The tyranny of lists
Adding my take to the crowded discourse on the NYT '100 Best Books of the 21st Century' list
Good day and welcome back to Writing About Reading. This is Issue 29. The past few issues were about: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Until August and posthumously published unfinished novels; Don DeLillo’s Underworld; “Barbenheimer” and book-to-movie adaptations; and The Thornbirds and quitting a book you’re not enjoying.
Since last issue, I’ve read: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (not my favorite writing style, didn’t love The Martian, but Rocky is one of the best alien characters ever); The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland (bizarrely enjoyable Anne Rice-style gothic vampire story transplanted into a domestic drama in upstate New York in the 1980s); and The Expectations by Alexander Tilney (rich privileged angsty youths playing squash at a stuffy boarding school). Waiting on my bedside table stack: Good Material by Dolly Alderton and A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko.
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Two weeks ago the New York Times published a “100 best books of the 21st century so far” list to an immediate flurry of tweets and takes and thinkpieces. Enough friends have texted me asking my opinion of the list that I am giving in and adding yet another take onto the collective pile.
For starters, if the excuse for doing this list was the first quarter of the century, it should have come out at the end of this year (2000 through the end of 2024 comprising the first 25 years of the century). But they were too excited to wait, I guess?
Let’s also remember the primary reason for doing such lists is to spur engagement, and it certainly worked in this case. I saw scores of tweets outraged a certain author was left off, or criticizing the process, or dunking on the top 10, but every social share only further spreads the list, so the whole exercise has been a success and also surely a traffic hit.
As far as the presentation goes, there’s some nice interactivity: as you scroll the full list, you can check off the books you’ve read and those you would like to read, and the page keeps track for you and shows your results at the bottom. I would have liked them to go a step further and offer a filter to categorize by year published (there was some recency bias, but not as much as you’d think), fiction vs nonfiction (the list is about 75% fiction), or authors with multiple books on the list (Bolaño, Edward P. Jones, Mantel, Denis Johnson, Alice Munro (!), Zadie Smith, and Philip Roth each got two books on the list; Elena Ferrante, Jesmyn Ward, and George Saunders have three).
The methodology: The Times says 503 “novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, and other book lovers” voted by selecting their top 10 books published since 2000. The Times did not define “best” for them and left it open-ended. (Maris Kreizman, who was one of the participants, writes that the Times did send a link to all of their “best book” lists since 2000 for reference, but that didn’t mean voters had to choose something from those lists.) They don’t list all 503 voters but separately have shared 53 ballots publicly, including those of Stephen King, John Irving, Knausgaard, Sarah Jessica Parker (?), Roxane Gay, and Marlon James. The Times doesn’t say whether its own critics are included in the 503 voters.
Overall, unlike with the paper’s annual “10 best books” or “100 notable books” rankings, any issues people have with this list they can’t really blame on the Times. Or at least not only on the Times. I suppose you could take issue with the sample size (only 503 voters?), or the elite backgrounds of the voting group (presumably? if that list were made public), but in general, if you’re stunned an author or book was left off, well, sorry, it didn’t get the votes.
So: to the list. Who was “snubbed?” Karl Ove Knausgaard (Dwight Garner writes that votes were split among the six-book My Struggle series, but that didn’t stop two of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series from making it), David Foster Wallace (The Pale King and Oblivion both have a strong case—did his posthumous cancellation keep people from voting for him?), Martin Amis, Amor Towles, Stephen King (he charmingly voted for one of his own books on his top ten, Under the Dome, and I agree it’s his best since 2000), Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Sally Rooney, Joshua Cohen, Michel Houellebecq, Emma Cline, Salman Rushdie (I’d put his memoir Joseph Anton on), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake is a shocking omission), Jonathan Lethem, John Irving (I’d put Last Night in Twisted River on), Tom McCarthy (Remainder and C would both make my list), Will Self, Meg Wolitzer, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo, Richard Ford, Jon Krakauer (despite a fair amount of narrative nonfiction on the list), Haruki Murakami, Steven Millhauser (especially surprising with so many short story collections), and Susan Choi all missed the cut. There are many more, but those are the authors that stood out to me. As for individual books, A Little Life and The Art of Fielding were two novels I remember creating massive moments in the literary world, and neither made it. And (unpopular take?) I’d put Freedom over The Corrections. And only one Cormac McCarthy, and it’s The Road? I’d put The Passenger on the list.
But again, overall, if you have beef with any snubs, your beef is with the 503 voters. My gripe is more with the approach of mixing genres: I’d separate fiction and nonfiction. To say The Warmth of Other Suns is the second-best book of the past 24 years feels… strange? When the rest of the top 10 are novels? The Looming Tower and Say Nothing make the top 100, but Columbine by Dave Cullen doesn’t? Nor any Erik Larson or David Grann? I’d have done two separate lists: 100 best novels and 100 best nonfiction books.
These lists are obviously extremely subjective. How did the voters even interpret “best?” Did they choose the 10 books they think were the most towering literary achievements, or the 10 books they most enjoyed reading?
This is the tyranny of lists: you roll your eyes, broadcast your gripes, but everyone still wants to see what/who made the list, and then everyone wants to share it. The tyranny of lists is that they pester and annoy, but boy do they click. The tyranny of lists is that everyone loves to complain about them, but they all want to make the list. This all applies to book rankings, “40 Under 40” and “30 Under 30” business lists, awards, every subjective exercise in ranking art or people.
The Times smartly lets you submit your own top 10, which is fun but nearly impossible. My first stab at my own top 10 looked like this:
Then I realized I’d left off The Pale King and Submission, two novels that are absolutely on my ten best of the century. So I revised by removing nonfiction.
Then I remember The Namesake, which not only should have been on the Times top 100, but I would think belongs in the top ten or so. I also remembered The Three-Body Problem, first published in China in 2008, then in English in 2014, which I recommend to everyone lately and which has got to be, along with Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, is the most original sci-fi series of the century so far. You can also see I couldn’t decide on Telephone or The Trees by Everett—both incredible, both have stuck with me, both better in my view than Erasure, his one title that did make the list (perhaps buoyed in voters’ minds by the recent film adaptation “American Fiction”).
So my next conceit was: why don’t I remove nonfiction and remove any titles that already made the NYT list, and keep it to my top 10 the Times missed, and here’s what I have for you:
Suffice it to say that the exercise of choosing just 10 is impossible (but fun!) so it’s no wonder voters forgot, or were forced to leave off, some very deserving books. Choosing 20 would have been much easier.
Last comment: many people were sharing their screenshot showing how many of the 100 books they’ve read. I shared mine on my Instagram, then got the recognizable icky feeling of tallying books and boasting about the tally, a ritual I wrote about here and again here. Books should be savored and enjoyed. You never want to get into the habit of whipping through them purely to count how many you read and tout your count.
But hey. We all do it… 😉
Thanks for reading.