The New York Times has been steadily releasing portions of its 100 best books of the 21st century list over the last few weeks. The complete list is now available for you to nod in approval with and/or scoff at. It's an incredible survey of some of the most captivating books published in the last two and a half decades.
The complete list can be seen here
That being said, I don't entirely agree with the list, primarily because I always find it a bit silly to rank great works of art together when so many of them stand up on their own disparate merits. Pitting great literature against investigative journalism or poetry against speculative fiction will ultimately come to a tiff that can only be resolved with a shrug. To each their own, I guess. Still, the NYT's methodology is interesting, and the resulting list has forced me to add a bunch of books I'd never heard of to my ever-increasing stack of to-reads.
In collaboration with the Upshot — the department at The Times focused on data and analytical journalism — the Book Review sent a survey to hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries, asking them to pick their 10 best books of the 21st century.
We let them each define "best" in their own way. For some, this simply meant "favorite." For others, it meant books that would endure for generations.
The only rules: Any book chosen had to be published in the United States, in English, on or after Jan. 1, 2000. (Yes, translations counted!)
After casting their ballots, respondents were given the option to answer a series of prompts where they chose their preferred book between two randomly selected titles. We combined data from these prompts with the vote tallies to create the list of the top 100 books.
NYT
The choices skew a little Americentric, which is to be expected, considering the criteria. Still, a few choices (and omits!) are somewhat questionable. The Copenhagen trilogy, for instance, was published in the 60s, but was translated into English just a few years ago. Karl Ove Knausgaard's (himself a contributor) books were all nominated separately, enough for his collected works to rank very highly, but no volume of My Struggle is included.
I still find the list comprehensive and a good summary of recent fantastic writing overall.
You can also see the choices from each contributor here. Stephen King nominated himself!
Previously:
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars — still amazing 30 years later
