NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: Last Installment

This week, the New York Times began posting its list of the 100 best books of the century so far, as determined by 500+ writers, editors, and so on. Each day, as it posts the next 20 books in the list, I’m going in and adding to this post, which I will publish on Friday. I already published comments about the lists from the first two days (#61-100) on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s List

I started out the last article by listing the books from the NYT list that I had read. So, here it is for the books listed Wednesday.

For books #60-51:

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

For 50-41:

• Trust by Hernan Diaz
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

As of Wednesday, they have made it possible to submit 10 of your favorite books for an audience favorites list. I made up a list and submitted it, So far, the only ones on the NYT list that I put on mine were Life After Life and The Goldfinch, but, full disclosure, I scratched off The Goldfinch in favor of a more obscure book because we are limited to 10. However, I might have included Middlesex if I’d thought of it and am happy to spot more books that I enjoyed appearing on the lists as we go up to #1.

Of these lists from Wednesday, I loved several of the books and actually didn’t like a couple of them at all, particularly A Brief History of Seven Killings and The Vegetarian. I was indifferent to one other.

To keep my count up, if I counted right, 11 of the 20 authors listed for these books are women. So far, that makes 33 out of 60.

Thursday’s List

Continuing my listing, of the list from Thursday, here are the books I’ve read:

For books #40-31:

• H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Well, that’s a pretty bad showing for those numbers.

For books 30-21:

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The Overstory by Richard Powers

I’m at least liking most of these selections as we get closer to the highest numbers on the list. I see there are some more Alice Munro books I need to read. Of the list of my top 10 that I submitted to the NYT on Wednesday, A Visit from the Goon Squad was on it, and both Atonement and The Overstory were on my shortlist and got taken off to get down to 10. If I’d thought of Cloud Atlas, it probably would have been on there, too. I think, actually, that I failed to check its publication date and thought it was before 2000.

Continuing my count of the women writers included, 13 out of 20 are women, for a total count of 46 out of 80. At this point, some names are duplicated, but since there are 100 books, I’m counting them each time they appear. It would be much more challenging to figure out how many women and men are listed, because of duplicates (which I’m still not happy they’ve included, that is, more than one book by an author).

Friday’s List and the Top Twenty!

On Friday, the NYT listed their top twenty books of the 21st century (along with the rest of the 100). Here’s my list of how many I have read.

For books #20-11:

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• Outline by Rachel Cusk
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

For the top 10:

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
• The Corrections by Jonathan Frazen
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

For my own part, I have done a lot better at having read the top books. Fifteen out of twenty isn’t bad! Of these, I found a flaw in my method of making my own list of favorite books, which was to go through my Best of the Year posts, but my blog only started in 2012, I think. So, for example,. I may have included Never Let Me Go in my list if I’d thought of it.

Of the ones on the list of 11-20, there are more books that I didn’t enjoy that much than on any of the other lists. The Sellout, for example, was a DNF for me, despite it being on one of my project lists. The only books I liked a lot were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Year of Magical Thinking.

I did much better with the top ten list. I considered The Known World and Wolf Hall for my own list. I liked all the others except, it’s now official, I must be the only person in the world who didn’t like My Brilliant Friend. Of course it came in at first place!

We are doing worse on the count of women writers for this one, only 7 out of 20. That brings the total to 53 out of 100, though, which is fair and much better than in previous lists by other organizations.