The 100 Best Books of the Century?

A closer look at the literary megalist from The New York Times Book Review

By Ashly Moore Sheldon • July 28, 2024

A few weeks ago, The New York Times Book Review published a piece entitled The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and it has garnered lots of attention. In creating their list, The New York Times (NYT) sent a survey to hundreds of novelists, non-fiction writers, academics, book editors, critics, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians, and other literary luminaries, asking them to pick their top ten books of the 21st century. They offered no guidance on the definition of "best" and simply let respondents use their own criteria. Here's the top 10, along with highlights, a reading guide, and more.

The Top 10

Highlights

Authors with more than one book on the list

Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment (#92), The Story of the Lost Child (#80), and My Brilliant Friend (#1)
George Saunders: Pastoralia (#85), Tenth of December (#54), and Lincoln in the Bardo (#18)
Jesmyn Ward: Men We Reaped (#97), Salvage the Bones (#33), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (#30)
Alice Munro: Runaway (#53) and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (#23)
Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives (#38) and 2666 (#6)
Edward P. Jones: All Aunt Hagar’s Children: Stories (#70) and The Known World (#4)
Hilary Mantel: Bring Up the Bodies (#95) and Wolf Hall (#3)
Zadie Smith: On Beauty (#94) and White Teeth (#31)
Philip Roth: The Human Stain (#91) and The Plot Against America (#65)
Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke (#100) and Train Dreams (#52)

Debuts

Books translated from other languages

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Spanish)
The Days of Abandonment, The Story of the Lost Child, and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Italian)
Septology by Jon Fosse (Norwegian)
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich (Russian)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Korean)
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (French)
2666 and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (Spanish)
The Years by Annie Ernaux (French)
Austerlitz by G. Sebald (German)
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (Spanish)

NYT reading guide

A hundred books is a lot to parse through, so the NYT offered a handy guide for distilling the list down to something you might enjoy best. We've summarized it here.

The top pick!

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

A short book you can read in a day

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
We the Animals by Justin Torres
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Maybe you want something enormous

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Septology by Jon Fosse
2666 by Roberto Bolaño

A thought-provoking choice for your book club

On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Something your book-loving teen might enjoy

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Books that are laugh-out-loud funny

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders

Books that will give you a good cry

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

A novel that takes you back in time

The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

A non-fiction book that takes you back in time

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

An absorbing memoir or biography

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar

A book packed with thriller-y tension

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Books about complex family dynamics

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Atonement by Ian McEwan

Author favorites that didn't make the list

As we mentioned, The New York Times polled hundreds of literary luminaries to create their list and they published the full ballots of some of these notables in a related article. In another piece, participating authors shared their favorites that didn't make the cut. Here are some of their would-be winners.

Like these authors, we have lots of favorites that we think deserve a place on this list. Why don't they ask readers? Well, as it turns out, they have. You can submit your own ballot to the NYT.

It's been fun dissecting this ambitious project. We hope it helps you get a sense of some of the great 21st century literature you might like to read. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

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