100 Best Books of the 21st Century?

Starting a new profession is always intimidating, and it’s been especially daunting launching my writing career at time when, according to pretty much everything I’ve read, the publishing industry is in a state of upheaval and transformation. As the odds of having a book accepted and released by one of the “Big 5” companies that dominate traditional publishing have continued to decline, more and more authors are turning to the ever-growing market for self-published work largely made possible by (ironically) that enemy of the independent bookstore, Amazon. Even so, for every writer the question remains—what makes a book “good”? Or marketable?

Formal book reviews, of course, provide one definition of the good or even great book, so I was interested to check out the New York Times’ recent list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Over the last several weeks, my social media feed has been swamped by discussions of the list, which was “voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers,” with “a little help” from the staff of The New York Times Book Review. It’s far from clear what “a little help” means. And not everyone agrees that the staff of the Book Review should have so much influence on the book market generally (as Yasmin Nair argued in this recent article in Current Affairs). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel gratified to find, thanks to the convenient calculator provided in the digital version of the paper, that of the 100 books on the official list, I’d read 33 and am interested in reading 12 more.

Happily, several of my absolute favorite nonfiction books made the list: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. So did numerous fiction books I loved: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (to name just a few).

Even more of my faves made the top 10 lists submitted by other authors as part of the selection process: Redeployment by Phil Klay (Min Jin Lee list), The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson and The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (R.L. Stine list), and State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (Roxane Gay list) (again, to name just a few).

Then there were the selections on the Reader Top 100, many of which I also would have nominated: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe.

It’s an intimidating and inspiring collection of talent and success. But also, I think, a good reminder for all writers, especially those of us just starting out. The NYT list, like all lists of this sort, includes a number of books that I read and didn’t love, as well as some that I appreciated but didn’t necessarily enjoy reading, and others that I actively disliked for whatever reason. There’d be no purpose in identifying any of those books because the thing is—books are only great for particular readers, not for everyone. There may be commonalities amongst certain books that make them appeal to a greater number of people, and true artistry has a universal appeal. Even so, book clubs and reviews and discussions wouldn’t exist if every single reader had the same perspective. So, hard as it may be to face, not everyone is going to like our work, and the goal can’t be to satisfy the entire audience. All we can do is tell the stories that fuel us as well as we possibly can and reach for the mastery that we admire so much in others.