Far From Brooklyn

The New York Times recently surveyed some 500 writers, thinkers, editors and cultural figures and came up with a list of the best 100 books of the 21st Century so far. It’s an interesting project and, at least by my lights, a pretty fair reckoning.

One of the most unusual aspects of the project was its scope: Any book of any sort, any genre, any language, could be included in the list, as long as it first appeared in English this century. That means that, for instance, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon,” though written roughly 100 years ago, was eligible. 

The list spurred me to think back over the books I have read since 2000, and to try my own forced ranking. I was pretty sure I knew which book would end up on top, and indeed it did, but I was surprised by some of the volumes I ended up putting in the top ten, and the ones that got aced out. 

I ended up with a list of 73 “top” books to choose from. I could have easily built it out to a round 100, but that would have been disingenuous: I limited my list to books that had stuck with me; I had to love them or, if not that, they had to have had a significant, lasting effect on me. 

[Update: The list felt incomplete at 73 so I went back and scoured my shelves and this blog and a few dozen annual best-of lists and built it out to a full 100.]

There are plenty of well-regarded books published in the last 24 years that I read but just didn’t particularly vibe with. An example would be “Americanah” (No. 27 on the NYT list.) I could have included it at the bottom of my personal top 100 since I read it and it was published within the required timeline, and furthermore it was a big, much-discussed title, but what would be the point of calling it one of my “top” books when I don’t feel much of anything about it? Other highly regarded books that just didn’t connect with me, at least when I read them for the first time, include “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson (No. 100 on the NYT), “The Flame Throwers” by Rachel Kushner (No. 58 on the NYT), and “A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (No. 39 on the NYT.) I keep meaning to go back to the Kushner and Egan books because they are so well-regarded, and it may be that when I picked them up the first time it just wasn’t the right moment for me to read them. Similarly, the Times’ No. 1 book, “My Brilliant Friend,” is one that I had picked up and lost patience with, in fact more than once. Since the list appeared I have reopened it to give it another go.

On the other hand, there were a handful of books on my list that I pretty much actively disliked, and yet recognized their power and, more importantly, am still thinking about them years later. Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth” is one of these (I wrote about it here), as is Ayad Akhtar’s “Homeland Elegies” (I wrote about it here). So they made the list.

Another rule I set for my own list: I had to remember the book. That sounds silly, but hear me out. I’ve read all of Alice Munro’s collections over the years, including two that were listed on the NYT list, but the fact is, I don’t remember a thing of them. Not a single story. I’ve been meaning to go back and re-read Munro, especially having spent most of 2022 reading and reflecting on Chekhov, but at the moment I could not tell you a thing about her stories, whether published this century or not. So there’s no Munro on my list. 

I liked the openness of the Times’ list — any sort of genre was fine, low- or high-brow be damned. I thought my own list would probably be drier, more self-consciously high-brow, since I’m not much for genre fiction. Plus, I have been called pretentious! But to my surprise, quite a few genre works ended up on my list. There were two graphic novels (well, memoirs, as it happens): “Fun Home” by Allison Bechdel (No. 35 on the NYT list) and “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant,” by Roz Chast. I ended up citing more science fiction than I would have expected: “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart; “Mort(e)” by Robert Repino; and “The Martian” by Andy Weir. I even have what I would classify as a fantasy novel: “The Buried Giant,” by Kazuo Ishiguro (but definitely not his more widely admired “Never Let Me Go,” which I didn’t like, and yet which placed No. 9 (gasp) on the NYT list.)

Anyway, my list ended up nicely variegated, especially the top ten, with a mix of fiction and non-fiction, newer and older titles, and writers from around the world. The countdown:

No. 10. The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray

This one snuck in at the last minute, shouldering out a handful of titles that seemed like shoo-ins at the outset. Gray’s fluid, elegant writing is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s a cockeyed memoir and t reads as if it were composed in real time, just dashed off on the page. The effect is something like being right there in his brain, as the words form out of flashing electrical pulses. I’m sure there is artifice and revision involved, but it feels, to use the same word again, electrically alive. Also, it’s very funny, and, unexpectedly, moving, as Gray grapples with the memory of his deeply imperfect parents and the loss of his wildly self-destructive brother. (This book was not among the top 100 on the New York Times list.)

No. 9. Citizen by Claudia Rankine

This short collection, mixing essay and poetry, gave me a sense of how exhausting and dispiriting it can be to be black in majority white America. It’s not about slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality, or even redlining or school busing, or any of the livid marks of racism in America. It’s more about inconvenience, insult, hurt and alienation. Even though it deals, much of the time, with minor issues, it is a powerful document. It’s one of the few books I can think of that changed my mind while I was reading it. (No. 34 on the NYT list.)

No. 8. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon

Hemon was one of the few writers to have multiple titles in my top 73, and another work of his—the lighter, funnier, “Making of Zombie Wars”—was very close to actually sneaking into my top ten, which is to say I really love Hemon, especially these two works, where he separates himself, at least a bit, from the trauma of his exile from Bosnia. That trauma certainly flavors both “The Lazarus Project” and “Zombie Wars,” but it’s not the central focus. “Lazarus” manages to be seriously funny even though takes on serious issues (race, exile) and serious sadness. (Not on the NYT list.)

No. 7. The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

This is the American Iliad. It’s that damn good. It’s the story of the misnamed “Nez Perce War,” which was really a long, awful chase across the American West, the Nez Perce tribe mostly in retreat, the American cavalry in pursuit. Profoundly powerful, incredibly well-researched, beautifully written and imagined, and, sadly, too long by at least several hundred pages, this novel is much, much too difficult to reach the audience that it deserves. (Not on the NYT list.)

No. 6. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

A deadly serious consideration of the unintended, and tragic, repercussions of scientific breakthroughs. The only fault I find with the book is that it is not quite fiction and not quite fact. For some reason, Labatut adds a few fictional curlicues to what would otherwise be historical essays. I just don’t see the point of that decision. (No. 83 on the NYT list.)

No. 5. Dancing Bears by Witold Szablowski

A brilliant mix of history and reportage that asks (and answers) a painfully uncomfortable question: Do we have the courage to be free? When I first read this volume, it helped me understand life in the post-Soviet republics. Alas, today, it helps me understand life right here in the United States. (Not on the NYT list.)

No. 4. Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

The life of Cudjo Lewis, an African man who in 1860 was captured in an inter-kingdom raid in West Africa, held in a prison, or barracoon, on the coast, and sent to America in chains, part of the very last shipment of African prisoners into American slavery. Much of the book is presented as oral history, in Lewis’s own words. Hurston is a brilliant interlocutor, pacing the story like a novel, preserving Lewis’s verbal tics but rendering them easily understandable to a modern reader. The text is nearly 100 years old but the prose is fresh and alive. Lewis’s story is a mix of tragedy and triumph. (Not on the NYT list.)

No. 3. Outline by Rachel Cusk

For several years in the late aughts and early teens, I found myself reading books that were presented as fiction but seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be unadorned memoir or reminiscence, with little concern for event or plot, and a focus on psyche, perception and emotion. I coined a term for these works, “The New Anti-Novel,” not realizing that academics and cultural arbiters were observing the same trend and referring to these works as autofiction. This is the novel that seemed to crystallize the moment: An essentially perfect work, a series of encounters, glimpses of reality. (No. 14 on the NYT list.)

No. 2. The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

A charming memoir that reads like fiction—in fact, it reads like the obsessive, recursive novels of Austrian giant Thomas Bernhard, but Bernhard without bitterness, rancor or disdain for the modern world. That’s a pretty neat trick. The brief volume circles around a failed romance and the author’s sometimes absurd efforts to “get past” the heartbreak. It sounds flossy but the text explores questions involving fate, mythology and more. I’ve read this book several times in the years since I discovered it and enjoyed it on every reading. (Not on the NYT list.)

No. 1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

A magisterial, massive novel composed of five distinct sub-novels, the separate threads sometimes only tangentially related to each other, each written in a distinct voice in a distinct style, the stories spreading and spreading like a massive river delta. The individual sections range from playful to pitch black. One section was so horrifyingly violent that I had to put the book away for months before resuming it to finish. (No. 6 on the NYT list.)

Here are five titles that I sorely would have liked to squeeze into my top ten:

My Struggle: Book One, A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The first of Knausgaard’s huge, multivolume autofiction. Along with Rachel Cusk’s “Outline,” this is pretty much the avatar of this type of writing. (Not on the NYT list, to my amazement, considering that this was probably the most talked about title of the last 20 years.)

The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandr Hemon

A very funny, mostly gossamer light comic novel that manages to stir in a tragic subplot involving unhappy refugees from the disintegrating nation-states of the former Yugoslavia. (Not on the NYT list.)

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

A giant, funny, sad stream of consciousness about life in the Trump years in midwestern America. (Not on the NYT list. WTF??)

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

A big, boiling adventure set in a nightmarish, incredibly well-imagined North Korea, (Not on the NYT list.)

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère

An embellished piece of autofiction that sounds dreadful and self-serving in the describing of it but that manages to be powerful and engrossing in the actual telling. (Not on the NYT list.)

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What follows is the full list of 100, in alphabetical order. Is an alphabetical listing a copout??? Yes. I feel like I really should go in and force rank them all, but I’ve spent enough time on this florilegia already.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (No. 6 on the NYT list)

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

An Oresteia translated by Anne Carson

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebold (No. 8 on the NYT list)

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (No. 98 on the NYT list)

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Thompson

Born in Blackness by Howard French

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast

Citizen by Claudia Rankine (No. 34 on the NYT list)(

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane

Dancing Bears by Witold Szablowski

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

Deep South by Paul Theroux

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Ofill

Doghead by Morten Ramstad

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs tonight by Alexandra Fuller

Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole

Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (No. 75 on the NYT list)

Family Life by Akhil Sharma

Fun Home by Allison Bechdel (No. 35 on the NYT list)

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar 

How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

Immortality by Milan Kundera

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

Memorial by Alice Oswald

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

Mort(e) by Robert Repino

My Struggle, Book One, a Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard

New Jack by Ted Conover

New York Burning by Jill Lepore

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goff

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Outline by Rachel Cusk (No. 14 on the NYT list)

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (No. 15 on the NYT list)

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan (No. 81 on the NYT list)

Redeployment by Phil Klay

Septology by Jon Fosse (No. 78 on the NYT list)

Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemerovsky

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteingart

Telephone by Percival Everett

Tenth of December by George Saunders (No. 54 on the NYT list)

The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

The Big Green Tent by Lyudmila Ulitskaya

The Book Against God by James Wood

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon

The Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandr Hemon

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

The Pillowman by Martin McDounough

The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (No. 38 on the NYT list)

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (No. 17 on the NYT list)

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray

The Trees by Percival Everett

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (No. 7 on the NYT list)

The Unwinding by George Packer

The Years by Annie Ernaux (No. 37 on the NYT list)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Ball by Michael Chabon

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

They Don’t Mean to but They Do by Cathleen Schine

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (No. 83 on the NYT list)

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère

You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett