I regret to say I read Tree of Smoke, on Freddie's recommendation, and it did nothing for me. It felt like a Robert Stone book wearing Don DeLillo's prose.
"Ultimately, this kind of list is intended to provoke, and it has provoked me, obviously, and I’m honestly just glad that there’s still book coverage that someone’s paying people money for."
That's the crux. My poet friends were provoked that "best books" effectively excluded books of poetry. Others were provoked by the idea that the list really meant "best books that US English-speakers read, which means anglophone literature and a tiny handful of other books that English-speakers read in translation that reach the US book market." But as someone who teaches lit, I'm just happy that there are still people who can get provoked about books period, no matter how gimmicky the premise.
New York Magazine recently had a little feature where a photographer when to the beach at Jacob Riis park at took photos of people and the books they were reading. Virtually everyone featured was hip, good-looking and in their twenties. Many commenters scoffed: "So no one over 30 reads at the beach?" But I was just happy at the evidence that young people were reading books at all––and many of the titles were substantial ones.
If gimmicks like that can make some inroads on the hijacking of brains by social media and the Silicon Valley "wisdom" that books are passé (Bankman-Fried, "if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a 6-paragraph blog post), more power to them.
i'm not much of a reader (i counted like only 5-6 of these) but just wanted to say that because i had read the warmth of other suns i actually totally understood why most americans had never heard of juneteenth prior to 2020
Wise and perceptive re mental health but somewhat myopic, in that if you look around, a similar failure of reasoning can be found re transitioning young children, preventing harm among drug addicted homeless people, letting men compete in women’s sports, using racism to cure racism, not having a border, thinking that a nuclear war can be managed, etc, etc, etc.
I did not expect to see Jonathan Franzen anywhere on the list, let alone at #5 (and I really enjoyed The Corrections).
The context of when and where I read has an oversized impact on my impression of a book. Too many times my schedule leads to a choppy read that undermines my appreciation of the craft and the story.
I read Train Dreams in a single day, tucked away in the shade, lakeside. It is an all time favorite.
The latter, especially since the NYT itself was heavily criticized for its excessive praise of his early books, to the apparent detriment of lesser known non-white-male writers.
I think The Corrections is amazing, definitely one of my favorite novels of the last 25 years, but I share your surprise at being that high. I did notice, when they linked to the NYT review of the book in that list, it was really just a piece criticizing him for not accepting the Oprah invitation,
What a weird thing, to link to the criticism while claiming to redirect to the review (the review is quite funny, including this quip that inadvertently anticipated the whole kerfuffle: "with just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won't assign it and ruin Franzen's street cred.") For s and gs, I clicked and the Munro links go to the reviews, not the recent controversies, which would seem to be a bigger deal than Franzen's prickly snobbishness.
I actually think Oscar Wao is overrated but it's one of those books that has been so celebrated - including in the pages of the NYT itself - that you can't exclude it from a list like this without almost outright discrediting the project.
Conversations regarding whether a book (or anything for that matter) is overrated or underrated ultimately depends on things unrelated to the book, and how much one thinks others are rating it. I read the book without knowing anything about Diaz or any acclaim surrounding him or the book, and it knocked my socks off, personally. It was just recommended by someone whose opinion I valued.
I mean, I suppose I'd agree. That wasn't the point of the comment, I'm just noting that whatever you think of the book itself, it is objectively one of the most celebrated of the 21st century, at least in venues like the NYT Book Review - indisputably top twenty, probably top ten, quite possibly top five - and thus cannot be plausibly excluded from a retrospective top 100 list without that list revealing itself as politicized in a way that is far too blatant to be countenanced.
I think we've sort of reached a point where it's recognized that the early-2010s Franzen hate was mostly displaced anger at broader industry dynamics that a) have actually seen very substantial change over the past ~13 years and b) didn't really have anything to do with Franzen in any case, and everyone is a little bit embarrassed about what in hindsight seems like some pretty unsophisticated cultural analysis. Also, his new book Crossroads has some really good, nuanced female characters and that was noticed.
I like all of his books because I just love reading his sentences - he's a great writer - but I'd agree that Purity is his weakest (though I should note I haven't read Twenty-Seventh City).
Crossroads is unbelievably good and I think would have been ranked if Franzen didn't already have a book on the list and/or wasn't a white man (sorry, I'm tired of pretending this isn't a systematic disadvantage these days). Assuming we're not all dead or AI raptured by 2100, it's best-of-the-century calibur.
As someone from St. Louis, I was very excited read Twenty-Seventh City. It's legitimately bad. I was probably too harsh on Purity, as I just thought it was far below Corrections and Freedom, but 27th City seems like it's by a different writer.
I've read some interviews where he talks about it and that sort of tracks - he's mentioned it's basically an imitation of what he (then in his late twenties, I believe) saw as a "serious novel" eg dick-swinging postmodernism, which obviously just isn't him.
Again, though, I haven't read it. Now I want to, though... I'll be back in a few days.
He didn't do himself any favors, as his quotes and interviews created what appeared to be a well deserved impression that he was a dink. Like this one, about Oprah, in which you can see what he's trying to say, but he just can't quite make himself do it: “To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who’s a hero — not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general — I feel bad in a public-spirited way.”
My nominations for novels that didn't get mentioned:
1. War Trash, Ha Jin
2. The Last Life , Claire Messud
3. I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. I understand those who don't think it's literature, who don't love Wolfe's writing, but you just have to appreciate the insight into human nature from the greatest chronicler of American life since Sinclair Lewis.
You are referring to The Emperor's Children? Also terrific, also an omission from this NYT list, but there is something just so perfect and subtle about The Last Life. I think it's her best work.
It's important, I guess, to stay partially abreast of contemporary literature, but I'm puzzled by people who clamor for more diversity and then lament that there aren't more books about "the way we live now". I'm sure Nathaniel P is a worthy book and I'll get around to it one day, but the world is so big, so weird, so old, and so diverse, really, really diverse that it seems a particularly elite form of navel-gazing to insist on the importance of reading about "the way we live now", as if we don't do that all day, every day. Left to my own devices and all else being equal, I'd happily choose "The Dawn of Everything" (sure, that's not a novel, but I'm just looking at my shelf for a quick example) over another novel about 21st century upper middle class anomie.
In many ways "the way we live now and here" is just the worst, and also boring, which is why I prefer to read "the way they lived then and there" and think others would benefit from same. Broaden their horizons a bit. There are other ways of living and thinking; it's pretty great, finding that out and I recommend it to the young
"It never seems to occur to people that when you go on and on about the importance of diversity in these kinds of rankings, and then the rankings are in fact diverse, the inevitable message is that the “marginalized” within them are playing JV."
I don't know if you ever touched on the Apple Music Top 100 Albums from a couple months ago Freddie. Not sure it exactly aligns with the quote above, but it's in the same general theme.
It's one thing to bump up Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye like Rolling Stone did in their George Floyd edition, but this list is just tasteless. Pure Heroine, AM, Billie Eilish and 50 Cent shouldn't be anywhere near a top anything list... Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme as the two token jazz entries is utterly predictable... the top electronic album is Discovery... Beyonce TWICE...
The list was assembled by asking over 500 writers, editors, critics, and literary luminaries for their top 10 best books of the 21st century. Most of the criticism of the list is nonsensical; the list is not any individual person's idea of the best books, but a list of the "most widely beloved". It is impossible for there to have been real surprises or "underrated" choices; if a book is loved by a wide enough audience, word spreads and it becomes a part of the contemporary literary canon. The books that are on this list are simply those that have a large enough audience of zealots.
There is no conspiracy here or any attempt to educate or force NYT readers into believing certain books are good and others are not. It's just a countdown of the "most treasured". The similarity of the Times list to the survey list created by its readers shows that some books have an extraordinary hold on their readers.
(Freddie, I had Love Affairs of Nathaniel P on my list and Best Minds just missed the cut, but apparently not enough writers agree with us. But the rest of my list is just chalk:
I think that's exactly right. By using the rubric of "best books," we're primed to approach the nominations and final list as a record of "books with the highest literary quality." But if that were actually the intent, they would have had a second round with, say, 200 titles that everyone voted for in ranked order as "best." In reality the list is really about the overlap among what a set of titles that some literary folk remember and love––love for the style, love for the topic, love for a plot that haunts, etc.
By the same token, I couldn't disagree more with Freddie deBoer's contention that previous calls for "diversity" mean that the titles by authors who are not white men will be presumed to me the JV team. Presumed by whom? When I look at the full set of nominated books, it would never occur to me that anyone had kicked white men off their list with an eye to making a more diverse list. Is the theory that the NYT engineered that via the people they picked to nominate? That logic seems specious, too.
At this point I think a more accurate way to look at it is less "affirmative action" than a systematic bias against white men which is pervasive in the contemporary American/English-speaking publishing industry specifically and literary world more broadly.
The good thing that there are a lot of great books, any best-of list is going to be arbitrary, and all zeitgeists have biases of one kind or another. Prioritizing race/gender identity doesn't mean that substandard work will be included, any more than earlier biases against (I don't know) postmodernism or sexual deviance (or, yes, women and minorities) implied that John Updike's work was "JV." Every book on the NYT's list that I have read is very good and worthy of celebration. I do wish that there were more books written by white men on the list (as well as more non-fiction, and a few other things I won't get into now). But that should not be construed as a slam on Colson Whitehead or Elena Ferrante or anyone else who is systematically advantaged by the current zeitgeist.
The Buried Giant and Never Let Me Go are the same story.
Boy and girl love each other, but are held at a distance due to somewhat inscrutable forces (a popular , intervening girl; loss of memory), but find their way to each other over the course of a journey, only to be separated by preordained and non-sensical rules about death, which is imminent.
I think its fascinating when an author writes the same story over and over in different ways. I always wonder what really happened.
"Toni Morrison does not belong on this list. It’s no insult to acknowledge that her major work was over before the turn of the millennium. A Mercy at 47 is just baldly a kind of backdoor lifetime achievement award, and I’m quite confident that the voters who put the book in that position didn’t think it belonged there. They apparently felt they had to kiss Morrison’s ring on a list like this, which is ultimately what makes lists like this what they always are. She was a truly great novelist of the 20th century and that is absolutely fine."
Appreciate this observation. For a comparable example, Bret Easton Ellis's good novels also came out before 1999, and including him would obviously make this list more of a hall of fame than an honest appraisal of books released in the last 25 years. In the case of Morrison who *was* included, it registers as a signal that they read authors who aren't white men - which is great! ...But if you actually read books, then that should be a given, and it just looks ostentatious to specify it. Maybe if Ellis croaks in the next few months, they can sneak The Shards in there somehow as a pity inclusion.
This list doesn’t have any plays (drama) on it, as well as lacking poetry. There’s some decent plays written in the last 24 years! I like Akhtar’s “Disgraced” for one.
I don’t agree with Freddie at all about Fun Home, but I totally agree about Morrison. Same thing with Lydia Davis and Lucia Berlin—all the good stuff is in the previous century.
Totally shocked that Freddie and the NYT didn’t mention McCarthy’s “Remainder,” which is probably the best novel “about” 9/11 that’s ever been written.
The entire point of the NYT is to instruct readers in the correct PMC hegemonic class attitude at that particular moment.
Paragraph 5 is cut off?
It was supposed to end at "necessary," not "necessary to," I fixed it
I regret to say I read Tree of Smoke, on Freddie's recommendation, and it did nothing for me. It felt like a Robert Stone book wearing Don DeLillo's prose.
(even makes a Hall of Mirrors references at one point)
"Ultimately, this kind of list is intended to provoke, and it has provoked me, obviously, and I’m honestly just glad that there’s still book coverage that someone’s paying people money for."
That's the crux. My poet friends were provoked that "best books" effectively excluded books of poetry. Others were provoked by the idea that the list really meant "best books that US English-speakers read, which means anglophone literature and a tiny handful of other books that English-speakers read in translation that reach the US book market." But as someone who teaches lit, I'm just happy that there are still people who can get provoked about books period, no matter how gimmicky the premise.
New York Magazine recently had a little feature where a photographer when to the beach at Jacob Riis park at took photos of people and the books they were reading. Virtually everyone featured was hip, good-looking and in their twenties. Many commenters scoffed: "So no one over 30 reads at the beach?" But I was just happy at the evidence that young people were reading books at all––and many of the titles were substantial ones.
If gimmicks like that can make some inroads on the hijacking of brains by social media and the Silicon Valley "wisdom" that books are passé (Bankman-Fried, "if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a 6-paragraph blog post), more power to them.
When photographing people at the beach a no-one-over-30 standard is entirely defensible.
i'm not much of a reader (i counted like only 5-6 of these) but just wanted to say that because i had read the warmth of other suns i actually totally understood why most americans had never heard of juneteenth prior to 2020
"best minds" was an amazing book. beyond the subject matter, just so well-written, even when you know what's going to happen, it was very captivating.
I found the individual ballots by the Times voters more interesting than the final result itself
Not on the list, but a book I think you'd like is "Molly" by Blake Butler. Lots of interesting discourse around it, too. style is way different than typical memoir https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/books/review/blake-butler-molly.html
Wise and perceptive re mental health but somewhat myopic, in that if you look around, a similar failure of reasoning can be found re transitioning young children, preventing harm among drug addicted homeless people, letting men compete in women’s sports, using racism to cure racism, not having a border, thinking that a nuclear war can be managed, etc, etc, etc.
I did not expect to see Jonathan Franzen anywhere on the list, let alone at #5 (and I really enjoyed The Corrections).
The context of when and where I read has an oversized impact on my impression of a book. Too many times my schedule leads to a choppy read that undermines my appreciation of the craft and the story.
I read Train Dreams in a single day, tucked away in the shade, lakeside. It is an all time favorite.
Because you don't think Franzen is deserving, or because you think he's such a paradigmatic "white male writer" that he'd be excluded?
The latter, especially since the NYT itself was heavily criticized for its excessive praise of his early books, to the apparent detriment of lesser known non-white-male writers.
I think The Corrections is amazing, definitely one of my favorite novels of the last 25 years, but I share your surprise at being that high. I did notice, when they linked to the NYT review of the book in that list, it was really just a piece criticizing him for not accepting the Oprah invitation,
What a weird thing, to link to the criticism while claiming to redirect to the review (the review is quite funny, including this quip that inadvertently anticipated the whole kerfuffle: "with just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won't assign it and ruin Franzen's street cred.") For s and gs, I clicked and the Munro links go to the reviews, not the recent controversies, which would seem to be a bigger deal than Franzen's prickly snobbishness.
I think it could have been an honest mistake. I'm going to go check out the actual review now.
Along those same lines, I was also surprised to see Junot Diaz in the top ten, but I guess Oscar Wao was too good to be denied.
I actually think Oscar Wao is overrated but it's one of those books that has been so celebrated - including in the pages of the NYT itself - that you can't exclude it from a list like this without almost outright discrediting the project.
Conversations regarding whether a book (or anything for that matter) is overrated or underrated ultimately depends on things unrelated to the book, and how much one thinks others are rating it. I read the book without knowing anything about Diaz or any acclaim surrounding him or the book, and it knocked my socks off, personally. It was just recommended by someone whose opinion I valued.
I mean, I suppose I'd agree. That wasn't the point of the comment, I'm just noting that whatever you think of the book itself, it is objectively one of the most celebrated of the 21st century, at least in venues like the NYT Book Review - indisputably top twenty, probably top ten, quite possibly top five - and thus cannot be plausibly excluded from a retrospective top 100 list without that list revealing itself as politicized in a way that is far too blatant to be countenanced.
I think we've sort of reached a point where it's recognized that the early-2010s Franzen hate was mostly displaced anger at broader industry dynamics that a) have actually seen very substantial change over the past ~13 years and b) didn't really have anything to do with Franzen in any case, and everyone is a little bit embarrassed about what in hindsight seems like some pretty unsophisticated cultural analysis. Also, his new book Crossroads has some really good, nuanced female characters and that was noticed.
I thought Crossroads was his best book since The Corrections. I liked Freedom. I thought Purity was terrible.
I like all of his books because I just love reading his sentences - he's a great writer - but I'd agree that Purity is his weakest (though I should note I haven't read Twenty-Seventh City).
Crossroads is unbelievably good and I think would have been ranked if Franzen didn't already have a book on the list and/or wasn't a white man (sorry, I'm tired of pretending this isn't a systematic disadvantage these days). Assuming we're not all dead or AI raptured by 2100, it's best-of-the-century calibur.
As someone from St. Louis, I was very excited read Twenty-Seventh City. It's legitimately bad. I was probably too harsh on Purity, as I just thought it was far below Corrections and Freedom, but 27th City seems like it's by a different writer.
I've read some interviews where he talks about it and that sort of tracks - he's mentioned it's basically an imitation of what he (then in his late twenties, I believe) saw as a "serious novel" eg dick-swinging postmodernism, which obviously just isn't him.
Again, though, I haven't read it. Now I want to, though... I'll be back in a few days.
He didn't do himself any favors, as his quotes and interviews created what appeared to be a well deserved impression that he was a dink. Like this one, about Oprah, in which you can see what he's trying to say, but he just can't quite make himself do it: “To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who’s a hero — not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general — I feel bad in a public-spirited way.”
My nominations for novels that didn't get mentioned:
1. War Trash, Ha Jin
2. The Last Life , Claire Messud
3. I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. I understand those who don't think it's literature, who don't love Wolfe's writing, but you just have to appreciate the insight into human nature from the greatest chronicler of American life since Sinclair Lewis.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook also deserved mention. There should be room on the list for frivolity.
Damn that big Messud book didn't make it either
You are referring to The Emperor's Children? Also terrific, also an omission from this NYT list, but there is something just so perfect and subtle about The Last Life. I think it's her best work.
Why War Trash? Just curious why you'd go for that title in particular and not another Ha Jin book.
It's important, I guess, to stay partially abreast of contemporary literature, but I'm puzzled by people who clamor for more diversity and then lament that there aren't more books about "the way we live now". I'm sure Nathaniel P is a worthy book and I'll get around to it one day, but the world is so big, so weird, so old, and so diverse, really, really diverse that it seems a particularly elite form of navel-gazing to insist on the importance of reading about "the way we live now", as if we don't do that all day, every day. Left to my own devices and all else being equal, I'd happily choose "The Dawn of Everything" (sure, that's not a novel, but I'm just looking at my shelf for a quick example) over another novel about 21st century upper middle class anomie.
In many ways "the way we live now and here" is just the worst, and also boring, which is why I prefer to read "the way they lived then and there" and think others would benefit from same. Broaden their horizons a bit. There are other ways of living and thinking; it's pretty great, finding that out and I recommend it to the young
"It never seems to occur to people that when you go on and on about the importance of diversity in these kinds of rankings, and then the rankings are in fact diverse, the inevitable message is that the “marginalized” within them are playing JV."
I don't know if you ever touched on the Apple Music Top 100 Albums from a couple months ago Freddie. Not sure it exactly aligns with the quote above, but it's in the same general theme.
https://100best.music.apple.com/us
It's one thing to bump up Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye like Rolling Stone did in their George Floyd edition, but this list is just tasteless. Pure Heroine, AM, Billie Eilish and 50 Cent shouldn't be anywhere near a top anything list... Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme as the two token jazz entries is utterly predictable... the top electronic album is Discovery... Beyonce TWICE...
I'm picking up half a dozen books from your alternative suggestions. Thanks for the recommendations!
The list was assembled by asking over 500 writers, editors, critics, and literary luminaries for their top 10 best books of the 21st century. Most of the criticism of the list is nonsensical; the list is not any individual person's idea of the best books, but a list of the "most widely beloved". It is impossible for there to have been real surprises or "underrated" choices; if a book is loved by a wide enough audience, word spreads and it becomes a part of the contemporary literary canon. The books that are on this list are simply those that have a large enough audience of zealots.
There is no conspiracy here or any attempt to educate or force NYT readers into believing certain books are good and others are not. It's just a countdown of the "most treasured". The similarity of the Times list to the survey list created by its readers shows that some books have an extraordinary hold on their readers.
(Freddie, I had Love Affairs of Nathaniel P on my list and Best Minds just missed the cut, but apparently not enough writers agree with us. But the rest of my list is just chalk:
The Corrections
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
My Brilliant Friend
A Visit From The Goon Squad
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
The Unwinding
The Art Of Fielding
On Beauty
Behind The Beautiful Forevers)
I think that's exactly right. By using the rubric of "best books," we're primed to approach the nominations and final list as a record of "books with the highest literary quality." But if that were actually the intent, they would have had a second round with, say, 200 titles that everyone voted for in ranked order as "best." In reality the list is really about the overlap among what a set of titles that some literary folk remember and love––love for the style, love for the topic, love for a plot that haunts, etc.
By the same token, I couldn't disagree more with Freddie deBoer's contention that previous calls for "diversity" mean that the titles by authors who are not white men will be presumed to me the JV team. Presumed by whom? When I look at the full set of nominated books, it would never occur to me that anyone had kicked white men off their list with an eye to making a more diverse list. Is the theory that the NYT engineered that via the people they picked to nominate? That logic seems specious, too.
At this point I think a more accurate way to look at it is less "affirmative action" than a systematic bias against white men which is pervasive in the contemporary American/English-speaking publishing industry specifically and literary world more broadly.
The good thing that there are a lot of great books, any best-of list is going to be arbitrary, and all zeitgeists have biases of one kind or another. Prioritizing race/gender identity doesn't mean that substandard work will be included, any more than earlier biases against (I don't know) postmodernism or sexual deviance (or, yes, women and minorities) implied that John Updike's work was "JV." Every book on the NYT's list that I have read is very good and worthy of celebration. I do wish that there were more books written by white men on the list (as well as more non-fiction, and a few other things I won't get into now). But that should not be construed as a slam on Colson Whitehead or Elena Ferrante or anyone else who is systematically advantaged by the current zeitgeist.
The Buried Giant and Never Let Me Go are the same story.
Boy and girl love each other, but are held at a distance due to somewhat inscrutable forces (a popular , intervening girl; loss of memory), but find their way to each other over the course of a journey, only to be separated by preordained and non-sensical rules about death, which is imminent.
I think its fascinating when an author writes the same story over and over in different ways. I always wonder what really happened.
excellent
"Toni Morrison does not belong on this list. It’s no insult to acknowledge that her major work was over before the turn of the millennium. A Mercy at 47 is just baldly a kind of backdoor lifetime achievement award, and I’m quite confident that the voters who put the book in that position didn’t think it belonged there. They apparently felt they had to kiss Morrison’s ring on a list like this, which is ultimately what makes lists like this what they always are. She was a truly great novelist of the 20th century and that is absolutely fine."
Appreciate this observation. For a comparable example, Bret Easton Ellis's good novels also came out before 1999, and including him would obviously make this list more of a hall of fame than an honest appraisal of books released in the last 25 years. In the case of Morrison who *was* included, it registers as a signal that they read authors who aren't white men - which is great! ...But if you actually read books, then that should be a given, and it just looks ostentatious to specify it. Maybe if Ellis croaks in the next few months, they can sneak The Shards in there somehow as a pity inclusion.
The Shards could sneak in there as queer literature. Truly Brett’s coming-out novel. I loved it, but I’m old…
This list doesn’t have any plays (drama) on it, as well as lacking poetry. There’s some decent plays written in the last 24 years! I like Akhtar’s “Disgraced” for one.
I don’t agree with Freddie at all about Fun Home, but I totally agree about Morrison. Same thing with Lydia Davis and Lucia Berlin—all the good stuff is in the previous century.
Totally shocked that Freddie and the NYT didn’t mention McCarthy’s “Remainder,” which is probably the best novel “about” 9/11 that’s ever been written.