Actually, I am a bit disappointed. What kind of authors did they ask? Were they only us based authors / the ones writing primarily in English? Such a list can have a magnitude of an impact and I believe should consider lots of voices, from minority groups and also different nationalities. This is now a list, but not the list. For me, as someone who is now living in the US/ UK - those books tell me little, I know only a few and I don't see much of diversity of authors from all corners of the world.
I’ve read 15 and DNFd another. Lots of books I want to read. I don’t think fiction and nonfiction should be on the same list. If the list was made in Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa…. The list would be very different.
Hi Shelly. Hey! Fun video. You are enthusiastic and a gracious hostess as always. This list is pretty good, admittedly, but it also made me mad. It doubles and triples up on some authors and excludes others, and it ignores too many non-Anglophone writers-so it manages to be both virtue-signaling and hegemonic at once. Left out are truly major voices in English: Pynchon, Vollmann, Gass, Auster, Amis, Rushdie, Joshua Cohen, Adam Levin, James McBride, Arundhati Roy, and I could go on. I adore George Saunders. I adore Denis Johnson. I adore Jesmyn Ward and Hilary Mantel. But why ignore so many terrific writers to name multiple books by the same people? Pynchon is probably the greatest living prose stylist in our language. Against the Day is one of the craziest, funniest, most brilliant books I have ever read. 2006. Nothing. I guess he’s “difficult”? Crazy. Ridiculous. He’s Thomas Pynchon! As for neglecting the world… breathtaking. Nothing by Tokarczuk, Krasznahorkai, Énard, Saramago, Lobo Antunes, Hodrova, Jelinek, Drndič, Pamuk, Jergovič, Murakami (!!), Eco, the Aussie genius Alexis Wright, Seamus Heaney, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, de la Pava, Fresán, Vesaas, Cǎrtǎrescu, Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and again I could go on. For Junot Díaz to rank so high on a list containing none of these people is galling. At least we got The Last Samurai and The Known World and some acknowledgement of W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth. Sebald is great, by the way! Denis Johnson too. Great genre writers were snubbed as they often are: the magnificent Jemisin aside, must we pretend Ted Chiang, China Miéville, Ken Liu, Joe Abercombie, Jeff VanderMeer and others just don’t exist? This keeps the boundary wall between genre fiction and so-called “literary fiction” high. And in a list that is otherwise so careful not to offend! Re: careful not to offend, I’ll cite the omission of Knausgard. I don’t like his work, incidentally-at least, not the way some people seem to. But that project was something of a phenomenon, no? Other important but problematic writers were probably excluded too for reasons more political than literary. I mentioned Murakami already. Then there’s Houellebecq. One need not like him to recognize his importance. I will refrain from too much observation of the fact that history, poetry, nature writing, philosophy, anthropology and other genres exist and that we have seen staggering masterpieces in all of them. But you know… Capital in the Twenty-First Century? Kind of a big, important, great book. Where are Mary Beard, Peter Frankopan, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Adrian Goldsworthy, Peter Wilson, Martin Meredith, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, David Graeber, Martha Nussbaum, Carl Safina, Frans de Waal…? Where’s Underland? The Hidden Life of Trees? It’s still a great list, but it’s blinkered. The Times could do more to advance the causes of literature and multiculturalism.
Thank you for sharing. I think this was The Times’ stab in the dark in order to take on the monumental task of determining the top 100 books of the 21st century. I was shocked that A Little Life was excluded from the list. Gah!
Me too! I think that was also maybe a political choice. A Little Life was polarizing because it was so graphic. I was actually thinking to myself when I was watching that we’d learn a lot about the criteria from whether or not Yanagihara’s book was included. Gah! indeed.
Hey! I've never even heard of most of these books 🙄. I have read 2, Demon Copperhead and all 3 of the Broken Earth trilogy. Thank you for putting the whole list in the description!! I look forward to your thoughts on the ones you read.
I thought at first you just loved the book Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and wanted to rave about it, instead of talking about how to go about talking about the list.
Sarah Jessica Parker is a publisher. Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Lit publishes sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking, and discussion-driven stories that are inclusive of international and underrepresented voices. SJP Lit books capture the contemporary imagination and reflect a wide range of ideas and experiences.
I love to see Junot Diaz in this list. The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao got me out of a really long reading slump after having my kids. I read it in one day and absolutely loved it.
I have not read 2666 but i have read other brilliant Bolaño Novels (Distant Star and Amulet which, i recomend as a great starting point) and I am so excited to one day pick 2666, as well as The Savage Detectives, because the spirit of Latin America as a whole is alive in his literature!
I read maybe 10 books from this list, the best being Trust and Atonement, which I just finished and was devastated by. I also liked Middlesex very much. I’m kind of surprised that Bel Canto is on this list, (meh in my opinion), and none of Amor Towles books made it. Also surprised The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls wasn’t mentioned. I’m a retired librarian and I have to honestly confess that there were many books on this list I never heard of. I did add some to my ridiculously long TBR list.
I’ve read 11 and definitely my favorite is “my brilliant friend” I’ve recommended this book to so many people, because it’s so relatable and easy to read. I also loved Bel canto , I’ve read it such a long time ago but it’s still stuck in my head. And “ never let me go” is my favorite Ishiguro read. Such a great list, although I haven’t heard of so many. But I own some of them and they are on my TBR. This list will put them on my top TBR now. Thank you for sharing and reading the whole list. This much have taken a lot of time.
Appreciated: The Corrections, Middlesex, A Visit from The Goon Squad, Demon Copperhead, The Overstory, and Olive Kitteridge. I have not read most of the others (yet).
This list was so fun. I've read a lot of these, but my favs are The Days of Abandonment, The Goldfinch, Olive Kitteridge, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and The Amazing Adventures of kavalier and Clay.
Hi Shelly, Thanks. That was Fun. This note is mostly only to say that and to say hello. But while I’m here let me qualify myself. I’m an English professor-sort of-I’m a language teacher, not a lit teacher. Recently retired. And, to make you feel better, I hope, I’m a book person too, yet I found eight books here for which I knew neither the book nor the author. (Two of those made my to get list.) I own a whopping 79 of these books-most paid for by the University, thankfully. I’m eager to read as many as I can as fast as I can, though as yet I’ve read only 14. I’ve set aside two that I hope to return to. Those are Tree of Smoke, and your favorite, Wolf Hall. Though I wasn’t especially enamored by either book, in both cases I would have finished them had life not got in the way, and rather than start over on them later when life moved aside for a while, I went on to something else for my reading pleasure. I DNFd another five of these books. Two were The Underground Railroad and Exit West, both of which I’d wanted to enjoy but wasn’t able to because of their Dues Ex Machina, which even the Greeks got tired of somewhere along the way. These days, apparently, this is wrongly called magical realism. Instead, it is only implausible magic and it displays both lazy writing and unacceptable editing- nothing but my own opinion here, of course, and it’s obviously a minority one, but it’s frustrating, at least for me, to imagine how good these two stories might have been were they better researched, richer, and more created in full. The other three I DNFd just bored me: Kavalier and Clay, The Goldfinch, and White Teeth, though I may one day finish the latter two. Not K & C. So, knowing this little bit about me, you can take the following recs with whatever you may consider the right sized grain of salt, but I want you to read A Visit From the Goon Squad, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is actually a ghost story, if a whole new kind of one, though no reviewer ever mentions this, and The Road. These are three of the best books I’ve ever read. Many books on this list are also on my own TBR list. Others, not on this list, surprisingly, at least to me, are Tokyo Ueno Station, The Book Thief, The Nightingale, The Pillars of the Earth, To Live, Little Fires Everywhere, Days Without End, The Devil All the Time, The Bee Sting, Jaber Crow, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, the entire MaddAddam Trilogy, The Bonfires of the Vanities, A Gentleman in Moscow, All the Light We Cannot See, Veronica Decides to Die, Don Winslow’s entire Border Trilogy, Kafka on the Shore, and The Heart. Plus two fabulous Westerns, which you may not realize how much you might enjoy: Doc and Deadwood. Im sure I’m forgetting some of my favorites, and I know I’m omitting all of the great nonfiction I’ve read lately, but I don’t understand how any of the above books have been left off the NYT list in favor of Kavalier & Clay, for example, or white Teeth (though I suspect the reason for that may hove more to do with political correctness than with correctness). But anyway, they all make my list of best recent books, so I wanted to rec them to you. Thanks again. And yes. Thelonius Monk was a jazz musician-a saxophone player.
So interesting, I love book lists! This one is very America-centric; I guess it's supposed to be. (The NY Times page is behind a paywall for me so I can't read about it). I loved 'Gilead' too! Strange there's no Margaret Atwood on there. I highly recommend "Goon Squad", I think you'd love it. Also I'm currently reading The Overstory, and I'm delighted to see it on the list!
Secondhand Time is seriously marvellous, as are The unwomanly face of war (about the experiences of soviet women who served in the army during WWII), and Chernobyl Prayer (which was a major source of the brilliant TV series).
I listen to a lot of audio books because of the kind of work that I do, spending a lot of time in the car traveling. I happened to come across a RU-vid video yesterday where the NYT guy who compiled the votes and list was being interviewed, and it got me a little bit excited about reading some of the selections. Then I saw your video suggested in the sidebar. Wow! Very glad I discovered you! Thanks so much for the tremendous resource you have put together and the commitment it took. I have now set some goals for myself for reading from this list the next couple years and will definitely use your video as introductory guide. Since yesterday I'm a few hours each into Erasure and My Brilliant Friend, both very enjoyable so far. Thanks again!
I rarely re -read novels , but found Life After Life so cleverly constructed that a second reading was just as enjoyable . Hernan Diaz's Trust takes a bit of getting into but stick with it as the ending brings everything together in a clever way.
I have read and finished 11 books from the list and loved all of them, there are several that I have tried and given up on. First impression the only book I will try to read from the list is the emperor of all maladies.
Thanks for this, Shelly. Have you thought about rearranging your shelves so that all of the ones you own that are on this list-but are as yet unread-could be in one place? 😅 I’ve read 62 on this list but not all (not many?) of those would make my personal top 100. One on the list that I would love to get to soon is Helen Dewitt’s Last Samurai. I read three of her other books and enjoyed them very much so that is promising.
OMG...never realized that "Tenth of December" and "Lincoln in the Bardo" was the same author. They are so different! Loved "Lincoln in the Bardo" and liked "Tenth of December"...
I heard about the list earlier today from Supposedly Fun's video. I can see why they released it 20 at a time, because reading through the whole thing at once was a lot! Plus I read other articles and reviews of some of the books on Storygraph. It was a long day! But I still had time to play a round of Triviaverse on Netflix, and finally scored over 4500. One question was about Wolf Hall 😃 I am so glad I can access the NYT through my library. 💙📚 I liked how after every book listed in the article you could check if you read it or plan to, and they suggested a couple more titles to try if you liked that book. There is another article where you can input your own top 10, although I'd have a hard time narrowing it down! I admire all the celebrity writers who shared their 10 (in yet another article), because that must have been tough to come up with. Got some ideas for the tbr from their lists, too. I've read 13 on the list, and added 8 from the list plus 2 adjacent to my tbr. Erasure was the one dnf of those I read, but I'm still planning to read James, and then based on what I learned from this list, am considering pairing it with The Sellout. Of the books I've read, the one I have thought of most frequently over the years is Nickel and Dimed.
Like any best of list, there are books included that are surprising, others I agree with, and others I've never heard of. I have read 35 and several are ones I want to read. I will take a look at some I'm unfamiliar with and I am sure I'll add more to my tbr. I like the variety of fiction and nonfiction.
I've read a few of these. My personal favourites: The Underground Railroad, The Known World, Wolf Hall (trilogy), The Sellout, Oscar Wao, Kavalier and Klay, and Middlesex. I didn't like A Brief History of Seven Killings (DNF) or Olive Kitteridge. And The Road was too unrelievedly grim and hopeless for my taste.
A very anglo- saxon list. Roth, Munro, Egan, McCarthy, Mcewan, Mantel, Hisham Matar are my favorites and I read them all. Strangely Auster and Delillo don't appear here.
Thanks for doing this as I was curious about the list but can't access it without setting up a subscription. It is a strangely mixed list, I suppose because of how it was compiled. Some gems in there though. I have read 45 I think.
I really enjoyed this video. I had read 19 of these, including 2666 (I remember it being a difficult read because of the subject matter). I wish the list was a little less US-centric but it was fun to go through it. One author from my country made the list. Super happy about My Brilliant Friend came out on top. I absolutely devoured these on release day when they came out.
Interesting list- I have read 10 and read other books by same author for a few - not a ton of them I have even heard of so need to maybe check out a few more. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Out of 100, I've read 9 and only have 11 on my TBR. I've read Austerlitz and really disliied it. I can't believe it even made the list much less so high. If I remember correctly, there is absolutely no punctuation in this book, no chapters or even paragraphs. It was such a hard reading experience. I felt i had to finish it because I was running our high school Book Club and that was a student pick for that month!😒🥴
Interesting list! I never really attach too much worth to these kinds of lists, but it’s a fun way to potentially discover great books. I hadn’t heard about a lot of these. I’ve read twelve so far, and around thirty more were already on my TBR. I just got Middlesex from the library, so I guess that will be my next read from this list :)
Thanks so much for doing this! Glad to see three favourites of mine here: Middlesex (highly recommend), The Return and Persepolis. Will check My Brilliant Friend for sure 😊
