07/17/2024
Maybe we need a little distraction?
The New York Times just completed its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Who really cares what they think these days but….
For a little fun which of these have you read?
1 My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
2 The Warmth Of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson NF
3 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4 The Known World by Edward P Jones
5 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
6 2666 by Roberto Bolano
7 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
8 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
9 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
10 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
11 The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
12 The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion NF
13 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
14 Outline by Rachel Cusk
15 Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
16 The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay by Michael Chabon (published in 2000 so 20th century by traditional reckoning)
17 The Sellout by Paul Beatty
18 Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders
19 Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe NF
20 Erasure by Percival Everett
21 Evicted by Matthew Desmond NF
22 Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo NF
23 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro SS
24 The Overstory by Richard Powers
25 Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc NF
26 Atonement by Ian McEwan
27 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
28 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
29 The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (published in 2000)
30 Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
31 White Teeth by Zadie Smith
32 The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
33 Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward
34 Citizen by Claudia Rankine (partly P)
35 Fun Home by Alison Bechdel NF G
36 Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates NF
37 The Years by Annie Ernaux NF
38 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
39 A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
40 H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald NF
41 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
42 A Brief History Of Seven Killings by Marlon James
43 Postwar by Tony Judt NF
44 The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
45 The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson NF
46 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
47 A Mercy by Toni Morrison
48 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi G
49 The Vegetarian by Han Kang
50 Trust by Hernan Diaz
51 Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
52 Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
53 Runaway by Alice Munro SS
54 Tenth Of December by George Saunders SS
55 The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright NF
56 The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
57 Nickel And Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich NF
58 Stay True by Hua Hsu NF
59 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
60 Heavy by Kiese Laymon NF
61 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
62 10:04 by Ben Lerner
63 Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
64 The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
65 The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
66 We The Animals by Justin Torres
67 Far From The Tree by Andrew Solomon NF
68 The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
69 The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander NF
70 All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P Jones SS
71 The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen NF (published in Danish in 1960s and 1970s, first published in English in 2021)
72 Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich NF
73 Lyndon Johnson: The Passage Of Power by Robert Caro NF
74 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (“novel in short stories” ala Thomas Beller)
75 Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
76 Tomorrow, Tomorrow, And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
77 An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
78 Septology by Jon Fosse
79 A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin SS (contents first published 1980s and 1990s, this collection published in 2015)
80 The Story Of The Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
81 Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan NF
82 Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
83 When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut NF
84 The Emperor Of All Maladies by Siddharta Mukherjee NF
85 Pastoralia by George Saunders SS
86 Frederick Douglass by David Blight NF
87 Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
88 Collected Stories by Lydia Davis SS
89 The Return by Hisham Matar NF
90 The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
91 The Human Stain by Philip Roth (published in 2000)
92 The Days Of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
93 Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
94 On Beauty by Zadie Smith
95 Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
96 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman NF
97 Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward NF
98 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
99 How To Be Both by Ali Smith
100 Tree Of Smoke by Denis Johnson
