The New York Times' 'best books' list
complaints about literary complaints
First of all, sorry that I didn’t post the past two weeks. I have a handful of excuses to offer and I’ll try to keep them brief A.) I have a two-year-old, with whom I spend 70% of the day, picking blackberries, riding around in a little remote control car, building wooden train tracks, destroying wooden train tracks — which leads me to B.) in that other 30% of the time, I’ve been writing a book that is either beautiful or stinks, reading good books and seeing old friends.
And also, C.) this Substack vibe has become a little exhausting. I don’t mean the writing of it, the writing of it is just writing and that won’t ever change. Hasn’t changed since Cicero did it. But Substack has become a social media site and social media sites are exhausting. Substack is trying to do this whole Twitter thing and I can only go to that place for like ten minutes a day. Substack has become a feed, which you’re expected to contribute to — nothing exceptional, just your daily thoughts and opinions. And, let’s be real, most of us have, maybe a dozen interesting thoughts a day and eight of those fly off as soon as they hit us. But, still, this is what Substack prompts me:
And this is what Twitter prompts me:
For the record, nothing instresting is on my/your mind 90% of the time. Nothing interesting is happening 90% percent of the time. Most of the time, we’re trying to sift out the unexceptional minutiae of the present and its relationship to ourselves. Why is that guy wearing jean shorts and cowboy boots? Will I look like that someday?
These are two unexceptional thoughts that recently berated me. Equally unexceptional — which has been occasionally berating me of the past week is: “I don’t think The Brilliant Friend was a brilliant book, so is there something wrong with me?”
I’m stressing about The Brilliant Friend — which, in my defense, I bought and read twice — because it topped the New York Times list of “Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.” And a lot of people are writing about that list. There’s this quick essay that I liked, looking at a few specific critiques, there’s this piece, calling the list “inoffensive, generally not wrong but sometimes wrong, boring, and predictable.”
So yeah, everybody’s already written about this list and I’ll try not to beat any dead horses, but I think it’s a fine list. It’s cliched to disagree with the New York Times’ list (which I half-do) and it’s lame to agree with it (which I half do). I think, more interesting, in the theory of these lists. If you read a lot, like if you have a reading habit, you get to be familiar with these “best books” lists. I’ll always take a word-of-mouth recommendation over a list, but like, I grew up on a river in the middle of the woods. So, in high school, I read from the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the 21st Century.
That list was put out in 1998 but, like all lists, it’s tainted by the time — by its own time and our own time. The New York Times says the Modern Library list was “assembled by scholars,” whatever the hell that means. Ulysses is on the top of the list, of course. But just under that is The Great Gatsby, which flopped when it was published. While F. Scott Fitzgerald was alive, less than 20,000 copies of his masterpiece were sold. It wasn’t until twenty years after publication — when the book was issued to WWII soldiers — that it became the cultural touchstone it is today. For perspective, New York Times list only considers books from the last twenty-four years. If they’d put out this list in 1949 (twenty-four years after the publication of Gatsby) they probably would have excluded it.
Also, the Times list only includes novels published in English. I know that because Maris Kriezman, who was one of the judges, published a LitHub piece explaining it. Here’s how she explained her choices:
I tried to define ‘best’ in a way that felt right for me. I settled on the books that changed the way I viewed the world, or changed my idea of what a book can do or be.
And I think that’s a wonderful criterion. But all our worlds are different, aren’t they? And the New York Times list is, like it or not, coming out of New York City. And publishing is an industry of New York City. Which leads me back to the theory of these lists and where they come from. Le Monde also published a Top 100 books of the 21st century and obviously, more of their books were French authors (Camus and Proust lead the list) but I think it’s a much better list than the Modern Library list. It favors the French but it also feels like it has a longer eye.
As I said earlier, I think the Times has a fine list. It’s as good as any list can be. Nobody, no publication — not the New York Times or Glamour Magazine — wants to put out a list and have everybody agree with it. That’s so boring. The fun is in standing beside some stranger you half-dislike at a cocktail party and telling him/her off about how Outline by Rachel Cusk should be in the top ten on the New York Times list. At least, that’s the kind of thing I hope happens in New York City. A sort of flagellation of tastes and opinions.
But then again, if a list isn’t a matter of tastes, what is it?1
I can, and am happy to rattle through half-a-dozen complaints but I didn’t want to do them in the body because I didn’t want to slow it down too much. But here we go — and again, this is all subjective — but 1.) The Road is not a great book. It’s a book that Cormac McCarthy wrote and he’s brilliant but it’s not nearly as good as his westerns, it shouldn’t be at #13 and 2.) White Teeth at #31?! Are you fucking kidding me? That’s top 10 easily and 3.) I love Donna Tartt’s writing too much to explain — it’s beautiful, it’s lush and yet The Goldfinch is not one of the top 50 best books of the century. Tartt, it seems like many of her classmates, was cursed with writing one brilliant breathtaking book while she was too young. 4.) a lot of readers have said this but Ada Limon should be on this list. Sharks in the Rivers is one of the best 20 books of the last quarter century. 5.) I understand that there’s this like anti-Sally Rooney vibe going around. But it’s insane that she’s not on this list. Normal People and her last books are both better than a quarter of the books here. and finally, 6.) none of these books are particularly sharp if that makes sense. I’d like to see something like Death Valley by Melissa Broder or The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams on this list. Both of which are razor-sharp.