The New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (2000-2024)

 I guess nearly 24 years of the 21st century (which technically began on 1/1/2001, but who's quibbling, right?) is as good of a time as any for some organization to begin trying to place tens of thousands of books in some sort of historical significance order, so it was with some curiosity that I read the recent New York Times attempt at doing such a thing.  I'll list the books below, with bold for titles that I have already read, if not reviewed way back when:

1.   Elena Ferrante (trans. by Ann Goldstein), My Brilliant Friend (2012)

2.   Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010)

3.   Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)

4.   Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)

5.   Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)

6.   Roberto Bolaño (translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666 (2008) * Read in Spanish

7.   Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

8.   W.G. Sebald (trans. by Anthea Bell), Austerlitz (2001)

9.   Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

10.  Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

11.  Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Was (2007)

12.  Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

13.  Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

14.  Rachel Cusk, Outline (2015)

15.  Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (2017)

16.  Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Clay (2000)

17.  Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015)

18.  George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

19.  Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2019)

20.  Percival Evertt, Erasure (2001)

21.  Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016)

22.  Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012)

23.  Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)

24.  Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)

25.  Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family (2003)

26.  Ian McEwan, Atonement (2002)

27.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

28.  David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

29.  Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000)

30.  Jasmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

31.  Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)

32.  Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)

33.  Jasmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

34.  Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014)

35.  Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006)

36.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

37.  Annie Ernaux (trans. by Alison L. Strayer), The Years (2018)

38.  Roberto Bolaño (trans. by Natasha Wimmer), The Savage Detectives (2007) * -Read in Spanish

39.  Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

40.  Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (2015)

41.  Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (2021)

42.  Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)

43.  Tony Judt, Postwar (2005)

44.  N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)

45.  Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

46.  Donna Tare, The Goldfinch (2013)

47.  Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)

48.  Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (2003)

49.  Han Kang (trans. by Deborah Smith), The Vegetarian (2016)

50.  Hernan Diaz, Trust (2022)

51.  Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (2013)

52.  Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2011)

53.  Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)

54.  George Saunders, Tenth of December (2013)

55. Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)

56.  Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013)

57.  Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dime: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

58.  Hua Hsu, Stay True (2022)

59.  Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

60.  Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018)

61.  Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (2022)

62.  Ben Lerner, 10:04 (2014)

63.  Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (2005)

64.  Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018)

65.  Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2004)

66.  Justin Torres, We the Animals (2011)

67.  Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree (2012)

68.  Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (2018)

69.  Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)

70.  Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hager's Children (2006)

71. Tove Ditlevsen (trans. by Tina Nunnally and Michael Favala), The Copenhagen Trilogy (2021)

72.  Svetlana Alexievich (trans. by Bela Shayevich), Secondhand Time (2016)

73.  Robert Cano, The Passage of Power (2012)

74.  Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (2008)

75.  Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017)

76.  Gabrielle Levin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022)

77.  Tyari Jones, An American Marriage (2018)

78.  Jon Fosse (trans. by Damion Searls), Septology (2022)

79.  Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015)

80.  Elena Ferrante (trans. by Ann Goldstein), The Story of the Lost Child (2015)

81.  John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

82.  Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes), Hurricane Season (2020)

83.  Benjamin Labatut (trans. by Adrian Nathan West), When We Cease to Understand the World (2021)

84.  Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010)

85.  George Saunders, Pastoralia (2010)

86.  David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass (2018)

87.  Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (2021)

88.  Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2010)

89.  Hisham Matar, The Return (2016)

90.  Việt Thanh Nguyễn, The Sympathizer (2015)

91.  Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000)

92. Elena Ferrante (trans. by Ann Goldstein), The Days of Abandonment (2005)

93.  Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014)

94.  Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)

95.  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

96.  Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)

97.  Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013)

98.  Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (2001)

99.  Ali Smith, How to Be Both (2014)

100.  Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (2007)

Currently, I've read 29 on this list.  It is not a bad list, but not a terribly surprising or bold one either.  There were more translated works listed for the past 25 years than I believe made most 20th century lists, so there is something to be said for the slow growth in translated fictions (I want to say there were around a dozen or so translated works on this list, so definitely above the bandied-about 3% number for translated works in a given year).  And while on the surface this is a more "diverse" list when it comes to the authors' ethnocultural backgrounds compared to 20th century "Best of" lists, thematically I just don't see quite the same diversity.

As I noted above, this is not a bad list at all, but it does certainly feel like the sort of list that I would expect the NYT to put out:  containing several no-doubt classics mixed in with secondary works from authors that do seem to be favored by the NYT editorial board.  Only surprising omission for me in all this was Javier Marîas's Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, but I'll certainly think of more in the coming days and weeks.  

Can’t Go Back Home Again?: A Look Back on Twenty-Five Years of Life, Reading, and Reviewing

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. - Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

2024 is shaping up to be a déjà vu sort of year for me.  Next month, I turn 50 and it will be 25 years since my first paid teaching job.  Yet after 23 years, I am returning to that school to teach history.  This is after I spent the last two months of 2023-24 school year teaching at another school where I did my student teaching in the spring of 1999.  Today, I just received a refurbished Dreamcast game console in the mail; I bought my first one on US release day back on 9/9/1999.  Next, I’ll probably turn on the radio and hear Santana’s “Smooth” or the New Radical’s “You Get What You Give” - both hits during the summer of 1999.

And yet so, so much has changed in the interim.  Every so often, maybe once every couple of months or so, I’ll try to follow links in my sidebar to sites that I used to visit and comment on frequently.  Take a look at it now:  it is more of a graveyard of sites, some who haven’t posted any updates since before my own gradual withdrawal from online book commentary that began in 2015.  The ones who do comment seem to not be talking much of anything new - I recognize still the authors, basic genres, and so forth - but yet there is a lot of silence even within those words, as if the writers (some of whom I would consider to be acquaintance-level friends even today, despite my near-total abandonment of reviewing in recent years) themselves are no longer as connected to something greater than a shrinking, small circle of like-minded people.

Of course, a lot of this can be seen in light of the technological changes since 2010, which seems to me to be around the highwater point of online book reviewing/blogging.  2010 was the year that I joined the then-Twitter and while it was exhilarating at times for the first couple of years getting to know even more people across 5-6 continents, communicating at times in 3 different languages, things just seemed to devolve the more “social” things got.  I’m not going to claim complete innocence in past comments on certain topics and people, but somewhere along the way, it seems that discussing a written work became less about how that work had a personal impact and more about what it could say about contemporary issues.  Not that there isn’t a time and place for such things, but when the Author(s) become the focal point of discourse, then what is contained within the Text(s) often becomes less important.  After a while, it was just a seeming hamster’s wheel of arguments over which authors should be considered for which accolades.  I never even bothered to get into the nascent Goodreads communities of a decade ago because of what I noticed going on in several of them that were linked to tweets that I read on my feed.

I just drifted away by late 2015.  I would read some, but I just didn’t fill fulfilled by writing about what I read or by what others were discussing.  I was just burned out by everything.  So I left.  Like Wolfe’s characters, I had to physically leave in order to find out something about myself, even if that meant a sort of permanent exile of sorts from a former time and “home.” 

However, lately I have begun questioning this line of thought.  Yes, me at 50 will be a very different “first year” teacher at my current school than the callow 25 year-old version.  Just like my experience in loading GD-ROM Dreamcast games that I played new back in 1999-2001, there is something “retro” about my relationships with what I wrote back 10-20 years ago compared to today.  Re-reading some of my reviews is akin to rediscovering things long forgotten.  And apparently, there were things written that were worth reading, considering the steady number of website visits I get for the “classics” or certain essays reviewing a line of thought compared to what was in “the rage” in other parts of the blogosphere that I visited.  Not everyone is satisfied with ***** commentaries with too-brief discussions and maybe a “dinosaur” such as this blog should write more to meet the needs of its creator and those who just maybe want something written that reminds them of a less group-centric literary discussion nature and something that, if not quite the home of years past, may provide something, or anything, that may serve to connect a lived past with an imagined present.

We’ll see, but I’ll try to start writing weekly or biweekly essays and occasional reviews of what I am reading, even if 99% of it is different from what I reviewed in 2008.  I am different now, after all…

Popular Patristics Series

Yes, I'm still doing a deep dive into the writings of the Christian Church Fathers, this time through buying/reading several volumes of the Popular Patristics Series.  As is the norm for series, I will list in italics books owned but not yet read and bold the ones that I've read.  I'm cautiously optimistic that I will have time later this summer to write essays on at least a few of these, perhaps on a different blog than this venerable one.  

Total through 5/12/2024:  32 books owned.

1. On the Priesthood by St. John Chrysostom
2. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments by St. Cyril of Jerusalem (discontinued)
3. On the Divine Images by St. John of Damascus (discontinued)
4. On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius (discontinued)
5. On the Holy Spirit by St. Basil the Great (discontinued)
6. On the Holy Icons by St. Theodore the Studite
7. On Marriage and Family Life by St. John Chrysostom
8. On the Divine Liturgy by St. Germanus of Constantinople
9. On Wealth and Poverty by St. John Chrysostom (2nd edition published 2020)
10. Hymns on Paradise by St. Ephrem the Syrian
11. On Ascetical Life by St. Isaac of Nineveh
12. On the Soul and Resurrection by St. Gregory of Nyssa
13. On the Unity of Christ by St. Cyril of Alexandria
14. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, vol. 1: The Church and The Last Things by St. Symeon the New Theologian
15. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, vol. 2: On Virtue and Christian Life by St. Symeon the New Theologian
16. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, vol. 3: Life, Times, and Theology by St. Symeon the New Theologian
17. On the Apostolic Preaching by St. Irenaeus of Lyons
18. On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies
19. On the Mother of God by Jacob of Serug
20. On Pascha by Melito of Sardis (discontinued)
21. On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus
22. On the Apostolic Tradition by St. Hippolytus (discontinued)
23. On God and Christ, The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius by St. Gregory of Nazianzus
24. Three Treatises on the Divine Images by St. John of Damascus (new translation, replaces volume 3)
25. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ by St. Maximus the Confessor
26. Letters from the Desert by St. Barsanuphius and John
27. Four Desert Fathers – Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt, and Macarius of Alexandria
28. Saint Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great
29. On the Lord’s Prayer by Tertullian, St. Cyprian, & Origen
30. On the Human Condition by St. Basil the Great
31. The Cult of the Saints by St. John Chrysostom
32. On the Church: Select Treatises by St. Cyprian of Carthage
33. On the Church: Select Letters by St. Cyprian of Carthage
34. The Book of Pastoral Rule by St. Gregory the Great
35. Wider Than Heaven: Eighth-century Homilies on the Mother of God
36. Festal Orations by St. Gregory of Nazianzus
37. Counsels on the Spiritual Life, Volumes One and Two by St. Mark the Monk
38. On Social Justice by St. Basil the Great
39. Harp of Glory (Enzira Sebhat): An Alphabetical Hymn of Praise for the Ever-Blessed Virgin Mary from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church
40. Divine Eros: Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian
41. On the Two Ways: Life or Death, Light or Darkness: Foundational Texts in the Tradition
42. On the Holy Spirit by St. Basil the Great (new translation, replaces volume 5)
43. Works on the Spirit by St. Athanasius the Great and Didymus the Blind
44. On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius the Great (new translation, replaces volume 4; available in Greek and English (44A) or English only (44B); own both)
45. Treasure-house of Mysteries: Exploration of the Sacred Text Through Poetry in the Syriac Tradition
46. Poems on Scripture by St. Gregory of Nazianzus
47. On Christian Doctrine and Practice St. Basil the Great
48. Light on the Mountain: Greek Patristic and Byzantine Homilies on the Transfiguration of the Lord
49. The Letters by St. Ignatius of Antioch
50. On Fasting and Feasts by St. Basil the Great
51. On Christian Ethics by St. Basil the Great
52. Give Me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers
53. Two Hundred Chapters On Theology by St. Maximus the Confessor
54. On the Apostolic Tradition (Second Edition) by St. Hippolytus (replaces volume 22)
55. On Pascha (Second Edition) by Melito of Sardis (replaces volume 20)
56. Letters to Saint Olympia by St. John Chrysostom
57. Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (Second Edition) by St. Cyril of Jerusalem (replaces volume 2)
58. The Testament of the Lord: Worship and Discipline in the Early Church
59. On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy: A Theological Vision of the Liturgy by St. Maximus the Confessor
60. Catechetical Discourse: A Handbook for Catechists by St. Gregory of Nyssa
61. Hymns of Repentance by St. Romanos the Melodist
62. On the Orthodox Faith: Volume 3 of the Fount of Knowledge by St. John of Damascus
63. Headings on Spiritual Knowledge: The Second Part, Chapters 1-3 by St. Isaac of Nineveh
64. On Death and Eternal Life by St. Gregory of Nyssa
65. The Prayers of Saint Sarapion: The Bishop of Thmuis