Best Books of the Decade

The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students and Their Mission – Herb Childress (2019)

A dystopian novel about what happens when a country becomes convinced that critical thinking is useless, education is a private luxury, and that anything that women can do must not be valuable. Only, it’s not fiction.  – Dr. Rebecca Nesvet

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (2017)

The book portrays emotional depth, nuance, and truth so accurately it hurts, yet Strout’s writing is never sentimental or melodramatic. – Dr. Jennie Young

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (2012)

Rowling’s sweeping, ambitious novel for adults examines how a cast of characters in a small UK village, from distinct social classes, respond when a seat on the town council becomes vacant. This book provides a complex look at how ambition, self-interest, and power structures drive flawed characters and marks the fabric of their community. Years later, this book still stabs me in the heart. – Tara DaPra

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (2014)

A collection of images, scripts, poems, and essays about personal stresses and public aggressions of living as an African American in the “post-racial era,” composed with unparalleled clarity and grief. Each edition of the book updates the list of names “In Memory of” black people killed in police custody, leaving room for our thoughts— and inevitable additions: “In Memory… In Memory …” – Dr. Rebecca Meacham

Combining image and essay with poetry, these prose pieces investigate the lived experiences of black citizens in the United States. This is a work that is brutal, suffused with the pain of continual “othering,” drawing the readers’ attention to the aggressions, both micro and macro, still present in supposedly “post-race” society. – Dr. Christopher Williams

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill (2014)

A small novel with profound ideas about marriage and what makes a home. Experimental yet strikingly clear in its observation of the human terrain between two people. – Dr. Bill Yazbec

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)

This twisty, turn-y, Who-Done-It-Wait-WHAT?! created a new standard for stories of troubled marriages, thrumming with wit and menace from its opening lines: “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with… Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.” – Dr. Rebecca Meacham

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)

Powerful, fresh novel about experiencing the chaos and pain of racial violence in America from the perspective of a teenage girl. – Dr. Sarah Schuetze

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)

The cells that led to the polio vaccine and pioneering medicines were cultured, without consent, from the body of a poor black woman in Baltimore. Skloot’s compassionate, humanizing inquiry into the life of that woman and her family’s exploitation literally changed their lives while educating readers around the world. – Dr. Rebecca Meacham

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

Told entirely as a chorus of voices—real and fabricated, alive and dead—the inhabitants of the spiritual realm of the bardo observe Abraham Lincoln’s grief at the death of his son Willie in 1862. From a writer who has consistently pushed the boundaries of narrative and perspective, Lincoln and the Bardo is a historic novel that is also about the collective identity of our time. – Dr. Julialicia Case

The Lost Child – Caryl Phillips (2016)

A postmodern meditation on the struggles of the Windrush Generation and the black Britons who crossed the Atlantic before they did, educational inequity in modern Britain, how societies “lose” their children, and Wuthering Heights. Like Phillips’s previous prose poem-like novels, this one is devastatingly accessible. – Dr. Rebecca Nesvet

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2010)

Alexander’s stunning work provides an essential dialog on the reality of racial politics in America, showing the role of racism in maintaining a contemporary system of slavery of African Americans via the penal system. Alexander provides ample documentation to suggest that the the government of the United States, regardless of political affiliation, has been historically complicit in systemic racism mechanisms that continue to thrive and infect the ideologies of Americans of all classes, races and affiliations. – Dr. Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

In the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, a black family in coastal Mississippi struggles to prepare for the storm. This is a beautiful, unflinching book by a writer whose works have shaped literary conversations about race in America across the last decade. – Dr. Julialicia Case

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West (2017)

Any person who, even momentarily,  felt apologetic for the body he/she/they were born into must read this book. It is comprised of a variety of essays demonstrating the liberation of a person who faced egregious discrimination (from family, friends, strangers and employers) because of the size of her body. West’s ability to perfectly capture a range of emotions from humiliation to elation, whilst being both contemplative and guffaw-inducingly funny, left me shook.   Dr. Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier

Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

Harrowing, haunting, and hopeful: Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel highlights the power of human relationships and the deep desire to create meaningful lives out of disaster, because “survival is insufficient.” – Dr. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten

There, There by Tommy Orange (2018)

A powerful narrative about the lives of Native Americans living in an urban environment, negotiating identity through their relationships and experiences. – Dr. Sarah Schuetze

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (2018)

Beautiful and quiet novel that explores the grief of daily life in the contemporary political climate. – Dr. Sarah Schuetze

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)

You can read all you want about the costs of slavery and the aftershocks from it that still haunt us. But it’s in Coates’ powerful first novel that you’ll find a true, emotional reckoning with the profound damage it did–and with the resilience it took for enslaved people to survive, to love, to fight a society gone mad. – Tracy Fernandez Rysavy

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

DON’T READ ANYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK BEFORE YOU READ IT! That includes the back of the book. I mean it! This book will make you think about your own reader’s expectations as it crosses boundaries that are often used to define family, love, and humanity. – Dr. Sarah Schuetze

WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier (2017)

This sharp, formally inventive collection resists the encroachment of boundaries on its poetry, raising the question of sovereignty and of justice as it explores the violence and erasure endured by indigenous peoples at the hands of the United States government and the trauma, often generational, left by that treatment. – Dr. Christopher Williams