I was surprised to have read thirty two of the books. None, except perhaps the Ernaux book were in my top xx. Those would have included Flights by Olga T, the Details by Ia Genberg, The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gundy, a book I suspect I may not like as much now as I did when I first read it but which I love so much when I first read it, I gotta put it on my list, Checkout Nineteen, a marvelous book about much including reading itself, by Claire Louise Bennet, last year's Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, the Topeka School by Ben Lerner, and an Immense World, by Ed Yong, a book about how other creatures sense and cognize that makes the reader feel a part of something so much larger than themselves.
omg I love Genberg’s The Details—so masterful and fluidly engrossing (the translators did an incredible job)! also agree with your pick of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19; she’s one of my favorite writers right now…and Flights is brilliant and such an amazing exploration of museums/nationalism/colonialism and history of science/anatomy/medicine in a novel
Kairos was a disappointment to me, actually! I remember being totally sold in the first 10 pages (brilliant style and brilliant rhythm) but I started to get very sick of the repetitive badness of the central relationship…but maybe that repetition is how bad relationships actually function in life?
I get your take on Kairos. For me nothing could trump this one paragraph in which the point of view, the narrator in fact, changed -- if I remember - mid sentence. Crazy love is like that; beyond rules, beyond the mind's capacity to wait or to order. Thank God.
I agree with every single omission you have pointed out - the lack of translated books while unsurprising, was still shocking. What I also thought is so may of the books are american centric in topic! While an element of this is to be expected as it is the NYT, all of the non fic (bar the troubles book) and memoir is about American events/culture and society. As a reader from the UK I just really noticed this, I hardly recognised many of the books and I can't help but wonder if this is because they are so American orientated in nature? I think the list is reading like a reflection of a certain age demographic of Americans and the books that have been available to them in their lifetime - I think it reflects super interesting trends in publishing in America and how this dominates what is available to be read/purchased/consumed in the country - perhaps a tell that publishing houses in the US deem books about the US the most 'important' - (this is an unrefined thought but one I have really been thinking about since the list)
Rooney one of THE 21st century writers - I think her exclusion might be related to the age of the voters asked? No Rooney, Olga Tokarczuk, Yaa Gyasi, S A Cosby, Douglas Stuart or Alejandro Zambra is shocking to me. I also think having no trans Japanese lit on there is absolute insanity.
While good I agree that Never Let Me Go and Exist West don't feel worthy of that list! I have only read one Ferrante novel (days of abandonment) but was shocked to see her as no1! I am going to have to read it out of curiosity, but I didn't think DOA deserved a place on that list. The only books I have read that I did think deserved a place were 'Demon Copperhead' and 'Station Eleven' because they were very very good.
Your comment made me think of the Guardian's list of 100 best books of the 21st century, which I believe was just compiled by the newspaper (and not writers/critics submitting their top 10) but does have a more UK focus (though with a few other European/African writers as well, e.g. Yanis Varoufakis) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/best-books-of-the-21st-century
I think their list is strange in many ways—it tends towards the popular, e.g. a Harry Potter book, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. But just to compare, I did a quick count and there are 13 books that appear on the Guardian's list and the NYT's: Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Franzen's The Corrections, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Tony Judt's Postwar, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
I agree that Tokarczuk and Zambra would have been appropriate picks for a "best books of the 21st century" list! Maybe also César Aira and László Krasznahorkai (2 of my faves)? But the last 2 especially aren't very widely read in the US…
Yess thanks for re reminding me of the Guardian list too! The cross overs are interesting - I’m not sure if I expected more than just 13 shared. I guess what would be most interesting is an opportunity to the public to poll best books to see how it differs from staff/critics. While I am aware of the many logistical issues of that, it would be fascinating.
Tokarczuk and Zambra definitely would have been good pics. Yes to Aira and Krasznahorkai!! I haven’t read either (YET, have intended too for a while) but if heard great things - which of their works would you recommend as a starting point?
The Road, The Corrections and The Emperor of Maladies also appear on both lists.
Overall, the Guardian list does better represent popular/genre fiction (Harry Potter, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Le Carre, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Ted Chiang, Terry Prachett. Philip Pullman; this list is of course heavily weighted towards British writers of these genres.) If one's definition of "best" includes a criteria like broader cultural impact, I can see that as a defensible position, although there's a lot of room to quibble with the specific choices.
To be fair, Tony Judt's history of postwar Europe finished 43rd.
Regarding translations, there's always the question of whose work you're actually reading, of what relationship the translated text has to the original, of whether reading a translation is the same as reading the original work.
Regarding the US-centric nature of the list, that is obviously true, but I think it might be a bit more complex. First, English is probably (depending on one's interpretation of the Indian language landscape and who counts as an English speaker) the world's most widely spoken and read language, so it makes sense that a large proportion of such a list would be in English, especially because of English's unique status as the lingua franca of the internet. It's also probably true that the US has been the world's cultural superpower thus far in the 21st century.
At the same time, primarily Americans voted on this list and of course their choices are going to be influenced by the culture they live in. A Chinese list of the young century's top books would look very different.
No David Graeber is a massive omission,—The Dawn of Everything was extremely impactful for a lot of people I know personally at least,— and the same with Ottessa Moshfergh, Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day really should have been on the list), and Knausgaard.
I will say though, My Brilliant Friend was a solid pick for first.
I haven't read The Dawn of Everything—would really like to soon (though clearly I have a lot of books I keep on saying this about!)
It's interesting…Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy both felt like "omissions" to me when I first read the list, but I think their most famous/influential works were all published in the late 20th century? But maybe it's also that we haven't had enough time and distance to assess their late-career works…
I'm in the same boat,—too many books to read and too little time!
But yeah, I feel the same way about McCarthy but also, the Road made it to 13 on the list which is a pretty good placement.
My thoughts with Pynchon is that, yeah while two of his three major works were published in the twentieth century (talking about Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon here), Against the Day was published in 2006 and I think there's a good chance that it's remembered down the road as his best. At the very least it lays out his philosophy better than his other books and it's a good skeleton key to understanding all of his other works imo (in the same way that Mullholand Drive was the key, for me anyway, of understanding David Lynch's work). The only issue is that Against the Day was 1200 pages smh...
But also like maybe i'm just too much of a pynchon fanatic lol
lol somehow I missed The Road being there! yet another situation in which I have read the “minor” work (Blood Meridian, unbelievably gorgeous prose and descriptions of landscape and nature) but not the more well-known work
Blood Meridian is soooooo good, but one of those books where I had to put it down for long periods of time because it was just too much to take in (I think i took a four month break right after the convoy passes the tree of dead babies lol,—what a ride that book was)
The Road is on the list, and I think one could make a strong argument for No Country for Old Men, a novel that seems to be on its way to something like classic status. If nothing else, the popularity of and critical acclaim for its (extremely faithful) film adaptation give it some cachet in wider pop culture.
Shocked that 'A Little Life' by Hanya Yanagihara isn't on the list, considering what a feat it is, or the attention it received, at least in my circles, as well as Rooney, with her popularity, like you say. I'm glad to see Ernaux, Bechdel and Adichie on the list, however. It really bugs me that multiple books by the same author appear on the list, even though it is a list of best *books* and not authors, but it feels like a missed opportunity to represent more authors. Personally, I've read only 15 on the list, and mostly a long time ago with some DNFs, and only want to read 6...which makes me feel very cool and alternative ... ;-)
I agree about the multiple authors…I almost wanted there to be an additional rule, like “no more than 2 books by the same author” bc it’s interesting to see what other names might come up!
I thought the list was interesting mostly because I never took it seriously. There is absolutely no method to this madness... it felt like a meme - which it eventually has become. And I think that was by design.
I love Leigh Stein's piece about it, I am willing to bet that the product team is behind the list (not the editors). It feels pretty transparent to me that the purpose behind it is to drive eyeballs to the website ... why else would you choose such a provocative, inaccurate title right?! On the other hand, the digital features + specific instructions on how to make the list your own are super well thought-out... look at all of us sharing and talking about!!! 😂
The Ferrante book at Number 1 is so interesting... So... Americans are willing to read in translation but only when there's a weird publicity frenzy around an author?!
yes, I think Leigh nailed it with the description of the list as CONTENT where the goal is to encourage ENGAGEMENT…the personalized graphics at the end were a brilliant move
I’m super fascinated by which translated books get read in the US—I wonder if there’s a survey out there describing who reads literature in translation (demographically), what languages, etc…and also breaking down who’s publishing those books
thank YOU—I really love following your newsletter and your thoughts on the current literary market, self-promotion, writing community…it's always a delight to read
Your point about the mainstream liberal-ness of all the non-fiction books really struck me. I totally agree that Graeber should have been there and probably Naomi Klein and Mike Davis too. I think Ehrenreich is probably the only author on the left really working in the left tradition and while I don't necessarily agree with some of the critiques of nickel and dimed you outline I do think it's not her strongest book, and probably the one most fittable into a liberal framework without a wider critique. I love a lot of the liberal nonfiction here, I just think it's kind of telling that most of the judges don't seem to be engaged with this body of work at all - Sarah Schulman being a big exception.
I'm not sure if I've seen anyone mention the most shocking omission to me, though, is that, unless I missed something there is not one book - fiction or non - primarly about climate. That seems pretty shocking.
Thank you Laura—these are all really good points. I actually looked up the publication date of Naomi Klein's No Logo because to me it's one of the most influential nonfiction books about our time—but it turns out it was published Dec 1999, and just missed the cutoff. Agree on Mike Davis as well.
I'm honestly so curious about who they asked to judge…my friends and I (and many of the writers I admire) are reading people like Schulman, Klein, Davis, Yanis Varoufakis, Byung-Chul Han…people who are more explicitly critical of neoliberal capitalism.
I think my personal picks for economic nonfiction would be Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (neither of them are explicitly anticapitalist, maybe more liberal social-democratic, but they point out some of the foundational myths about our current economic system and how they contribute to inequality)
On the more explicitly anticapitalist side: David Harvey's Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism and Yanis Varoufakis's Talking to My Daughter about the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism perhaps? (Or another Varoufakis book)
I see a lot of people talk about Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism as a more introductory/possibly overhyped book, but I also think it's introduced many, many people to critiques of neoliberal capitalism. It's had a massive influence and would probably appear on a different, less liberal version of the NYT's list?
Thank you for your comment and provoking more reflections! Lastly—completely agree about the omission of climate-related books…literature should not be an escape from the reality we live in, but a deepened experience of that reality. I'm trying to think what I would pick in this category—maybe David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth? I also really really liked Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline (maybe more niche, though)
Totally agree about the lack of translated novels. Translated novels are at least half of what I read because they prevent me from thinking a modern novel should follow particular conventions i.e. the type of “mfa” writing a lot of americans talk about. The main american novel I would have added to the list is the quick and the dead by joy williams; it’s brilliant, funny, and one of her most underrated imo. For translated I would include something by banana yoshimoto (can’t pick), and breasts and eggs by mieko kawakami. Off the top of my head I am not sure if any of my other favorite translated works are from the 21st century. I would also include always coming home by ursula k. Le guin (a dense masterwork that really pushes fiction forward) (or at least one of le guin’s 21st century essay collections), and sharp objects by gillian flynn. I was happy to see han kang’s the vegetarian on the nyt list, tho, and there are definitely several books you mentioned that I’m interested in reading now. Great piece!
Thank you for reading!! Also yes—love Banana Yoshimoto and Mieko Kawakami (I was revisiting this brief interview with her the other day, where she talks about Kafka being her comfort read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/12/mieko-kawakami-franz-kafka-is-my-comfort-read) and I think both are brilliant writers. Yoshimoto in particular has such a rare gift for taking horribly painful topics (loss of a mother/father, suicide) and writing stories that have such nourishing happy endings—ones that integrate the trauma of the character's past and still create a feeling of hope and optimism
More on the Japanese literature front…I've seen a few people mention Yoko Tawada's The Memory Police as a favorite 21st century book! I've only read one much weirder, stranger Tawada book (The Naked Eye…SO strange and disorienting but stylistically and structurally remarkable to me) but curious about The Memory Police too
This was a truly engrossing read, Celine; thank you so much for sharing this.
I am interested to hear why you hate multigenerational immigrant novels. I have always disliked them but can never seem to put my finger on why that is. I was especially disappointed, for example, by Middlesex, which I was fully prepared to connect with given my own heritage (and that was even before I understood the implications of Eugenides' representation of transness). I much prefer the granularity of a single individual's story. I think my preference is associated with the fact that modern life makes me feel scattered and that which is pared down and focused or presented in microcosm makes it easier for me to dwell in nuance and particularity.
Perhaps for the same reason, even the idea of selecting 100 best books of the 21st century nauseates me, especially because this project plays fast and loose with genre (perhaps its greatest methodological oversight other than including multiple books by the same authors. I would have at least separated out NF from F!). Ultimately, I found myself feeling so hungry for more precision and categorization in this list.
Like many others, I was expecting to see Knausgaard, Yanagihara, Moshfegh, Tokarczuk, Lockwood, and perhaps Gyasi among the bunch.
Final note: It was interesting to cross-check the NYT list with the 21st c. list of Pulitzer Prize winners! (https://lithub.com/have-a-look-back-at-every-pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-winner-of-the-21st-century/) and see which novels were snubbed. Some of these titles induce a different kind of nausea in me. If only I had earned a dollar for every copy of All the Light We Cannot See I handled as a bookseller and library worker...
Athena!! always so happy to hear from you and get your literary opinions 🕊️
My problem with multigenerational immigrant novels, I think, is that so many of them veer more historical fiction–y (the genre I read the least, even though I LOVE historical nonfiction) and many of them are more conventional on a sentence/style level. It’s strange bc I am very impressed by novels that cover a vast expanse of time, and love novels with a wide cast of characters…but Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, for example, doesn’t draw me in stylistically, and same with Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. I respect what both writers are doing on a plot level and the ambitions of the novel, it’s just not my thing.
This isn’t a multigenerational family novel but more a big-cast-of-linked-characters novel…but I am very impressed by Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and really want to read it at some point!
I think the mix of fiction plus memoir plus nonfiction, etc is inevitable for this kind of list…but I would also love to see “books” broken down into distinct genres and get a top 10/25 list for each
I resonate with that assessment completely. Also, this is again my bookselling/librarianing bias coming through, but it seems like many contemporary multigenerational immigrant novels have that "book club darling" sheen to them, or a kind of marketable palatability I am a bit allergic to.
(While we're all still talking about this list, a) I think every one of the sequels to Gilead is better than Gilead, b) I wish people talked more often about Ehrenreich's follow-up to Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, in which she does the whole "cosplay as someone who doesn't already have a job" but this time as a precariously white-collar person, and she goes to all the "networking events" and sees all the "resume consultants" and whatnot, and it's a less important book than N&D but it's a lot funnier)
Now I’m intrigued…because I loved the experience of reading Gilead, but haven’t gotten to the later books! Part of me wants to buy the whole quartet, because I really love the covers that Na Kim designed, with paintings by Charles E. Burchfield…
I’m also very curious about the other Ehrenreich book you mentioned, too—something that highlights the absurdities of white-collar job rituals
One thought, which might be too obvious, is the question of what we talk about when we talk about the best books, a question that the New York Times article doesn't even attempt to answer. Are we talking about the most influential books of the century so far? The ones that in some sense best capture a 21st century zeitgeist, however we define that? The best written books according to some aesthetic criteria? How does one assess the quality of a history vs. a novel vs. a memoir vs. a poetry collection, when their respective authors seem to be pursuing very different aesthetic goals?
Yes, this is a great question—I actually spent a bit of time trying to define what I consider "best", and then cut it out of the post for some reason.
To me, the "best" books are ones that have high artistic ambitions and execute on them beautifully; they're innovative and influential (inaugurating or helping shape some genre or trend); they're somewhat recognized, but they might be a critic's pick or an under-read contemporary classic. The ideal best list, to me, would in some ways reflect the entire literary landscape: there would be some places for each genre—this list is heavily weighted towards novels and nonfiction, but in my ideal list there would be more poetry, more cross-genre work, more essays and criticism, maybe even a play—since all of these reflect literary culture today, even if some of these are less discussed and consumed by the public. (My picks: Amia Srinivasan's essay collection The Right to Sex, Jeremy O'Harris's play Slave Play.)
I also think the question of what constitutes a "21st century zeitgeist," as you pointed out, is a really good one! Would love more people's thoughts on this
First, the reality that there is no one 21st century zeitgeist, that the century's history and sociocultural situation will look very different to someone in New York vs. someone in rural China vs. someone living on a Greek island.
There are quite a few modes of writing -- some extremely popular and commercially successful -- not represented in the NYT list. Children's fiction, mysteries, travel writing, criticism (of anything, really; no art/film/music/literary criticism), drama, academic philosophy, self-help, sports writing, manga.
With you on missing the Ferrante moment but thinking now I have another chance. 2666 would be on my overrated list— the Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile are far better IMO. And yes, the list skews toward middle-aged to older writers but I am not sure exactly how I’d fix that. I love that you’ve kept your “want to read” list so manageable. I added so many to mine and then I didn’t even want to look at it— there’s just not time for that!
Ah, interesting! I'm so curious why you think 2666 is overrated (I haven't read By Night in Chile btw)
I think my manageable "want to read" list stems partly from being so dedicated to novels that are coming out NOW—partly because I want to keep up with new books to review, but partly because I'm intensely curious about what is being published now, and whether I can come to my own conclusions about what feels great and worth remembering decades later. I also really value keeping up with smaller presses (which are barely represented on the NYT's list!)
correct takes as always!i think torrey peters' book is there as the "millennial fiction; observations as humour; voice-y writing" book in the place of many others (sally rooney, luster) ... imo, it's one of the best of this niche so i'm happy for it to be the representative!
thank you Laurel ❤️ also I really like your framing—Rooney/Peters/Luster for me are all operating in this space of frank discussions of sexuality (often trans/queer sexuality) + some attention to precarity and material conditions and class + very colloquially charming but not unsophisticated writing
I also really admire how well-structured the plot is for Peters's book—it's so genuinely CONSUMABLE as a novel, I couldn't stop reading it and then couldn't stop talking about it after I'd finished
yes!!! to the structure of peters' book, i SO admire a book that tells a story non-linearly without being confusing or taking you out of the rhythm of the book.
PS: my brilliant friend/the neapolitan quartet is so timeless that i would argue it's "moment" is whenever you want a book that makes you feel something
My brilliant friend is addictive to say the least!! Imo now is the perfect time to pick up the neapolitan quartet cause the fourth season in the TV series is dropping in November, just in time for u to finish the whole series and the previous 3 seasons of the TV show
sadly I am very anti TV (no attention span for it somehow, even a 60 second Tiktok makes me feel claustrophobic, and a 10 minute Youtube video is the first circle of hell) BUT I think your comment has made me feel like I must get to Ferrante this year! maybe the first novel of the series can be my August holiday read
Ok that explains how you're able to read so much and write on top of a full time job haha. Hoping you become a Ferrante stan. There's no one quite like her
other than just being a David Mitchell stan, I think part of the reason Cloud Atlas is so important is because it was one of the first speculative epics. Once time has passed and others have done it the same or better the original can feel a bit over played. I loved it though. I appreciated this piece from Lincoln Michel on the topic! https://countercraft.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-speculative-epic
I was surprised to have read thirty two of the books. None, except perhaps the Ernaux book were in my top xx. Those would have included Flights by Olga T, the Details by Ia Genberg, The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gundy, a book I suspect I may not like as much now as I did when I first read it but which I love so much when I first read it, I gotta put it on my list, Checkout Nineteen, a marvelous book about much including reading itself, by Claire Louise Bennet, last year's Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, the Topeka School by Ben Lerner, and an Immense World, by Ed Yong, a book about how other creatures sense and cognize that makes the reader feel a part of something so much larger than themselves.
omg I love Genberg’s The Details—so masterful and fluidly engrossing (the translators did an incredible job)! also agree with your pick of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19; she’s one of my favorite writers right now…and Flights is brilliant and such an amazing exploration of museums/nationalism/colonialism and history of science/anatomy/medicine in a novel
Kairos was a disappointment to me, actually! I remember being totally sold in the first 10 pages (brilliant style and brilliant rhythm) but I started to get very sick of the repetitive badness of the central relationship…but maybe that repetition is how bad relationships actually function in life?
I get your take on Kairos. For me nothing could trump this one paragraph in which the point of view, the narrator in fact, changed -- if I remember - mid sentence. Crazy love is like that; beyond rules, beyond the mind's capacity to wait or to order. Thank God.
Thanks!! I will check out. I looked at Flights by Olga T but was put off by the florid descriptions. But I’m taking a shine to The Details.
I agree with every single omission you have pointed out - the lack of translated books while unsurprising, was still shocking. What I also thought is so may of the books are american centric in topic! While an element of this is to be expected as it is the NYT, all of the non fic (bar the troubles book) and memoir is about American events/culture and society. As a reader from the UK I just really noticed this, I hardly recognised many of the books and I can't help but wonder if this is because they are so American orientated in nature? I think the list is reading like a reflection of a certain age demographic of Americans and the books that have been available to them in their lifetime - I think it reflects super interesting trends in publishing in America and how this dominates what is available to be read/purchased/consumed in the country - perhaps a tell that publishing houses in the US deem books about the US the most 'important' - (this is an unrefined thought but one I have really been thinking about since the list)
Rooney one of THE 21st century writers - I think her exclusion might be related to the age of the voters asked? No Rooney, Olga Tokarczuk, Yaa Gyasi, S A Cosby, Douglas Stuart or Alejandro Zambra is shocking to me. I also think having no trans Japanese lit on there is absolute insanity.
While good I agree that Never Let Me Go and Exist West don't feel worthy of that list! I have only read one Ferrante novel (days of abandonment) but was shocked to see her as no1! I am going to have to read it out of curiosity, but I didn't think DOA deserved a place on that list. The only books I have read that I did think deserved a place were 'Demon Copperhead' and 'Station Eleven' because they were very very good.
Your comment made me think of the Guardian's list of 100 best books of the 21st century, which I believe was just compiled by the newspaper (and not writers/critics submitting their top 10) but does have a more UK focus (though with a few other European/African writers as well, e.g. Yanis Varoufakis) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/best-books-of-the-21st-century
I think their list is strange in many ways—it tends towards the popular, e.g. a Harry Potter book, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. But just to compare, I did a quick count and there are 13 books that appear on the Guardian's list and the NYT's: Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Franzen's The Corrections, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Tony Judt's Postwar, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
I agree that Tokarczuk and Zambra would have been appropriate picks for a "best books of the 21st century" list! Maybe also César Aira and László Krasznahorkai (2 of my faves)? But the last 2 especially aren't very widely read in the US…
Yess thanks for re reminding me of the Guardian list too! The cross overs are interesting - I’m not sure if I expected more than just 13 shared. I guess what would be most interesting is an opportunity to the public to poll best books to see how it differs from staff/critics. While I am aware of the many logistical issues of that, it would be fascinating.
Tokarczuk and Zambra definitely would have been good pics. Yes to Aira and Krasznahorkai!! I haven’t read either (YET, have intended too for a while) but if heard great things - which of their works would you recommend as a starting point?
The Road, The Corrections and The Emperor of Maladies also appear on both lists.
Overall, the Guardian list does better represent popular/genre fiction (Harry Potter, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Le Carre, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Ted Chiang, Terry Prachett. Philip Pullman; this list is of course heavily weighted towards British writers of these genres.) If one's definition of "best" includes a criteria like broader cultural impact, I can see that as a defensible position, although there's a lot of room to quibble with the specific choices.
To be fair, Tony Judt's history of postwar Europe finished 43rd.
Regarding translations, there's always the question of whose work you're actually reading, of what relationship the translated text has to the original, of whether reading a translation is the same as reading the original work.
Regarding the US-centric nature of the list, that is obviously true, but I think it might be a bit more complex. First, English is probably (depending on one's interpretation of the Indian language landscape and who counts as an English speaker) the world's most widely spoken and read language, so it makes sense that a large proportion of such a list would be in English, especially because of English's unique status as the lingua franca of the internet. It's also probably true that the US has been the world's cultural superpower thus far in the 21st century.
At the same time, primarily Americans voted on this list and of course their choices are going to be influenced by the culture they live in. A Chinese list of the young century's top books would look very different.
No David Graeber is a massive omission,—The Dawn of Everything was extremely impactful for a lot of people I know personally at least,— and the same with Ottessa Moshfergh, Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day really should have been on the list), and Knausgaard.
I will say though, My Brilliant Friend was a solid pick for first.
I haven't read The Dawn of Everything—would really like to soon (though clearly I have a lot of books I keep on saying this about!)
It's interesting…Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy both felt like "omissions" to me when I first read the list, but I think their most famous/influential works were all published in the late 20th century? But maybe it's also that we haven't had enough time and distance to assess their late-career works…
I'm in the same boat,—too many books to read and too little time!
But yeah, I feel the same way about McCarthy but also, the Road made it to 13 on the list which is a pretty good placement.
My thoughts with Pynchon is that, yeah while two of his three major works were published in the twentieth century (talking about Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon here), Against the Day was published in 2006 and I think there's a good chance that it's remembered down the road as his best. At the very least it lays out his philosophy better than his other books and it's a good skeleton key to understanding all of his other works imo (in the same way that Mullholand Drive was the key, for me anyway, of understanding David Lynch's work). The only issue is that Against the Day was 1200 pages smh...
But also like maybe i'm just too much of a pynchon fanatic lol
lol somehow I missed The Road being there! yet another situation in which I have read the “minor” work (Blood Meridian, unbelievably gorgeous prose and descriptions of landscape and nature) but not the more well-known work
I thought that Blood Meridian was generally thought of as his magnum opus.
Blood Meridian is soooooo good, but one of those books where I had to put it down for long periods of time because it was just too much to take in (I think i took a four month break right after the convoy passes the tree of dead babies lol,—what a ride that book was)
The Road is on the list, and I think one could make a strong argument for No Country for Old Men, a novel that seems to be on its way to something like classic status. If nothing else, the popularity of and critical acclaim for its (extremely faithful) film adaptation give it some cachet in wider pop culture.
Shocked that 'A Little Life' by Hanya Yanagihara isn't on the list, considering what a feat it is, or the attention it received, at least in my circles, as well as Rooney, with her popularity, like you say. I'm glad to see Ernaux, Bechdel and Adichie on the list, however. It really bugs me that multiple books by the same author appear on the list, even though it is a list of best *books* and not authors, but it feels like a missed opportunity to represent more authors. Personally, I've read only 15 on the list, and mostly a long time ago with some DNFs, and only want to read 6...which makes me feel very cool and alternative ... ;-)
I agree about the multiple authors…I almost wanted there to be an additional rule, like “no more than 2 books by the same author” bc it’s interesting to see what other names might come up!
I thought the list was interesting mostly because I never took it seriously. There is absolutely no method to this madness... it felt like a meme - which it eventually has become. And I think that was by design.
I love Leigh Stein's piece about it, I am willing to bet that the product team is behind the list (not the editors). It feels pretty transparent to me that the purpose behind it is to drive eyeballs to the website ... why else would you choose such a provocative, inaccurate title right?! On the other hand, the digital features + specific instructions on how to make the list your own are super well thought-out... look at all of us sharing and talking about!!! 😂
The Ferrante book at Number 1 is so interesting... So... Americans are willing to read in translation but only when there's a weird publicity frenzy around an author?!
yes, I think Leigh nailed it with the description of the list as CONTENT where the goal is to encourage ENGAGEMENT…the personalized graphics at the end were a brilliant move
I’m super fascinated by which translated books get read in the US—I wonder if there’s a survey out there describing who reads literature in translation (demographically), what languages, etc…and also breaking down who’s publishing those books
Would be curious to know what you think of My Brilliant Friend! The series is one of my favorite works of all time.
Thank you for the mention Celine!
thank YOU—I really love following your newsletter and your thoughts on the current literary market, self-promotion, writing community…it's always a delight to read
Your point about the mainstream liberal-ness of all the non-fiction books really struck me. I totally agree that Graeber should have been there and probably Naomi Klein and Mike Davis too. I think Ehrenreich is probably the only author on the left really working in the left tradition and while I don't necessarily agree with some of the critiques of nickel and dimed you outline I do think it's not her strongest book, and probably the one most fittable into a liberal framework without a wider critique. I love a lot of the liberal nonfiction here, I just think it's kind of telling that most of the judges don't seem to be engaged with this body of work at all - Sarah Schulman being a big exception.
I'm not sure if I've seen anyone mention the most shocking omission to me, though, is that, unless I missed something there is not one book - fiction or non - primarly about climate. That seems pretty shocking.
Thank you Laura—these are all really good points. I actually looked up the publication date of Naomi Klein's No Logo because to me it's one of the most influential nonfiction books about our time—but it turns out it was published Dec 1999, and just missed the cutoff. Agree on Mike Davis as well.
I'm honestly so curious about who they asked to judge…my friends and I (and many of the writers I admire) are reading people like Schulman, Klein, Davis, Yanis Varoufakis, Byung-Chul Han…people who are more explicitly critical of neoliberal capitalism.
I think my personal picks for economic nonfiction would be Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (neither of them are explicitly anticapitalist, maybe more liberal social-democratic, but they point out some of the foundational myths about our current economic system and how they contribute to inequality)
On the more explicitly anticapitalist side: David Harvey's Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism and Yanis Varoufakis's Talking to My Daughter about the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism perhaps? (Or another Varoufakis book)
I see a lot of people talk about Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism as a more introductory/possibly overhyped book, but I also think it's introduced many, many people to critiques of neoliberal capitalism. It's had a massive influence and would probably appear on a different, less liberal version of the NYT's list?
Thank you for your comment and provoking more reflections! Lastly—completely agree about the omission of climate-related books…literature should not be an escape from the reality we live in, but a deepened experience of that reality. I'm trying to think what I would pick in this category—maybe David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth? I also really really liked Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline (maybe more niche, though)
Totally agree about the lack of translated novels. Translated novels are at least half of what I read because they prevent me from thinking a modern novel should follow particular conventions i.e. the type of “mfa” writing a lot of americans talk about. The main american novel I would have added to the list is the quick and the dead by joy williams; it’s brilliant, funny, and one of her most underrated imo. For translated I would include something by banana yoshimoto (can’t pick), and breasts and eggs by mieko kawakami. Off the top of my head I am not sure if any of my other favorite translated works are from the 21st century. I would also include always coming home by ursula k. Le guin (a dense masterwork that really pushes fiction forward) (or at least one of le guin’s 21st century essay collections), and sharp objects by gillian flynn. I was happy to see han kang’s the vegetarian on the nyt list, tho, and there are definitely several books you mentioned that I’m interested in reading now. Great piece!
Thank you for reading!! Also yes—love Banana Yoshimoto and Mieko Kawakami (I was revisiting this brief interview with her the other day, where she talks about Kafka being her comfort read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/12/mieko-kawakami-franz-kafka-is-my-comfort-read) and I think both are brilliant writers. Yoshimoto in particular has such a rare gift for taking horribly painful topics (loss of a mother/father, suicide) and writing stories that have such nourishing happy endings—ones that integrate the trauma of the character's past and still create a feeling of hope and optimism
More on the Japanese literature front…I've seen a few people mention Yoko Tawada's The Memory Police as a favorite 21st century book! I've only read one much weirder, stranger Tawada book (The Naked Eye…SO strange and disorienting but stylistically and structurally remarkable to me) but curious about The Memory Police too
I really, really need to read some Joy Williams…I even wrote an article earlier this year where I quoted an interview she did (which was full of incredible insights on fiction and writing https://www.vice.com/en/article/avav9b/joy-williams-ninety-nine-stories-of-god-how-to-write-a-short-story) but haven't gotten around to ACTUALLY reading her work! Thank you for the gentle push to take a look 💌
This was a truly engrossing read, Celine; thank you so much for sharing this.
I am interested to hear why you hate multigenerational immigrant novels. I have always disliked them but can never seem to put my finger on why that is. I was especially disappointed, for example, by Middlesex, which I was fully prepared to connect with given my own heritage (and that was even before I understood the implications of Eugenides' representation of transness). I much prefer the granularity of a single individual's story. I think my preference is associated with the fact that modern life makes me feel scattered and that which is pared down and focused or presented in microcosm makes it easier for me to dwell in nuance and particularity.
Perhaps for the same reason, even the idea of selecting 100 best books of the 21st century nauseates me, especially because this project plays fast and loose with genre (perhaps its greatest methodological oversight other than including multiple books by the same authors. I would have at least separated out NF from F!). Ultimately, I found myself feeling so hungry for more precision and categorization in this list.
Like many others, I was expecting to see Knausgaard, Yanagihara, Moshfegh, Tokarczuk, Lockwood, and perhaps Gyasi among the bunch.
Final note: It was interesting to cross-check the NYT list with the 21st c. list of Pulitzer Prize winners! (https://lithub.com/have-a-look-back-at-every-pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-winner-of-the-21st-century/) and see which novels were snubbed. Some of these titles induce a different kind of nausea in me. If only I had earned a dollar for every copy of All the Light We Cannot See I handled as a bookseller and library worker...
Athena!! always so happy to hear from you and get your literary opinions 🕊️
My problem with multigenerational immigrant novels, I think, is that so many of them veer more historical fiction–y (the genre I read the least, even though I LOVE historical nonfiction) and many of them are more conventional on a sentence/style level. It’s strange bc I am very impressed by novels that cover a vast expanse of time, and love novels with a wide cast of characters…but Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, for example, doesn’t draw me in stylistically, and same with Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. I respect what both writers are doing on a plot level and the ambitions of the novel, it’s just not my thing.
This isn’t a multigenerational family novel but more a big-cast-of-linked-characters novel…but I am very impressed by Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and really want to read it at some point!
I think the mix of fiction plus memoir plus nonfiction, etc is inevitable for this kind of list…but I would also love to see “books” broken down into distinct genres and get a top 10/25 list for each
I resonate with that assessment completely. Also, this is again my bookselling/librarianing bias coming through, but it seems like many contemporary multigenerational immigrant novels have that "book club darling" sheen to them, or a kind of marketable palatability I am a bit allergic to.
I have added Evaristo to my TBR. Thank you.
Oh hey thanks so much Celine!!
(While we're all still talking about this list, a) I think every one of the sequels to Gilead is better than Gilead, b) I wish people talked more often about Ehrenreich's follow-up to Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, in which she does the whole "cosplay as someone who doesn't already have a job" but this time as a precariously white-collar person, and she goes to all the "networking events" and sees all the "resume consultants" and whatnot, and it's a less important book than N&D but it's a lot funnier)
Now I’m intrigued…because I loved the experience of reading Gilead, but haven’t gotten to the later books! Part of me wants to buy the whole quartet, because I really love the covers that Na Kim designed, with paintings by Charles E. Burchfield…
I’m also very curious about the other Ehrenreich book you mentioned, too—something that highlights the absurdities of white-collar job rituals
One thought, which might be too obvious, is the question of what we talk about when we talk about the best books, a question that the New York Times article doesn't even attempt to answer. Are we talking about the most influential books of the century so far? The ones that in some sense best capture a 21st century zeitgeist, however we define that? The best written books according to some aesthetic criteria? How does one assess the quality of a history vs. a novel vs. a memoir vs. a poetry collection, when their respective authors seem to be pursuing very different aesthetic goals?
Yes, this is a great question—I actually spent a bit of time trying to define what I consider "best", and then cut it out of the post for some reason.
To me, the "best" books are ones that have high artistic ambitions and execute on them beautifully; they're innovative and influential (inaugurating or helping shape some genre or trend); they're somewhat recognized, but they might be a critic's pick or an under-read contemporary classic. The ideal best list, to me, would in some ways reflect the entire literary landscape: there would be some places for each genre—this list is heavily weighted towards novels and nonfiction, but in my ideal list there would be more poetry, more cross-genre work, more essays and criticism, maybe even a play—since all of these reflect literary culture today, even if some of these are less discussed and consumed by the public. (My picks: Amia Srinivasan's essay collection The Right to Sex, Jeremy O'Harris's play Slave Play.)
I also think the question of what constitutes a "21st century zeitgeist," as you pointed out, is a really good one! Would love more people's thoughts on this
A few thoughts.
First, the reality that there is no one 21st century zeitgeist, that the century's history and sociocultural situation will look very different to someone in New York vs. someone in rural China vs. someone living on a Greek island.
There are quite a few modes of writing -- some extremely popular and commercially successful -- not represented in the NYT list. Children's fiction, mysteries, travel writing, criticism (of anything, really; no art/film/music/literary criticism), drama, academic philosophy, self-help, sports writing, manga.
With you on missing the Ferrante moment but thinking now I have another chance. 2666 would be on my overrated list— the Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile are far better IMO. And yes, the list skews toward middle-aged to older writers but I am not sure exactly how I’d fix that. I love that you’ve kept your “want to read” list so manageable. I added so many to mine and then I didn’t even want to look at it— there’s just not time for that!
Ah, interesting! I'm so curious why you think 2666 is overrated (I haven't read By Night in Chile btw)
I think my manageable "want to read" list stems partly from being so dedicated to novels that are coming out NOW—partly because I want to keep up with new books to review, but partly because I'm intensely curious about what is being published now, and whether I can come to my own conclusions about what feels great and worth remembering decades later. I also really value keeping up with smaller presses (which are barely represented on the NYT's list!)
The Savage Detectives did finish in 38th place.
correct takes as always!i think torrey peters' book is there as the "millennial fiction; observations as humour; voice-y writing" book in the place of many others (sally rooney, luster) ... imo, it's one of the best of this niche so i'm happy for it to be the representative!
thank you Laurel ❤️ also I really like your framing—Rooney/Peters/Luster for me are all operating in this space of frank discussions of sexuality (often trans/queer sexuality) + some attention to precarity and material conditions and class + very colloquially charming but not unsophisticated writing
I also really admire how well-structured the plot is for Peters's book—it's so genuinely CONSUMABLE as a novel, I couldn't stop reading it and then couldn't stop talking about it after I'd finished
yes!!! to the structure of peters' book, i SO admire a book that tells a story non-linearly without being confusing or taking you out of the rhythm of the book.
PS: my brilliant friend/the neapolitan quartet is so timeless that i would argue it's "moment" is whenever you want a book that makes you feel something
My brilliant friend is addictive to say the least!! Imo now is the perfect time to pick up the neapolitan quartet cause the fourth season in the TV series is dropping in November, just in time for u to finish the whole series and the previous 3 seasons of the TV show
sadly I am very anti TV (no attention span for it somehow, even a 60 second Tiktok makes me feel claustrophobic, and a 10 minute Youtube video is the first circle of hell) BUT I think your comment has made me feel like I must get to Ferrante this year! maybe the first novel of the series can be my August holiday read
Ok that explains how you're able to read so much and write on top of a full time job haha. Hoping you become a Ferrante stan. There's no one quite like her
other than just being a David Mitchell stan, I think part of the reason Cloud Atlas is so important is because it was one of the first speculative epics. Once time has passed and others have done it the same or better the original can feel a bit over played. I loved it though. I appreciated this piece from Lincoln Michel on the topic! https://countercraft.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-speculative-epic
cloud atlas, even i read that one - i remember a future fast-food penal colony, and that i enjoyed the book
It's interesting. I've never read that book, but it seems to be one that readers either love or hate (or viewers, in the case of the film adaptation.)
agreed!! David Mitchell is a polarizing author