Top 100 Books of the 21st Century by NYT

My first impression was that it would be books from 1900 to now and then I realized that it is the list of books in 21st century and that a quarter of a century has passed since 2000! It just seems like 2000 was yesterday!

NYT article on this is here. I’m not sure if would be paywalled or not. NYT didn’t drop all the names in the list in one shot. They did it in stages, posting 20 every day starting with 100 and working their way down.

Below is a table with the full list. 100 seems to be a large number but when you think of it, each year hundreds of thousands of books are published and over 25 years, the number is huge. So there could at least be a thousand must-read books. So shortlisting to just 100 might have been a tough task. Kudos to NYT.

Rank	Name	Author	Year
1	My Brilliant Friend	Elena Ferrante	2012
2	The Warmth of Other Suns	Isabel Wilkerson	2010
3	Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel	2009
4	The Known World	Edward P. Jones	2003
5	The Corrections	Jonathan Franzen	2001
6	2666	Roberto Bolaño	2008
7	The Underground Railroad	Colson Whitehead	2016
8	Austerlitz	W.G. Sebald	2001
9	Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	2005
10	Gilead	Marilynne Robinson	2004
11	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Díaz	2007
12	The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	2005
13	The Road	Cormac McCarthy	2006
14	Outline	Rachel Cusk	2015
15	Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	2017
16	The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay	Michael Chabon	2000
17	The Sellout	Paul Beatty	2015
18	Lincoln in the Bardo	George Saunders	2017
19	Say Nothing	Patrick Radden Keefe	2019
20	Erasure	Percival Everett	2001
21	Evicted	Matthew Desmond	2016
22	Behind the Beautiful Forevers	Katherine Boo	2012
23	Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage	Alice Munro	2001
24	The Overstory	Richard Powers	2018
25	Random Family	Adrian Nicole LeBlanc	2003
26	Atonement	Ian McEwan	2002
27	Americanah	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	2013
28	Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	2004
29	The Last Samurai	Helen DeWitt	2000
30	Sing, Unburied, Sing	Jesmyn Ward	2017
31	White Teeth	Zadie Smith	2000
32	The Line of Beauty	Alan Hollinghurst	2004
33	Salvage the Bones	Jesmyn Ward	2011
34	Citizen	Claudia Rankine	2014
35	Fun Home	Alison Bechdel	2006
36	Between the World and Me	Ta-Nehisi Coates	2015
37	The Years	Annie Ernaux	2018
38	The Savage Detectives	Roberto Bolaño	2007
39	A Visit From the Goon Squad	Jennifer Egan	2010
40	H Is for Hawk	Helen Macdonald	2015
41	Small Things Like These	Claire Keegan	2021
42	A Brief History of Seven Killings	Marlon James	2014
43	Postwar	Tony Judt	2005
44	The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	2015
45	The Argonauts	Maggie Nelson	2015
46	The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt	2013
47	A Mercy	Toni Morrison	2008
48	Persepolis	Marjane Satrapi	2003
49	The Vegetarian	Han Kang	2016
50	Trust	Hernan Diaz	2022
51	Life After Life	Kate Atkinson	2013
52	Train Dreams	Denis Johnson	2011
53	Runaway	Alice Munro	2004
54	Tenth of December	George Saunders	2013
55	The Looming Tower	Lawrence Wright	2006
56	The Flamethrowers	Rachel Kushner	2013
57	Nickel and Dimed	Barbara Ehrenreich	2001
58	Stay True	Hua Hsu	2022
59	Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides	2002
60	Heavy	Kiese Laymon	2018
61	Demon Copperhead	Barbara Kingsolver	2022
62	10:04	Ben Lerner	2014
63	Veronica	Mary Gaitskill	2005
64	The Great Believers	Rebecca Makkai	2018
65	The Plot Against America	Philip Roth	2004
66	We the Animals	Justin Torres	2011
67	Far From the Tree	Andrew Solomon	2012
68	The Friend	Sigrid Nunez	2018
69	The New Jim Crow	Michelle Alexander	2010
70	All Aunt Hagar’s Children	Edward P. Jones	2006
71	The Copenhagen Trilogy	Tove Ditlevsen	2021
72	Secondhand Time	Svetlana Alexievich	2016
73	The Passage of Power	Robert Caro	2012
74	Olive Kitteridge	Elizabeth Strout	2008
75	Exit West	Mohsin Hamid	2017
76	Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow	Gabrielle Zevin	2022
77	An American Marriage	Tayari Jones	2018
78	Septology	Jon Fosse	2022
79	A Manual for Cleaning Women	Lucia Berlin	2015
80	The Story of the Lost Child	Elena Ferrante	2015
81	Pulphead	John Jeremiah Sullivan	2011
82	Hurricane Season	Fernanda Melchor	2020
83	When We Cease to Understand the World	Benjamín Labatut	2021
84	The Emperor of All Maladies	Siddhartha Mukherjee	2010
85	Pastoralia	George Saunders	2000
86	Frederick Douglass	David W. Blight	2018
87	Detransition, Baby	Torrey Peters	2021
88	The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis	Lydia Davis	2010
89	The Return	Hisham Matar	2016
90	The Sympathizer	Viet Thanh Nguyen	2015
91	The Human Stain	Philip Roth	2000
92	The Days of Abandonment	Elena Ferrante	2005
93	Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	2014
94	On Beauty	Zadie Smith	2005
95	Bring Up the Bodies	Hilary Mantel	2012
96	Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments	Saidiya Hartman	2019
97	Men We Reaped	Jesmyn Ward	2013
98	Bel Canto	Ann Patchett	2001
99	How to Be Both	Ali Smith	2014
100	Tree of Smoke	Denis Johnson	2007

7/19/2024: NYT Readers’ List

NYT offered readers a chance to vote on their own best-books of the 21st century-so-far list and a lot of people responded. The article with the readers’ list is here. Sixty-one books from the NYT list were not on the readers’ list. A lot of books that I’ve heard of are on this list than the original one, probably because many of them got made into movies and TV series or they featured on airports, costco and other places that I go to.
Here is the list.

Rank	Title	Author	On NYT List
1	Demon Copperhead	Barbara Kingsolver	No. 61
2	All the Light We Cannot See	Anthony Doerr	-
3	A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles	-
4	The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt	No. 46
5	Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	No. 15
6	Educated	Tara Westover	-
7	Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow	Gabrielle Zevin	No. 76
8	My Brilliant Friend	Elena Ferrante	No. 1
9	Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	No. 9
10	Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	No. 93
11	A Little Life	Hanya Yanagihara	-
12	The Overstory	Richard Powers	No. 24
13	The Underground Railroad	Colson Whitehead	No. 7
14	Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel	No. 3
15	The Road	Cormac McCarthy	No. 13
16	Lincoln in the Bardo	George Saunders	No. 18
17	Atonement	Ian McEwan	No. 26
18	Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides	No. 59
19	Americanah	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	No. 27
20	The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay	Michael Chabon	No. 16
21	Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi	-
22	Hamnet	Maggie O’Farrell	-
23	The Warmth of Other Suns	Isabel Wilkerson	No. 2
24	Bel Canto	Ann Patchett	No. 98
25	Gilead	Marilynne Robinson	No. 10
26	The Corrections	Jonathan Franzen	No. 5
27	Normal People	Sally Rooney	-
28	Cutting for Stone	Abraham Verghese	-
29	Say Nothing	Patrick Radden Keefe	No. 19
30	A Visit From the Goon Squad	Jennifer Egan	No. 39
31	Circe	Madeline Miller	-
32	Cloud Cuckoo Land	Anthony Doerr	-
33	The Book Thief	Markus Zusak	-
34	Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	No. 28
35	The Covenant of Water	Abraham Verghese	-
36	The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	No. 12
37	The Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead	-
38	The Great Believers	Rebecca Makkai	No. 64
39	Olive Kitteridge	Elizabeth Strout	No. 74
40	The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini	-
41	Life After Life	Kate Atkinson	No. 51
42	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Díaz	No. 11
43	Between the World and Me	Ta-Nehisi Coates	No. 36
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	No. 50
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	No. 41
58	White Teeth	Zadie Smith	No. 31
59	Where the Crawdads Sing	Delia Owens	-
60	The Dutch House	Ann Patchett	-
61	North Woods	Daniel Mason	-
62	The Sympathizer	Viet Thanh Nguyen	No. 90
63	The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	No. 44
64	2666	Roberto Bolaño	No. 6
65	Evicted	Matthew Desmond	No. 21
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	No. 30
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	No. 54
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	No. 65
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	-