Anyway, my next pick for Best of the 2000s is obvious, so brace yourselves: It’s the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling.

Some of you are moaning. Others are cheering. Others are tired and want to take a nap.

I was one of those people who refused to read Harry Potter because it was popular. Indeed, up until about 2003 I had a pretty negative attitude towards teen fiction in general, in spite of the fact that I was already a Meg Cabot fan.

Then one day I realized that I should probably just get on with it. And I did. I gulped the first two books down in one sitting, and then went to the grocery store in the middle of the night to buy the next three. By the time I was done with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a week later, I was well on my way to being Queen of Harry Potter Predictions.

I have to say, I love Rowling’s sense of whimsy, her world-building and her plot twists. What was most awesome about the HP days was the anticipation of the next book. We’d all of us work ourselves into a frenzy about which character would do what and why.

And the fan fic! In the days leading up to the release of the final book, I read one piece of fan fic that I think may (in some ways) be better than the real thing. There are authors out there who got their starts writing HP fan fic, and then went on to build their own fantasy worlds. It’s incredible, how inspired we all got — kids and adults alike. We talked about canon, timelines, themes, motives and all sorts of other things. We talked about it for hours. Nay, for days. Weeks. Months. Years.

I can’t think of any other series that was so universally exciting to me, mainly because I cared about what happened, and I thought Rowling had a methodology — a grand plan, if you will — for how it would all turn out. Other people cared even more than I did, and they had websites devoted to it all. Fandom has not been the same since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mainly because all the fans have nothing left to do. Except maybe read other books.

Now, if you ask me, the best and most rewarding of the HP books was Half-Blood Prince. It gave us some backstory, but not too much backstory. We saw that Snape was maybe (but totally not really) evil. We also got to spend some time guessing what items would be horcruxes. And because it was the penultimate book, we were all in a super-frenzy afterwards. (Which is one of the reasons, if you ask me, that Deathly Hallows couldn’t have met anyone’s expectations.)

Fast forward to 2010: I’ve read all the books so many times I should probably have memorized them. I’ve got a boxed set that I keep in its original shrink wrap so that I’ll never drop any of the books into the bathtub, and I’ve had to recycle several copies of each novel because it really, seriously, has gotten dropped into the tub too many times.

Anyway, that’s my own personal Harry Potter story. I’m sure you must agree that the Potterverse belongs on any thorough Best of the 2000s list. If you don’t, I’ll bludgeon you with a quaffle or perhaps turn you into a bouncing ferret.

You know I adore her writing. You know I consider her to be the High Priestess of YA.

The first time I read a Meg Cabot book must have been the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001. I was sick, and I’d had to leave college right before my last semester. My dear friend Jami B. mailed me a care package including The Princess Diaries and a pink plastic tiara.

I put on the tiara and read the book in one sitting. Mia Thermopolis enchanted me. A princess who doesn’t want to be a princess??? How could it get any better?

As time passed, I collected pretty much every single thing Meg has ever had published. The woman is a powerhouse. I don’t know how she does it, but she is unbelievably prolific, and her style is very much her own. She’s big on texture, which is my favorite thing about creative writing. She consistently serves up e-mails, instant messages, text messages, journal entries, receipts, even airline tickets. I wish more authors were good at the whole artifact thing, because it’s such a joy to be reading a book and stumble upon, I don’t know, a picture of a cat drawn onto a menu in Italian.

If Gossip Girl was potato chips, Meg’s books are more like … pita chips. You still shouldn’t eat too many of them at once, but you can feel sort of good about what you’re consuming. You’re all, “This is creative! It’s a pita! And it’s a chip!”

No, seriously, though. The 2000s would have sucked much, much more had it not been for Meg. And she’s written such a variety of books. She’s got an accidental princess, an accidental witch (Jinx), a girl who saves the president’s life (All-American Girl), and most recently, a girl who gets her brain transplanted into a supermodel’s body (Airhead). The only thing Meg hasn’t written is a space western, which thankfully she has left to the likes of Joss Whedon.

And Meg is no slacker in the books-for-grownups department, either. But you all know all of this. Because you love Meg as I do. (Don’t you? Don’t you???)

See, the thing is this: The 2000s were a decade in which we all needed to escape sometimes. I think all decades are like this, but for me the 2000s were especially full of moments in which I needed to not be thinking about work, or bills, or school, or boys, or whatever else was on my plate at the moment. And Meg has helped me escape for a few hours at a time with every one of her books.

The best thing that happened, if you ask me, is that young adult literature exploded. You can walk into almost any Barnes and Noble now and find a whole section devoted to YA fiction.

I don’t imagine I’ll be able to write this all in one sitting, so I’m just going to start at the beginning, which for me was Gossip Girl.

It was 2003, I think, when I was working at a small daily paper in southern Connecticut, that an editor dropped a stack of Gossip Girl novels on my desk. I worked for the city desk, meaning I mostly wrote obits and covered breaking news stories about important happenings, like the local post office getting its own little postal ATM.

But Jim, the amazing and wonderful features editor, knew I had better things to do with my time. Like read Cecily von Ziegesar’s highly addictive and seriously trashy novels about wealthy teenaged girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Cecily, when I met her, took umbrage at my calling her books “trashy.” But I meant it in a good way. What she wrote wasn’t saccharine sweet, like the Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club books I had grown up reading. No, Cecily ventured into dangerous territory. She wrote about booze and drugs and sex and fashion and the general cattiness of New York’s upper crust.

Looking back now, and seeing all the amazing teen literature that came both before and after Gossip Girl, it’s easy to trash the series. Cecily’s characters had few redeeming qualities, and her plots were designed to fill her readers with envy.

But isn’t that what your teen years are really all about? I don’t know about you, but I spent my teens being uncomfortable with my body, with my social standing, with my clothes, with my interests. I was uncomfortable around boys, and I was even more uncomfortable around girls. If anyone knew I’d gotten my new sweater at a discount store instead of at Nordstrom, I was sure I’d become an instant pariah.

Right. So the thing that amazed me about Gossip Girl is that, as a series, it hit readers right where it hurt the most. Those of us who devoured the novels were excited because they were racy and fun and because they lacked the kind of moralizing we’d come to expect.

For me, Gossip Girl was the start of something new in young adult fiction. Instead of being preachy and condescending, authors and publishers were finally starting to understand that teenagers are … you know … people. With brains. Instead of pretending that no teenager ever smoked a joint (unless he or she was a “bad seed”), Gossip Girl acknowledged it and moved on. It’s hard to believe now that, when the books first became popular, there were tons of articles published questioning whether all that exposure to sex, drugs and rock and roll would corrupt teenagers.

I’m not saying it was all good, Gossip Girl. For one thing, the concept for the series was developed by a book packager — although it was Cecily’s concept, as she worked for the company.

For awhile, toward the end of the 2000s, I was very bitter toward book packagers because I thought the idea of a bunch of guys in suits sitting around a table and deciding what teenagers would like was, you know, ludicrous. But let’s face it: lots of writers, including Cecily, get their start by writing for these companies. And they’ve always existed, these men in suits and struggling young writers. As much as it’s tempting to idolize authors as unique snowflakes whose creativity is akin to godliness, it turns out the publishing industry isn’t quite that simple.

Lots of brilliant folks, like Scott Westerfeld and Libba Bray, got their starts writing for book packagers. And now they’re off doing their own awesome, wacky, super-smart projects.

Ahem. I believe I may have gone off on a tangent. The point here is that regardless of how many puppet-masters there were behind the scenes, Gossip Girl broke new ground for writers and readers of teen lit. And, you know. It was also an incredibly popular book series that spawned any number of spinoffs and knockoffs, got its own TV series, and provided tons of brain candy for those of us who dared to indulge.

With that, I’ll leave you for today. But I’ll be back soon, with more about literature of the ’00s.

Much love,
brina