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?