As young Muggles scrambled to get their hands on the last books in the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling promptly became the world's first billionaire author. Just as Potter-mania appeared to be waning, the romantic bloodsuckers in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series gave teen girls and cash-strapped publishers something to swoon about.
Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.
