Few writers have turned the raw material of their lives into literature as relentlessly as Karl Ove Knausgård. Born in Oslo in 1968, he studied arts and literature at the University of Bergen before working a succession of jobs — from teaching high school and selling cassette tapes to stints at a psychiatric hospital and on an oil platform — while trying to make it as a writer. His first novel, Out of the World, appeared in 1998 and won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, marking the first debut book to receive the award.
But it was his six-volume epic My Struggle, published between 2009 and 2011, that made Knausgård an international literary sensation. The sprawling autobiographical project transformed the minutiae of everyday life — family, marriage, fatherhood, friendship, embarassment and grief — into an expansive investigation of memory, identity and what it means to mine a life for literature.
Last year, The New York Times Book Review took on an ambitious endeavor of its own: to ring in the first quarter of the century by identifying the books that have mattered most. Hundreds of writers, critics and other literary leaders were asked to name the 10 best books published since 2000, resulting in a list that offered a snapshot of the era’s most influential and enduring literature.
So what does one of the 21st century’s most uncompromising novelists read when he isn’t writing?
For Knausgård, the list is as eclectic and intellectually curious as his own work. From Roberto Bolaño’s sweeping 2666 to Svetlana Alexievich’s searing oral history Voices from Chernobyl, his selections move between fiction, memoir, autofiction, literary experimentation and historical testimony, united by a fascination with memory, identity, and the blurred lines between literature and lived experience.
Explore Knausgård’s top 10 books of the 21st century below, and complement with the bookshelves of other literary luminaries.
Karl Ove Knausgård’s Reading List
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (also rec’d by Anya Taylor-Joy, Carrie Brownstein, Emma Watson, Greta Gerwig & Kim Gordon)
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (also rec’d by Alice Walker)
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (also rec’d by Slavoj Žižek)
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Storm Still by Peter Handke
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
(via The New York Times)
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