New York Times Top 100 Books of the 21st Century

Entertainment! Books
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Critics list

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

Public Vote List

  1. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
  2. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
  3. A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
  4. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
  5. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
  6. Educated - Tara Westover
  7. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
  8. My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
  9. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
  10. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
  11. A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
  12. The Overstory - Richard Powers
  13. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
  14. Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
  15. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
  16. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
  17. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  18. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
  19. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  20. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
  21. Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi
  22. Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell
  23. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
  24. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
  25. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
  26. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
  27. Normal People - Sally Rooney
  28. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
  29. Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe
  30. A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
  31. Circe - Madeline Miller
  32. Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr
  33. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
  34. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
  35. The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese
  36. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
  37. The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead
  38. The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai
  39. Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
  40. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
  41. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
  42. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz
  43. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
  44. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride
  45. There There - Tommy Orange
  46. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
  47. Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
  48. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong
  49. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
  50. James - Percival Everett
  51. Caste - Isabel Wilkerson
  52. The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah
  53. Trust - Hernan Diaz
  54. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
  55. Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
  56. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
  57. Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
  58. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
  59. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
  60. The Dutch House - Ann Patchett
  61. North Woods - Daniel Mason
  62. The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
  63. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
  64. 2666 - Roberto Bolaño
  65. Evicted - Matthew Desmond
  66. Just Kids - Patti Smith
  67. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
  68. The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
  69. Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann
  70. Know My Name - Chanel Miller
  71. Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward
  72. Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner
  73. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
  74. Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
  75. The Lincoln Highway - Amor Towles
  76. Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson
  77. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
  78. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
  79. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
  80. Deacon King Kong - James McBride
  81. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
  82. Tom Lake - Ann Patchett
  83. Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann
  84. Tenth of December - George Saunders
  85. When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
  86. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
  87. Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
  88. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
  89. The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
  90. In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado
  91. Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
  92. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
  93. Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt
  94. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
  95. A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
  96. The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett
  97. My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh
  98. Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
  99. Empire of Pain - Patrick Radden Keefe
  100. A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Backman
2 Likes
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a load of fannies are going to start bragging how many they’ve read. they’re literally counting now.

CBA to read either list/100

3 Likes
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Love this book

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Got to number 53 till I saw one I’d heard of

5

Thanks for letting us know, was worried nobody would.

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Meme Shock GIF by Evan Klar

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The public vote list looks way better, unsurprising I guess.

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Is the critics’ list the wrong way around - i.e. Ferrante no. 1, etc.?

Update: yes, pretty sure it’s backwards!

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Fox’s Socks notable by it’s absence

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Zero

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Actually just read the list and one - 2666. Assumed that was older tbh.

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Come off it.

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It has Project Hail Mary on it though, which is absolute garbage

14

Will never understand the fawning of this book.

4 Likes
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Uh oh, I’m reading it now, quite enjoying it so far

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Lots of people did!

17

Utter garbage, smug self satisfied tripe

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Reading this atm (alongside 2 other books)

Good book!

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Honest guv!

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I was going to say that there’s no Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and so this list is null and void, but it’s actually on both lists so now I don’t know what to say to sound like I’m above this kind of thing.

3 Likes