Favorite Books of the 21st Century
(A snapshot of my personal 21st century literary canon, inspired by this list in La Vanguardia by Jorge Carrión. Like Carrión, I constrained myself to one book for each publication year. A few unusually fruitful years forced me to remove books that would almost certainly have made the list if they had been published earlier or later (sorry, Inherited Disorders). I also eliminated books that merely compiled material from older volumes (sorry, The Complete Short Stories of JG. Ballard) and pinned each book to its original publication date rather than its date of English translation, which disqualified every book that appeared in its parent language prior to 2000 (sorry, Palafox). I’ve often been bothered by the uniformity of books-of-the-year lists; such narrowness is broadly defensible, though, I figure, or at least forgivable, considering how little reading any one person can do during any one year. Books-of-the-decade lists are another matter, and books-of-the-century lists even more so. In 2010, for instance, when overviews of the first ten years of the literary century began appearing in newspapers and magazines, it looked as if there was a small pool of, say, 75 titles from which every critic was secretly required to select the best books of the decade. Some of the books in that pool are extraordinary, and one or two of them show up in the catalog below, but I couldn’t understand why the lists I was seeing weren’t more idiosyncratic, as if there was one shared reading personality in the world rather than countless peculiarly individual readers with countless peculiarly individual tastes. Surely everyone doesn’t actually love the same few Pulitzer Prize winners, do they? And surely, once the constraints of the calendar year have slipped away, readers should have time to discover some of the undersung titles they’ve missed? Anyway, there’s less literature in translation on my own list than I’d like: eight books out of 21. If I were listing my five favorite books per year, the balance would look a lot different. I tried not to cheat the results, though. I’m sure this list will change considerably after a few years have gone by, as new titles appear in English translation and I uncover various writers I’ve overlooked.)
2000: Under the Skin by Michel Faber
2001: Esther Stories by Peter Orner
2002: My Happy Life by Lydia Millet
2003: With by Donald Harington
2004: Mister Brecht by Gonçalo M. Tavares
2005: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
2006: Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge
2007: The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra
2008: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
2009: Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët
2010: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2011: Fireflies by Luis Sagasti
2012: Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle
2013: The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by César Aira
2014: God’s Wife by Amanda Michalopoulou
2015: Difficult Light by Tomás González
2016: The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasm
2017: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
2018: West by Carys Davies
2019: Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
2020: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
2021: Matrix by Lauren Groff
2022: The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel by John Kessel
2023: The Deluge by Stephen Markley
2024: The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry
— June 27, 2024