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.
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