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NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

When I visited Helen’s Book Blog on Sunday, I saw that the New York Times created a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century and knew I needed to take a look. Even though I’ve usually only read a handful of books on these types of lists, I always think it’s fun to compare.

I’ll put a next to the ones I’ve read, a next to the ones on my TBR, and an next to the ones I’ve attempted and haven’t finished. Without further ado, here’s the NYT’s list:

  1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
  2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
  3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  4. The Known World by Edward P Jones
  5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
  7. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  8. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
  9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
  12. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  13. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  14. Outline by Rachel Cusk
  15. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
  16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
  17. The Sellout by Paul Beatty
  18. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  19. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
  20. Erasure by Percival Everett
  21. Evicted by Matthew Desmond
  22. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
  23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
  24. The Overstory by Richard Powers
  25. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
  26. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  27. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  28. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  29. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
  30. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
  31. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
  32. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
  33. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
  34. Citizen by Claudia Rankine
  35. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
  36. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  37. The Years by Annie Ernaux
  38. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
  39. A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
  40. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
  41. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
  42. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
  43. Postwar by Tony Judt
  44. The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
  45. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
  46. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  47. A Mercy by Toni Morrison
  48. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
  49. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
  50. Trust by Hernan Diaz
  51. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
  52. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
  53. Runaway by Alice Munro
  54. Tenth of December by George Saunders
  55. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
  56. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
  57. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
  58. Stay True by Hua Hsu
  59. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  60. Heavy by Kiese Laymon
  61. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
  62. 10:04 by Ben Lerner
  63. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
  64. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
  65. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
  66. We the Animals by Justin Torres
  67. Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
  68. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
  69. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
  70. All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones
  71. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
  72. Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexeivich
  73. The Passage of Power by Robert Caro
  74. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
  75. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
  76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
  77. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
  78. Septology by Jon Fosse
  79. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
  80. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
  81. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
  82. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
  83. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labtut
  84. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  85. Pastoralia by George Saunders
  86. Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight
  87. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
  88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis
  89. The Return by Hisham Matar
  90. The Sympathizer by by Viet Thanh Nguyen
  91. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
  92. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
  93. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
  94. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
  95. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
  96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
  97. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
  98. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  99. How to be Both by Ali Smith
  100. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

If my count is correct, I’ve read 1 of the 100 and I have 6 on my TBR. Honestly, now that I’ve read through the whole list, I’m not surprised by my results. I’m not a huge fan of literary fiction. I prefer other genres, which mostly accounts for the 6 books on my TBR. When I do read literary fiction, it’s usually because of my IRL book club.

What about you? How many of these books have you read? How many are on your TBR? Do you agree with the list?

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Goodreads Popular Books List

I love lists. It’s one of the reasons I participate in Top Ten Tuesday most weeks. One of my favorite lists was BBC’s The Big Read Top 100. Every few years I’d take stock and post the list highlighting the books I had read since the last time I posted it. It was a lot of fun and I miss doing it.

Anyway, back in May, Goodreads posted a similar list. This list is a collection of the 100 most popular books since 1922 and is sorted by publication year. You can click the link to see how Goodreads determined each year’s book.

I didn’t see the original post back in May. I did see Susan’s post on Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books. Because I love lists so much, I decided to join the fun. I’ll put a next to the ones I’ve read, a next to the ones on my TBR, and an next to the ones I’ve attempted and haven’t finished. Without further ado, here’s Goodreads’ list:

  1. Ulysses by James Joyce
  2. The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
  3. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
  4. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
  5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  6. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  7. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
  8. Passing by Nella Larsen
  9. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  10. The Joy of Cooking by Irma S Rombauer
  11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  12. In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
  13. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
  14. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
  15. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  16. Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  17. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  19. Native Son by Richard Wright
  20. The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
  21. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  22. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  23. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
  24. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
  25. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
  26. No Exit by Jean Paul-Sartre
  27. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
  28. 1984 by George Orwell
  29. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
  30. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  31. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  32. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  33. The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
  34. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  35. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
  36. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  37. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  38. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  39. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  40. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  41. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  42. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  43. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
  44. Dune by Frank Herbert
  45. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
  46. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
  47. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
  48. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
  49. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  50. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
  51. Ways of Seeing by John Berger
  52. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
  53. Carrie by Stephen King
  54. Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
  55. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
  56. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
  57. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
  58. Kindred by Octavia E Butler
  59. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  60. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  61. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
  62. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
  63. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
  64. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  65. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
  66. Watchmen by Alan Moore
  67. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  68. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
  69. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  70. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
  71. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  72. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
  73. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
  74. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
  75. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
  76. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
  77. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
  78. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
  79. House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielwski
  80. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  81. Coraline by Neil Gaiman
  82. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  83. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  84. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  85. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  86. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  87. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
  88. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  89. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  90. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
  91. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
  92. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  93. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
  94. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  95. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
  96. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
  97. Educated by Tara Westover
  98. Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
  99. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
  100. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This is a very interesting list, isn’t it? I’m surprised that none of the Harry Potter books or Twilight Saga are on it. Harry Potter probably didn’t make the cut because of the controversy with JKR, which is a real shame. I imagine that Twilight wasn’t included because of the polarization the series causes. Are there any books you expected to be on the list that aren’t?

I learned in DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) that life is full of dialectics, or two opposing truths. In this case, the two opposing truths are: 1) I don’t agree with JKR’s stance regarding trans people, and 2) I still love Harry Potter.

If my count is correct, I’ve read 14 of the 100 and I have 27 on my TBR. What about you? How many have you read? How many are on your TBR?

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