Follow Up to NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

When I visited Anne’s blog, My Head is Full of Books, last Thursday, I saw that the New York Times created a follow up list to their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century article. They received feedback from their readers who agreed and disagreed with the books on their list and decided to post a new article: Readers Pick their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. After taking a look, I can say that I like this list much better. Ha!

Just as I did with the first article, I thought I’d compare the books I’ve read with the new article. 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. I’ll also bold the ones that made the NYT’s original list. Without further ado, here’s the list:

1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
2. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
3. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
4. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
5. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
6. Educated by Terra Westover
7. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
8. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
10. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
11. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
12. The Overstory by Richard Powers
13. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
14. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
15. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
16. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
17. Atonement by Ian McEwan
18. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
19. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
20. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
21. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
22. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
23. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
24. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
25. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
26. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
27. Normal People by Sally Rooney
28. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
29. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
30. A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
31. Circe by Madeline Miller
32. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
33. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
34. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
35. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
36. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
37. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
38. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
39. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
40. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
41. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
42. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
43. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
44. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Story by James McBride
45. There There by Tommy Orange
46. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
47. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
48. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
49. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
50. James by Percival Everett
51. Caste by Isabel Wilkinson
52. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
53. Trust by Hernan Diaz
54. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
55. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
57. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
58. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
59. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
60. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
61. North Woods by Daniel Mason
62. The Sympathizer by by Viet Thanh Nguyen
63. The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
64. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
65. Evicted by Matthew Desmond
66. Just Kids by Patti Smith
67. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
68. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
69. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
70. Know My Name by Chanel Miller
71. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
72. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
73. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
74. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
75. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
76. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
77. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
78. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
79. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
80. Deacon King Kong by James McBride
81. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
82. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
83. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
84. Tenth of December by George Saunders
85. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
86. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
87. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
88. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
89. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
90. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
91. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
92. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
93. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
94. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
95. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
96. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
97. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
98. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
99. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
100. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

If my count is correct, I’ve read 7 of the 100 as opposed to 1 from the original list and I have 22 on my TBR vs 6. Obviously, I prefer this list to the original as it seems to be more than just literary fiction which I don’t read a lot of. For those of you who are curious, below are the 61 books from the original list that the NYT’s readers didn’t include in their top 100:

1. The Known World by Edward P Jones
2. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
3. Outline by Rachel Cusk
4. The Sellout by Paul Beatty
5. Erasure by Percival Everett
6. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
7. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
8. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
9. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
10. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
11. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
12. Citizen by Claudia Rankine
13. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
14. The Years by Annie Ernaux
15. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
16. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
17. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
18. Postwar by Tony Judt
19. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
20. A Mercy by Toni Morrison
21. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
22. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
23. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
24. Runaway by Alice Munro
25. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
26. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
27. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
28. Stay True by Hua Hsu
29. Heavy by Kiese Laymon
30. 10:04 by Ben Lerner
31. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
32. We the Animals by Justin Torres
33. Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
34. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
35. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
36. All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones
37. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
38. Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexeivich
39. The Passage of Power by Robert Caro
40. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
41. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
42. Septology by Jon Fosse
43. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
44. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
45. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
46. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
47. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labtut
48. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
49. Pastoralia by George Saunders
50. Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight
51. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
52. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis
53. The Return by Hisham Matar
54. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
55. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
56. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
57. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
58. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
59. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
60. How to be Both by Ali Smith
61. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

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