I've read only two of them, and looked into several of the others and put them quietly down and backed away.

You really have to wonder who is making up these lists, as Anathem, while a perfectly decent experimental novel for Stephenson, was published in the same decade as the entire Baroque Cycle plus Cryptonomicon.

And a top ten list for the last decade without any Stross on it at all is, well, croggling.

Audrey -- I was describing "Old Man's War"; I screwed up the editing.

Did you read "Perdido Street Station"? If so, what did you think?

Peter -- no kidding on "best far joke ever". But the whole book "Android's Dream"was a delight, at least if you aren't a Scientologist who takes his or her religion seriously. Scalzi does facetious better than anybody I know, with the possible exceptions of Jeffry Dwight over on SFFNet (who usually keeps his among friends) and my better half (who has recently started blogging and taken to it like a duck to water). It seems a GenX trait.

Scalzi also picks other books well. I recently read Jo Walton's new fantasy, "Among Others". If it hadn't just been published in 2011, I would have included it on last decades' best list. Unless several people write some *very* good books in the next ten years, it'll be on that list at the end of the decade too. It's an absolutely lovely story, although a bit dark from time to time.