Ten Favorite Books on 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 I like best. None of them would make my own actual ballot of—these are the rules—“the 10 best books published [in English] since Jan. 1, 2000,” which is here, or my ballot of pre-21st Century books that weren’t translated into English until this century, which is here, but I admire them all.)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (#39)
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (#92)
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (#52)
All Aunt Hagar’s Children: Stories by Edward P. Jones (#70)
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (#83)
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (#64)
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (#68)
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (#98)
Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders (#54)
We the Animals by Justin Torres (#66)
— July 12, 2024