UncleClimax started that 10 Best Active Novelist thread in order to get kind of a handle on who he should be reading when he finally starts to crack the fiction of the 20th century.

I was kind of gazing at my bookshelves last night and thinking about this and the question whether Nick Hornby should or should not be included in the list.

And that makes me want to refine the question a little bit.

Without regard to whether their entire oeuvre would rank them in the top ten, what novelists and which of their novels in particular do you recommend for someone like UC?

Or, without regard to the lasting quality of their work, i.e., whether they'll be highly regarded or even remembered in a hundred years, what books/writers do you think capture an age, an emotion, an experience, in a way that you closely connect with?

So like, oh yeah, for the dysfunctional white single male of a certain age, Nick Hornby has it on lock with High Fidelity and About A Boy.

Or like, I totally did not have any inkling or sympathy whatsoever as to the Korean-American experience until I read Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker.

Or like, how is it that Norman Rush could write Mating, which was (1) politically perceptive, (2) pretty good wrt the woman's pov, AND (3) hysterically funny, and then write Mortals, which fails at all three?

Like that.

So not the "Best Book You've Ever Read" and not "The Best Writer In The World" but more like, "Hidden Gems and Slept-On Treasures."