Ten Books I Would Add to the New York Times “Best Books of the 21st Century” List
(Lists like this—the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, as determined by a New York Times survey of “503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers, with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review”—seem tailor-made to aggravate me. Someone is out there recommending the wrong books. It drives me crazy. I’m sure many of the individual ballots are more surprising (and better) than the list would suggest, and I hope the NYT will eventually publish a complete catalogue of the several thousand titles that must have been nominated, but anytime you rely on 500-some ballots to aggregate a list, it’s bound to favor the expected: the odds-on favorites, the crowd-pleasers, the non-eccentric; the prizewinners and the book club picks; in short, the already famous. Some of those books will be very good, of course, but few of them will be the particular books that made essential additions to the life of any one individual reader—and therefore might make an essential addition to yours. Of the books on the list, I’ve read 42, and alternate titles by most of the other authors. Of those 42, I like roughly twenty, am indifferent to about fourteen, and loathe exactly eight. Listed below, alphabetically by author, are the ten books that would have made my own ballot, each of them—these are the rules—“published [in English] since Jan. 1, 2000.” I’ve ruled out books that compile stories or essays that were mostly published before the turn of the century, as well as books by anyone I know well enough that I could send them a text or an e-mail without awkwardness. A companion ballot of my favorite pre-21st Century books that weren’t translated into English until this century is here, and a list of my ten favorite books that actually made the cut at the Times is here.)
The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasm
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Under the Skin by Michel Faber
The Torturer’s Wife by Thomas Glave
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn
Fireflies by Luis Sagasti
The Neighborhood by Gonçalo M. Tavares
Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët
The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra
— July 12, 2024