I love lists, especially lists of great books. Working with novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers, staff members of The New York Times Book Review recently published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and a list of The Best Books of the Year (So Far). With all credit to them, I share books from the lists below with a few notes, additions [e.g., list, genre], and comments.
[Best Books of the Year (So Far)]
James by Percival Everett [Historical Fiction]
In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.
[The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century]
100. Tree of Smoke (2007) by Denis Johnson [Historical Fiction]
2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction
Like the project of the title — an intelligence report that the newly minted C.I.A. operative William “Skip” Sands comes to find both quixotic and useless — the Vietnam-era warfare of Johnson’s rueful, soulful novel lives in shadows, diversions and half-truths. There are no heroes here among the lawless colonels, assassinated priests and faith-stricken NGO nurses, only villainy and vast indifference.
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Missionaries,” by Phil Klay or “Hystopia,” by David Means.
99. How to Be Both (2014) by Ali Smith [Fiction – Coming of Age, Historical Fiction, Women’s Fiction]
Man Booker Prize Finalist
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Ali Smith’s novel How to Be Both is an experiment in combining a modern coming of age narrative with a related, but also separate, historical fiction novella. The Scottish author published the book two different ways: some copies have the modern section first, featuring the story of a young woman named George who is trying to cope with the recent death of her mother; and some have the historical section first, featuring the fictional autobiography of the real historical Italian Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. Readers don’t know which version they will get until they open the book to start reading. The stories these two sections tell are interconnected, but the references will mean different things depending on whether they are being read “backward” or “forward.” [How to Be Both Summary | SuperSummary]
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” by Geoff Dyer or “The Argonauts,” by Maggie Nelson.
98. Bel Canto (2001) by Ann Patchett [Literary Fiction]
This novel is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. A famed opera singer is performing for a Japanese executive’s birthday at a luxe private home in South America when a group of young guerrillas swoops in and takes everyone in the house hostage. Patchett’s exquisitely calibrated novel, inspired by a real incident, shines with character development and relationship building.
Comment: My wife and I share books we love with our kids, and after I raved about “Bel Canto” — the voice, the setting, the way romance and suspense are so perfectly braided — I gave copies to my kids, and they all loved it, too. My son was in high school then, and he became a kind of lit-pusher, pressing his beloved copy into friends’ hands. We used to call him the Keeper of the Bel Canto. — Jess Walter, author of “Beautiful Ruins”
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Nocturnes,” by Kazuo Ishiguro or “The Piano Tuner,” by Daniel Mason.
97. Men We Reaped (2013) by Jesmyn Ward [Memoir]
Men We Reaped has been named a Best Book of the Century by both The New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine. Sandwiched between her two National Book Award-winning novels, Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend, Ward’s memoir carries more than fiction’s force in its aching elegy for five young Black men (a brother, a cousin, three friends) whose untimely exit from her life came violently and without warning. Their deaths — from suicide and homicide, addiction and accident — place the hidden contours of race, justice, and cruel circumstance in stark relief.
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons,” by Imani Perry or “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir,” by Natasha Trethewey.
96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) by Saidiya Hartman [Nonfiction – History]
A National Book Critics Award winner in 2019 in the category ‘Criticism’ and an Amazon Editor’s pick, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals is a beautiful, meticulously researched exploration of the lives of Black girls whom early-20th-century laws designated as “wayward” for such crimes as having serial lovers, or an excess of desire, or a style of comportment that was outside white norms. Hartman grapples with “the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known” about poor Black women, but from the few traces she uncovers in the historical record, she manages to sketch moving portraits, restoring joy and freedom and movement to what, in other hands, might have been mere statistics. — Laila Lalami, author of “The Other Americans”
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” by Christina Sharpe or “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake,” by Tiya Miles.
95. Bring Up The Bodies (2012) by Hilary Mantel [Historical Fiction]
Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book Award for that same year, Bring Up The Bodies is the sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall. The title comes from an old English legal phrase for summoning men who have been accused of treason to trial; in the court’s eyes, effectively, they are already dead. But Mantel’s tour-de-force portrait of Thomas Cromwell thrums with thrilling, obstinate life: a lowborn statesman on the rise; a king in love (and out of love, and in love again); a mad roundelay of power plays, poisoned loyalties and fateful realignments. It’s only empires, after all.
If you’ve read and liked it, try: “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams or “The Western Wind,” by Samantha Harvey.
94. On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith [Literary Fiction]
Consider it a bold reinvention of Howards End, or take Smith’s sprawling third novel as its own golden thing: a tale of two professors — one proudly liberal, the other staunchly right-wing — whose respective families’ rivalries and friendships unspool over nearly 450 provocative, subplot-mad pages. I love this line: “You don’t have favorites among your children, but you do have allies.”
Let’s admit it: Family is often a kind of war, even if telepathically conducted. — Alexandra Jacobs, book critic for The Times.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Crossroads,” by Jonathan Franzen.
93. Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel
Increasingly, and for obvious reasons, end-times novels are not hard to find. But few have conjured the strange luck of surviving an apocalypse — civilization preserved via the ad hoc Shakespeare of a traveling theater troupe; entire human ecosystems contained in an abandoned airport — with as much spooky melancholic beauty as Mandel does in her beguiling fourth novel.
Voted for by ANN NAPOLITANO, novelist. See her full top 10 here.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Severance,” by Ling Ma or “The Passage,” by Justin Cronin.
92. The Days of Abandonment (2005) by Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein
There is something scandalous about this picture of a sensible, adult woman almost deranged by the breakup of her marriage, to the point of neglecting her children. The psychodrama is naked — sometimes hard to read, at other moments approaching farce. Just as Ferrante drew an indelible portrait of female friendship in her quartet of Neapolitan novels, here, she brings her all-seeing eye to female solitude.
I LOVE THIS LINE on the book cover: “The circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
It so simply encapsulates how solitude can, with the inexorable passage of time, calcify into loneliness and then despair. — Alexandra Jacobs
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Eileen,” by Ottessa Moshfegh or “Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation,” by Rachel Cusk.
91. The Human Stain (2000) by Philip Roth
Set during the Clinton impeachment imbroglio, this is partly a furious indictment of what would later be called cancel culture, partly an inquiry into the paradoxes of class, sex and race in America. A college professor named Coleman Silk is persecuted for making supposedly racist remarks in class. Nathan Zuckerman, his neighbor (and Roth’s trusty alter ego), learns that Silk, a fellow son of Newark, is a Black man who has spent most of his adult life passing for white. Of all the Zuckerman novels, this one may be the most incendiary, and the most unsettling. — A.O. Scott
Voted for by STEPHEN L. CARTER, author and law professor. See his full top 10 here.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Vladimir,” by Julia May Jonas or “Blue Angel,” by Francine Prose.
90. The Sympathizer (2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Penned as a book-length confession from a nameless North Vietnamese spy as Saigon falls and new duties in America beckon, Nguyen’s richly faceted novel seems to swallow multiple genres whole, like a satisfied python: political thriller and personal history, cracked metafiction and tar-black comedy.
If you’ve read it and liked it, try: “Man of My Time,” by Dalia Sofer or “Tomás Nevinson,” by Javier Marías; translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
