My name is Sam Anderson. I'm a staff writer for the New York Times magazine. Over the years, I've interviewed actors, artists, athletes. Recently, I've been spending time with animal people. Wait, what happens if I put my fingers in that bottom cage? He will probably bite you. Scientists, ferret breeders, a heavy metal band that rescues baby puffins. You got one. Everyone has a story.

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She didn't hear my mom backing in for the a dry boy, and she got her pushed by my mom. Jessica, the rat, used to eat ice cream out of my mouth.

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Hi, everyone. It's Sabrina. We're taking a break from our usual weekend routine to bring you something special today. It's summer. It's beach reading time. Maybe you need a book to take a break from the news. Anyway, our wonderful colleagues at the New York Times Book Review recently compiled a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far. To be clear, this is not a list of bestsellers or just literary award winners. I mean, there's some of those, but to make their list, they surveyed more than 500 novelists, poets, critics, editors, and readers. It's a very cool project, and it's a super interesting list. It's gotten a huge response. And so today, we're sending you the episode of their podcast. It's an episode about this list and what's on it. You should also know that beyond this episode, the New York Times Book Reviews podcast comes out regularly. They have fascinating conversations all the time, including with some of the phenomenal writers on this recent list. So sign up for their show wherever you listen to us. Okay, here they are.

I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. On this week's episode, I'm very excited to finally talk about a project that we've been working on for much of 2024, and which is finally out there in the world. The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century so far. If you're listening to this show, if you're listening to a podcast about books, I have to think you've already seen part or all of it. Joining me this week are three editors who have been deep in the weeds with me on this since January. Tina Jordan. Hello.

Hi.

Ju Monica Tee. Welcome back.

Hi, Gilbert.

And Scott Heller. This is your first time on the show.

It is. I'm a listener now. I'm excited to be here.

Thanks. I'm excited to have all of you on. So I'm hoping we can have a free flowing discussion about this effort, about some of the books on the list, books that didn't make the list. There's a lot to dig into here. And I want to start by asking someone else who's not me, Tina, why did we do this?

Why did we do this? Because we looked around and it was almost the quarter century mark. We're book nerds who like to categorize and make lists. And we thought, what are the best books of the 21st century so far? We started to argue about it. We started to talk ourselves about the things we'd read since January first, 2000 that we loved. And then we thought, hey, maybe there's something here, but let's put this out to a lot of people.

Because normally, we would have just done this in-house. We would have pulled the editors, we would have pulled the critics, our wonderful critics, and that would have been it. But this seemed like an opportunity to do something bigger. Given that we ask all these writers all the time to write for us, to review books, to appear in our pages. We figured we could actually use their voices towards something massive. And this thing is massive. Scott, as someone who's still relatively new to The Desk, as new as I am, we've only been here about two years. What was the most surprising thing to you about this effort, this project?

What ended up being most surprising, actually, was how many people were willing to share their ballots. We bent over backwards to let people know this was anonymous. And don't worry, we're not going to reveal who you pick, who you left off. And yet so many people were willing to come forward with what they selected. And I think that's one of the best things about it, in fact. The aggregated list is wonderful and there's plenty to argue about. But when you get in and dig into what Stephen King put on his list, in fact, he put himself on his list, which I think people have gotten a kick out of, but many others came forward. And I think that makes for a wonderful reading in and of itself. And Also, you get to see a lot of quirky choices that maybe many people didn't vote for, but that individuals are passionate about. And I really enjoyed that.

Scott, I think you're right. I think seeing some of the ballots possibly is more entertaining to some of our readers than seeing the list itself. I have to say in our earliest discussions about this project, one of the things this every 10 years, but it certainly is an inspiration to try to capture a moment in time. And whatever else you want What I want to say about this list, it is a snapshot of this moment in time. There are probably books on here. If you took this poll at the end of this year, it would not be on here. If you had taken it earlier, they would not be on here. This is what people in the spring of 2024 that we pulled thought were the 100 best books. So let's talk about some of these books. I'd love to start with our number one book, which I don't know, were people surprised? Was anyone in this room at least surprised that My Brilliant Friend by Elina Farrante was, according to our 503 respondents, the number one book of the 21st century?I was surprised. But maybe I shouldn't have been because as a reminder to our listeners, we asked our respondents to choose what they thought were the 10 best books of the century so far, but we didn't define best for them. People clearly defined it in different ways. They defined it as the book they loved that they pass along to people. They defined it as the books they thought would still be around generations from now. But it really seems to me that a lot of the people who took our poll were just like voting for the books that had struck them, right? The books they could not get out of their heads.Absolutely. I think we're all going to touch on what books fell into our own personal categories of books we couldn't get out of our head. But talk a little bit more about Farante. Thankfully, luckily, we have a Farante expert on here. Apparently, there are several Farante experts on the desk, but we have one who is in studio, who wrote a wonderful article that published in conjunction with this project, looking at all the theories about who Elaina Farante is. Elaina Farante is an author who uses an alias. We don't really know who the author is. There are theories and suspicions. But first, Shumana, I'd love for you to talk about just the book and maybe the Neapolitan quartet as a whole. Two of them appeared on this list.There is, of course, some irony of being an expert on somebody that we don't even know who it is, but I will lean into that with pride. Tina, I actually agree with you that I was surprised to see my brilliant first. I do think it's a nice representation of a couple of things. Obviously, this whole quartet touched people really deeply, but also, I think we're all still coming out of Farrante fever. Do you remember those years where it was every Nobody was reading these books. It was an actual event when she had a new book coming out, when the HBO adaptations were on. So I liked that this top pick represents a couple of different ways of looking at what best really means. In case you are one of the people who has not been infected with Farrante fever, My Brilliant Friend is the first in a seriesWell, listeners, if you haven't checked out that list, please do find it. We do more than lists here, but that's a great one as well. One question that I've gotten a couple of text about, shout out my friend Lenore, is the break between fiction and non-conviction. We decided to do both categories in one list as opposed to doing two lists. I think it was our estimation that maybe we had one shot at this and we would collapse if we actually had to do this effort twice. There are, I believe, 26 non-conviction books on here. So just over a quarter of the books are non-conviction. What stood out to any of you in terms of the types of non-conviction books that our poll respondents picked?What stood out to me actually was the wide range. We don't have that many of them. Like this podcast. No.This is the guy who says around the horn, like we're on the ESPN.You're right. I forgot him on the horn. Okay, forget it. It is non-fiction. In addition to the French writers and, of course, Balanye is on here, which was exciting to me, we even had Tova Dittliffsen, who wrote The Copenhagen Trilogy, which is a book that has stuck with me and a lot of my friends, came as a total shock out of left field. We named it as one of our 10 best a couple of years ago. So it's nice to see a really good representation from across the world. Persepolis, The Vegetarian. It's good. I'm sleeping better.Okay. So one thing that I was maybe not surprised to see, given what some interpret as the state of the world over the past couple of decades, was several dystopian novels on here. There are ones that are incredibly dark, like Cromack McCarthy's The Road, which is about a father and son on the road. They're in a burned-out post-nuclear war America, and they're trying to survive, and they're cannibals, and it's just grim, even though he tries to leave you the flicker of hope at the end. So you have something like that. There was Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. This is a book that became very popular during the early days of the pandemic because it was about a superflu that took out most of the world, had an amazing HBO adaptation. But this, unlike The Road, is a book that leaves you feeling a little bit hopeful. A big part of the book is about a troupe of actors walking around one of the Great Lakes, bringing the last flickers of civilization, Shakespeare, to all the groups of people that they run into. And while, again, most people in the world died, and they're very sad parts of the book, it's also about the persistence of art, how we use art to remind ourselves that we're human, how we use art to remind ourselves that in the darkest of times, there's beauty in the world.Station 11 is just a great book. And then there is Never Let Me Go, which I think I characterized it recently as the quietest dystopian novel that might ever exist. Most of it is about a bunch of kids at an English boarding school. I'm not going to ruin what the book is actually about, but once you discover what is actually happening to the kids in this boarding school, where they're living their little quotidian lives and just running, having little arguments and sniping at each other, it becomes crushingly sad. I don't know. The 21st century, has it been so sad that we care about dystopia novels more than ever.Dystopia for Summer. No, this is part of the firmament of most good literature. It's never that far out of reach for the good writers. Do I think, I don't know, do we need some benzos collectively? Maybe. I'm not a doctor. I don't know. Scott, what do you think?I actually would have thought that there would be more bleak stuff on the list, in fact. Sorry to say. I really did. I did. I thought the road would be higher, in fact. I don't know how you judge whether a book, how high it's ranked is how miserable people feel about the world.It's a direct connection, Scott.Yeah, there is. Okay. I had a conversation with the critics, and we talked about whether this list and how this list speaks to the shadow of 9/11 and what the 21st century has been about. I think the agreement was that it felt like people were picking books that took them away from the state of the world more than took them closer to I agree with that, actually, in terms of stuff that's directly connected to the political situation. We have The Looming Tower, the Lawrence Wright book was very specifically about 9/11 and its aftermath. But it's really only around edges, and in many ways not even around the edges. There's quite a number of historical novels on this list, which, of course, are still maybe about contemporary America in all sorts of ways, especially the novels that are about race and slavery, inevitably are still about now. They're not just about then. But there's something about this facet of the 21st century that I found there to be not as much as I expected.I do agree with that, especially because for the The first half of the time period we're talking about, it was also what consumed the young adult literary landscape, right?Like hunger games.Hunger games, all those books. That's all there was.The other thing I was really interested going in, and I'm still trying to figure out, is this is a list of books that were all produced in the digital first era for the most part. And do we feel like these are books that live in the shadow of the Internet that are made by and for people who don't have the attention spans to read and are actually, as we all are, listening to books and not just reading books, which is increasingly part of the way people are consuming. I was interested in getting into that with the critics, and I think the critics had some interesting answers, but I'm curious what people hear thing.First of all, Scott, I think listening to a book is reading a book.Thank you. Okay, I hear you.One thing you mentioned does remind me just how popular historical fiction and historical fiction, I feel like, is possibly on the edge of being too broad a category at this point, if the '80s are starting to be historical fiction. But how popular historical fiction is as a category, as a genre, and how well represented it is on our list, from Wolf Hall to the Known World to the underground railroad to Pachinko to Lincoln and the Bardo. I mean, those arguably are all pieces of historical fiction. I think if you go down the list of 100 here, you probably have 40% or something like that.I agree with you.Actually, Scott, your point about to what extent the internet has influenced this list, maybe it's that it drove people in the other direction. At the same time, when we're talking about the tech boom and barreling towards relentless progress at what cost, people are being driven to historical fiction as a means of escape. That I could think... I'm willing to stand behind that.We We have a theory.Look, it also makes big fat novels more pleasurable to be sinking into an old-fashioned narrative, and there's many of them on this list, I think is a pleasure of this moment because we're receiving information in bits and fragments so much. To sustain a real story is a pleasure.As we draw to a close here, I'm curious. I'd love to go around again and just ask each of you It's a stump for a book that did not appear on the list, but you are particularly passionate about. Scott?We were talking about Funny before, and one of the funiest books that was on the other list, and I wish was on this one, is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Farris, which I think is one of the absolute funiest workplace comedies ever. And wherever you work, you're going to laugh. Then you may cry a little bit, too. But I think that's one that I really do think was on my ballot, and I wish made it into the full list. And the other one that was on my ballot, and that's just singular, and there's not that many of us who would have gone for it, but I had been the theater editor for a long time. And the best theater books that have come out during this period are these two books of Stephen Sondheim, Lierre's lyrics called Finishing the Hat. And look, I made a hat. And the more people are embracing Sondheim, the more people are going to start looking back at these books and realize that he's an amazing writer, lyricist, and an amazing critic of his own work. And you're introduced to his thought processes as he wrote some of the greatest songs in theater history, and they're incredible books.Scott, I love those books. One's a bright pink cover. One's a bright blue cover. That's right. He annotates his lyrics. There's photos from the original productions. Those are absolutely wonderful. A good gift for anyone or for yourself.Thank you.Ximana.I love Dana Spiada, colleague of George Sanders. I voted for one of her books. I think she's just incredible book to book to book. I would have liked to see Eat the Document on here. This is from 2006. It is about 1970s activists. There's a Bob Dylan reference. I love her. I wish I'd seen her, but Dana, you're on my list.Tina, what What would you have liked to have seen on here?I would have loved to have seen a novel called The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, which I think is probably my favorite book of the century so far. Good kick, Tina.Really? Oh, yeah. Good kick.It's set In Britain, in the 1920s, when things were grim, postwar years, when things were especially grim.That's a Tina special.Yeah, right? A young woman and her mother are taking in a loger to help them make ends meet. The loger they take in, her name is Lillian, she and the daughter of Francis fall in love. But it's set against the backdrop of a murder, which I can't get into. But there are individual scenes of such power in this book that I'll never get out of my head. There's one scene where someone is being given a shave with a straight razor, and you're certain it's going to end in that person's death. You're reading and you're just sweating because the tension is dialed so high. I don't know if you experience it like that, Jumana, but just highs and lows, but just an incredible story.It makes me happy I don't shave my face.Yeah.It's making me think of Sweeney Todd.It should, right?Gilbert, did you have one?No. Every book I put on my list ended up on here. Really?Yeah.No, I'm just kidding. I mentioned Gone Girl. I think Gone Girl is one that should be on there. I put On Writing by Stephen King, which actually I thought would have appeared on this list.But see, I think that the reason Stephen King isn't on this list is that he has so many great books. I think he got a lot of votes. But when you write a book a year, the votes are going to get split.Yeah. We actually should end by talking about a series that none of the books appeared on this list. People were a little bit surprised, and I think it's because there are so many of them. Frante has four books. That's a lot of books. But someone else that has seven?Six. Six, I think you're thinking.What am I talking about?You're talking about our great Disgorgeer, Carl Ova, Knaelsgard.Six My Struggle Books.Six My Struggles.Not a one. Appeared on our list. I think it's not because people don't like them, but because people just voted for different ones.But then again, look at how many series books we do have on the list. I would just like to point out that Farante has two. Hillary Mantell has two from her series.So you're saying if he had bundled all of them together, you and Fawzia- I don't know. That would have been... Listeners, you can't see what I'm doing, but the book would have been this big. I don't think Binding exists.I just don't think it... I think it definitely affected him. I think it definitely affected Stephen King. But I think in other cases, people who loved all the books, look, two of four for Ante, two of three for Hillary Mantell.Shout out to Scott Thoreau, who put all four of the Neapolitan quartet on his ballot.It was amazing to see. I never would have guessed that of all the people on there, he would have been the one. But you like what you like. He loves all the legal drama in the Neapolitan quartet.There's no rule of law in Naples. Maybe that's what he likes.It has been a pleasure to talk about this project with all three of you. It's been a pleasure to work on it over the past many months with all of you, and I genuinely look forward to never speak about it again. So thank you for joining me this week on the Book Review podcast, Humana.Thanks for having me. I had fun. I don't know about you.Scott, you did it first time.I did it. I'll be funnier next time.You'll definitely be back. Tina, thank you again.Thanks for having me. Please don't start another big project anytime soon.Okay. Okay. I guess I will promise on there. Listeners, please do, if for some reason you haven't, check out our list of the 100 books of the 21st century so far, is voted on by 503 writers and other literary luminaries. You can Find that on nytems. Com. Please do let us know what you think of the list. Happy reading. That was my conversation with Scott Heller, Juman Khatib, and Tina Jordan, my fellow editors at the Bookerview about our 100 Books of the 21st Century Project. As I said, I hope you've had an opportunity to read it, to experience it, to check which books you've read, which books you want to read. You've taken our opportunity's a lot to do there. As always, it's still true. I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the Times Bookerview. Thanks for listening.

this every 10 years, but it certainly is an inspiration to try to capture a moment in time. And whatever else you want What I want to say about this list, it is a snapshot of this moment in time. There are probably books on here. If you took this poll at the end of this year, it would not be on here. If you had taken it earlier, they would not be on here. This is what people in the spring of 2024 that we pulled thought were the 100 best books. So let's talk about some of these books. I'd love to start with our number one book, which I don't know, were people surprised? Was anyone in this room at least surprised that My Brilliant Friend by Elina Farrante was, according to our 503 respondents, the number one book of the 21st century?

I was surprised. But maybe I shouldn't have been because as a reminder to our listeners, we asked our respondents to choose what they thought were the 10 best books of the century so far, but we didn't define best for them. People clearly defined it in different ways. They defined it as the book they loved that they pass along to people. They defined it as the books they thought would still be around generations from now. But it really seems to me that a lot of the people who took our poll were just like voting for the books that had struck them, right? The books they could not get out of their heads.

Absolutely. I think we're all going to touch on what books fell into our own personal categories of books we couldn't get out of our head. But talk a little bit more about Farante. Thankfully, luckily, we have a Farante expert on here. Apparently, there are several Farante experts on the desk, but we have one who is in studio, who wrote a wonderful article that published in conjunction with this project, looking at all the theories about who Elaina Farante is. Elaina Farante is an author who uses an alias. We don't really know who the author is. There are theories and suspicions. But first, Shumana, I'd love for you to talk about just the book and maybe the Neapolitan quartet as a whole. Two of them appeared on this list.

There is, of course, some irony of being an expert on somebody that we don't even know who it is, but I will lean into that with pride. Tina, I actually agree with you that I was surprised to see my brilliant first. I do think it's a nice representation of a couple of things. Obviously, this whole quartet touched people really deeply, but also, I think we're all still coming out of Farrante fever. Do you remember those years where it was every Nobody was reading these books. It was an actual event when she had a new book coming out, when the HBO adaptations were on. So I liked that this top pick represents a couple of different ways of looking at what best really means. In case you are one of the people who has not been infected with Farrante fever, My Brilliant Friend is the first in a seriesWell, listeners, if you haven't checked out that list, please do find it. We do more than lists here, but that's a great one as well. One question that I've gotten a couple of text about, shout out my friend Lenore, is the break between fiction and non-conviction. We decided to do both categories in one list as opposed to doing two lists. I think it was our estimation that maybe we had one shot at this and we would collapse if we actually had to do this effort twice. There are, I believe, 26 non-conviction books on here. So just over a quarter of the books are non-conviction. What stood out to any of you in terms of the types of non-conviction books that our poll respondents picked?What stood out to me actually was the wide range. We don't have that many of them. Like this podcast. No.This is the guy who says around the horn, like we're on the ESPN.You're right. I forgot him on the horn. Okay, forget it. It is non-fiction. In addition to the French writers and, of course, Balanye is on here, which was exciting to me, we even had Tova Dittliffsen, who wrote The Copenhagen Trilogy, which is a book that has stuck with me and a lot of my friends, came as a total shock out of left field. We named it as one of our 10 best a couple of years ago. So it's nice to see a really good representation from across the world. Persepolis, The Vegetarian. It's good. I'm sleeping better.Okay. So one thing that I was maybe not surprised to see, given what some interpret as the state of the world over the past couple of decades, was several dystopian novels on here. There are ones that are incredibly dark, like Cromack McCarthy's The Road, which is about a father and son on the road. They're in a burned-out post-nuclear war America, and they're trying to survive, and they're cannibals, and it's just grim, even though he tries to leave you the flicker of hope at the end. So you have something like that. There was Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. This is a book that became very popular during the early days of the pandemic because it was about a superflu that took out most of the world, had an amazing HBO adaptation. But this, unlike The Road, is a book that leaves you feeling a little bit hopeful. A big part of the book is about a troupe of actors walking around one of the Great Lakes, bringing the last flickers of civilization, Shakespeare, to all the groups of people that they run into. And while, again, most people in the world died, and they're very sad parts of the book, it's also about the persistence of art, how we use art to remind ourselves that we're human, how we use art to remind ourselves that in the darkest of times, there's beauty in the world.Station 11 is just a great book. And then there is Never Let Me Go, which I think I characterized it recently as the quietest dystopian novel that might ever exist. Most of it is about a bunch of kids at an English boarding school. I'm not going to ruin what the book is actually about, but once you discover what is actually happening to the kids in this boarding school, where they're living their little quotidian lives and just running, having little arguments and sniping at each other, it becomes crushingly sad. I don't know. The 21st century, has it been so sad that we care about dystopia novels more than ever.Dystopia for Summer. No, this is part of the firmament of most good literature. It's never that far out of reach for the good writers. Do I think, I don't know, do we need some benzos collectively? Maybe. I'm not a doctor. I don't know. Scott, what do you think?I actually would have thought that there would be more bleak stuff on the list, in fact. Sorry to say. I really did. I did. I thought the road would be higher, in fact. I don't know how you judge whether a book, how high it's ranked is how miserable people feel about the world.It's a direct connection, Scott.Yeah, there is. Okay. I had a conversation with the critics, and we talked about whether this list and how this list speaks to the shadow of 9/11 and what the 21st century has been about. I think the agreement was that it felt like people were picking books that took them away from the state of the world more than took them closer to I agree with that, actually, in terms of stuff that's directly connected to the political situation. We have The Looming Tower, the Lawrence Wright book was very specifically about 9/11 and its aftermath. But it's really only around edges, and in many ways not even around the edges. There's quite a number of historical novels on this list, which, of course, are still maybe about contemporary America in all sorts of ways, especially the novels that are about race and slavery, inevitably are still about now. They're not just about then. But there's something about this facet of the 21st century that I found there to be not as much as I expected.I do agree with that, especially because for the The first half of the time period we're talking about, it was also what consumed the young adult literary landscape, right?Like hunger games.Hunger games, all those books. That's all there was.The other thing I was really interested going in, and I'm still trying to figure out, is this is a list of books that were all produced in the digital first era for the most part. And do we feel like these are books that live in the shadow of the Internet that are made by and for people who don't have the attention spans to read and are actually, as we all are, listening to books and not just reading books, which is increasingly part of the way people are consuming. I was interested in getting into that with the critics, and I think the critics had some interesting answers, but I'm curious what people hear thing.First of all, Scott, I think listening to a book is reading a book.Thank you. Okay, I hear you.One thing you mentioned does remind me just how popular historical fiction and historical fiction, I feel like, is possibly on the edge of being too broad a category at this point, if the '80s are starting to be historical fiction. But how popular historical fiction is as a category, as a genre, and how well represented it is on our list, from Wolf Hall to the Known World to the underground railroad to Pachinko to Lincoln and the Bardo. I mean, those arguably are all pieces of historical fiction. I think if you go down the list of 100 here, you probably have 40% or something like that.I agree with you.Actually, Scott, your point about to what extent the internet has influenced this list, maybe it's that it drove people in the other direction. At the same time, when we're talking about the tech boom and barreling towards relentless progress at what cost, people are being driven to historical fiction as a means of escape. That I could think... I'm willing to stand behind that.We We have a theory.Look, it also makes big fat novels more pleasurable to be sinking into an old-fashioned narrative, and there's many of them on this list, I think is a pleasure of this moment because we're receiving information in bits and fragments so much. To sustain a real story is a pleasure.As we draw to a close here, I'm curious. I'd love to go around again and just ask each of you It's a stump for a book that did not appear on the list, but you are particularly passionate about. Scott?We were talking about Funny before, and one of the funiest books that was on the other list, and I wish was on this one, is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Farris, which I think is one of the absolute funiest workplace comedies ever. And wherever you work, you're going to laugh. Then you may cry a little bit, too. But I think that's one that I really do think was on my ballot, and I wish made it into the full list. And the other one that was on my ballot, and that's just singular, and there's not that many of us who would have gone for it, but I had been the theater editor for a long time. And the best theater books that have come out during this period are these two books of Stephen Sondheim, Lierre's lyrics called Finishing the Hat. And look, I made a hat. And the more people are embracing Sondheim, the more people are going to start looking back at these books and realize that he's an amazing writer, lyricist, and an amazing critic of his own work. And you're introduced to his thought processes as he wrote some of the greatest songs in theater history, and they're incredible books.Scott, I love those books. One's a bright pink cover. One's a bright blue cover. That's right. He annotates his lyrics. There's photos from the original productions. Those are absolutely wonderful. A good gift for anyone or for yourself.Thank you.Ximana.I love Dana Spiada, colleague of George Sanders. I voted for one of her books. I think she's just incredible book to book to book. I would have liked to see Eat the Document on here. This is from 2006. It is about 1970s activists. There's a Bob Dylan reference. I love her. I wish I'd seen her, but Dana, you're on my list.Tina, what What would you have liked to have seen on here?I would have loved to have seen a novel called The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, which I think is probably my favorite book of the century so far. Good kick, Tina.Really? Oh, yeah. Good kick.It's set In Britain, in the 1920s, when things were grim, postwar years, when things were especially grim.That's a Tina special.Yeah, right? A young woman and her mother are taking in a loger to help them make ends meet. The loger they take in, her name is Lillian, she and the daughter of Francis fall in love. But it's set against the backdrop of a murder, which I can't get into. But there are individual scenes of such power in this book that I'll never get out of my head. There's one scene where someone is being given a shave with a straight razor, and you're certain it's going to end in that person's death. You're reading and you're just sweating because the tension is dialed so high. I don't know if you experience it like that, Jumana, but just highs and lows, but just an incredible story.It makes me happy I don't shave my face.Yeah.It's making me think of Sweeney Todd.It should, right?Gilbert, did you have one?No. Every book I put on my list ended up on here. Really?Yeah.No, I'm just kidding. I mentioned Gone Girl. I think Gone Girl is one that should be on there. I put On Writing by Stephen King, which actually I thought would have appeared on this list.But see, I think that the reason Stephen King isn't on this list is that he has so many great books. I think he got a lot of votes. But when you write a book a year, the votes are going to get split.Yeah. We actually should end by talking about a series that none of the books appeared on this list. People were a little bit surprised, and I think it's because there are so many of them. Frante has four books. That's a lot of books. But someone else that has seven?Six. Six, I think you're thinking.What am I talking about?You're talking about our great Disgorgeer, Carl Ova, Knaelsgard.Six My Struggle Books.Six My Struggles.Not a one. Appeared on our list. I think it's not because people don't like them, but because people just voted for different ones.But then again, look at how many series books we do have on the list. I would just like to point out that Farante has two. Hillary Mantell has two from her series.So you're saying if he had bundled all of them together, you and Fawzia- I don't know. That would have been... Listeners, you can't see what I'm doing, but the book would have been this big. I don't think Binding exists.I just don't think it... I think it definitely affected him. I think it definitely affected Stephen King. But I think in other cases, people who loved all the books, look, two of four for Ante, two of three for Hillary Mantell.Shout out to Scott Thoreau, who put all four of the Neapolitan quartet on his ballot.It was amazing to see. I never would have guessed that of all the people on there, he would have been the one. But you like what you like. He loves all the legal drama in the Neapolitan quartet.There's no rule of law in Naples. Maybe that's what he likes.It has been a pleasure to talk about this project with all three of you. It's been a pleasure to work on it over the past many months with all of you, and I genuinely look forward to never speak about it again. So thank you for joining me this week on the Book Review podcast, Humana.Thanks for having me. I had fun. I don't know about you.Scott, you did it first time.I did it. I'll be funnier next time.You'll definitely be back. Tina, thank you again.Thanks for having me. Please don't start another big project anytime soon.Okay. Okay. I guess I will promise on there. Listeners, please do, if for some reason you haven't, check out our list of the 100 books of the 21st century so far, is voted on by 503 writers and other literary luminaries. You can Find that on nytems. Com. Please do let us know what you think of the list. Happy reading. That was my conversation with Scott Heller, Juman Khatib, and Tina Jordan, my fellow editors at the Bookerview about our 100 Books of the 21st Century Project. As I said, I hope you've had an opportunity to read it, to experience it, to check which books you've read, which books you want to read. You've taken our opportunity's a lot to do there. As always, it's still true. I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the Times Bookerview. Thanks for listening.

Well, listeners, if you haven't checked out that list, please do find it. We do more than lists here, but that's a great one as well. One question that I've gotten a couple of text about, shout out my friend Lenore, is the break between fiction and non-conviction. We decided to do both categories in one list as opposed to doing two lists. I think it was our estimation that maybe we had one shot at this and we would collapse if we actually had to do this effort twice. There are, I believe, 26 non-conviction books on here. So just over a quarter of the books are non-conviction. What stood out to any of you in terms of the types of non-conviction books that our poll respondents picked?

What stood out to me actually was the wide range. We don't have that many of them. Like this podcast. No.This is the guy who says around the horn, like we're on the ESPN.You're right. I forgot him on the horn. Okay, forget it. It is non-fiction. In addition to the French writers and, of course, Balanye is on here, which was exciting to me, we even had Tova Dittliffsen, who wrote The Copenhagen Trilogy, which is a book that has stuck with me and a lot of my friends, came as a total shock out of left field. We named it as one of our 10 best a couple of years ago. So it's nice to see a really good representation from across the world. Persepolis, The Vegetarian. It's good. I'm sleeping better.Okay. So one thing that I was maybe not surprised to see, given what some interpret as the state of the world over the past couple of decades, was several dystopian novels on here. There are ones that are incredibly dark, like Cromack McCarthy's The Road, which is about a father and son on the road. They're in a burned-out post-nuclear war America, and they're trying to survive, and they're cannibals, and it's just grim, even though he tries to leave you the flicker of hope at the end. So you have something like that. There was Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. This is a book that became very popular during the early days of the pandemic because it was about a superflu that took out most of the world, had an amazing HBO adaptation. But this, unlike The Road, is a book that leaves you feeling a little bit hopeful. A big part of the book is about a troupe of actors walking around one of the Great Lakes, bringing the last flickers of civilization, Shakespeare, to all the groups of people that they run into. And while, again, most people in the world died, and they're very sad parts of the book, it's also about the persistence of art, how we use art to remind ourselves that we're human, how we use art to remind ourselves that in the darkest of times, there's beauty in the world.Station 11 is just a great book. And then there is Never Let Me Go, which I think I characterized it recently as the quietest dystopian novel that might ever exist. Most of it is about a bunch of kids at an English boarding school. I'm not going to ruin what the book is actually about, but once you discover what is actually happening to the kids in this boarding school, where they're living their little quotidian lives and just running, having little arguments and sniping at each other, it becomes crushingly sad. I don't know. The 21st century, has it been so sad that we care about dystopia novels more than ever.Dystopia for Summer. No, this is part of the firmament of most good literature. It's never that far out of reach for the good writers. Do I think, I don't know, do we need some benzos collectively? Maybe. I'm not a doctor. I don't know. Scott, what do you think?I actually would have thought that there would be more bleak stuff on the list, in fact. Sorry to say. I really did. I did. I thought the road would be higher, in fact. I don't know how you judge whether a book, how high it's ranked is how miserable people feel about the world.It's a direct connection, Scott.Yeah, there is. Okay. I had a conversation with the critics, and we talked about whether this list and how this list speaks to the shadow of 9/11 and what the 21st century has been about. I think the agreement was that it felt like people were picking books that took them away from the state of the world more than took them closer to I agree with that, actually, in terms of stuff that's directly connected to the political situation. We have The Looming Tower, the Lawrence Wright book was very specifically about 9/11 and its aftermath. But it's really only around edges, and in many ways not even around the edges. There's quite a number of historical novels on this list, which, of course, are still maybe about contemporary America in all sorts of ways, especially the novels that are about race and slavery, inevitably are still about now. They're not just about then. But there's something about this facet of the 21st century that I found there to be not as much as I expected.I do agree with that, especially because for the The first half of the time period we're talking about, it was also what consumed the young adult literary landscape, right?Like hunger games.Hunger games, all those books. That's all there was.The other thing I was really interested going in, and I'm still trying to figure out, is this is a list of books that were all produced in the digital first era for the most part. And do we feel like these are books that live in the shadow of the Internet that are made by and for people who don't have the attention spans to read and are actually, as we all are, listening to books and not just reading books, which is increasingly part of the way people are consuming. I was interested in getting into that with the critics, and I think the critics had some interesting answers, but I'm curious what people hear thing.First of all, Scott, I think listening to a book is reading a book.Thank you. Okay, I hear you.One thing you mentioned does remind me just how popular historical fiction and historical fiction, I feel like, is possibly on the edge of being too broad a category at this point, if the '80s are starting to be historical fiction. But how popular historical fiction is as a category, as a genre, and how well represented it is on our list, from Wolf Hall to the Known World to the underground railroad to Pachinko to Lincoln and the Bardo. I mean, those arguably are all pieces of historical fiction. I think if you go down the list of 100 here, you probably have 40% or something like that.I agree with you.Actually, Scott, your point about to what extent the internet has influenced this list, maybe it's that it drove people in the other direction. At the same time, when we're talking about the tech boom and barreling towards relentless progress at what cost, people are being driven to historical fiction as a means of escape. That I could think... I'm willing to stand behind that.We We have a theory.Look, it also makes big fat novels more pleasurable to be sinking into an old-fashioned narrative, and there's many of them on this list, I think is a pleasure of this moment because we're receiving information in bits and fragments so much. To sustain a real story is a pleasure.As we draw to a close here, I'm curious. I'd love to go around again and just ask each of you It's a stump for a book that did not appear on the list, but you are particularly passionate about. Scott?We were talking about Funny before, and one of the funiest books that was on the other list, and I wish was on this one, is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Farris, which I think is one of the absolute funiest workplace comedies ever. And wherever you work, you're going to laugh. Then you may cry a little bit, too. But I think that's one that I really do think was on my ballot, and I wish made it into the full list. And the other one that was on my ballot, and that's just singular, and there's not that many of us who would have gone for it, but I had been the theater editor for a long time. And the best theater books that have come out during this period are these two books of Stephen Sondheim, Lierre's lyrics called Finishing the Hat. And look, I made a hat. And the more people are embracing Sondheim, the more people are going to start looking back at these books and realize that he's an amazing writer, lyricist, and an amazing critic of his own work. And you're introduced to his thought processes as he wrote some of the greatest songs in theater history, and they're incredible books.Scott, I love those books. One's a bright pink cover. One's a bright blue cover. That's right. He annotates his lyrics. There's photos from the original productions. Those are absolutely wonderful. A good gift for anyone or for yourself.Thank you.Ximana.I love Dana Spiada, colleague of George Sanders. I voted for one of her books. I think she's just incredible book to book to book. I would have liked to see Eat the Document on here. This is from 2006. It is about 1970s activists. There's a Bob Dylan reference. I love her. I wish I'd seen her, but Dana, you're on my list.Tina, what What would you have liked to have seen on here?I would have loved to have seen a novel called The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, which I think is probably my favorite book of the century so far. Good kick, Tina.Really? Oh, yeah. Good kick.It's set In Britain, in the 1920s, when things were grim, postwar years, when things were especially grim.That's a Tina special.Yeah, right? A young woman and her mother are taking in a loger to help them make ends meet. The loger they take in, her name is Lillian, she and the daughter of Francis fall in love. But it's set against the backdrop of a murder, which I can't get into. But there are individual scenes of such power in this book that I'll never get out of my head. There's one scene where someone is being given a shave with a straight razor, and you're certain it's going to end in that person's death. You're reading and you're just sweating because the tension is dialed so high. I don't know if you experience it like that, Jumana, but just highs and lows, but just an incredible story.It makes me happy I don't shave my face.Yeah.It's making me think of Sweeney Todd.It should, right?Gilbert, did you have one?No. Every book I put on my list ended up on here. Really?Yeah.No, I'm just kidding. I mentioned Gone Girl. I think Gone Girl is one that should be on there. I put On Writing by Stephen King, which actually I thought would have appeared on this list.But see, I think that the reason Stephen King isn't on this list is that he has so many great books. I think he got a lot of votes. But when you write a book a year, the votes are going to get split.Yeah. We actually should end by talking about a series that none of the books appeared on this list. People were a little bit surprised, and I think it's because there are so many of them. Frante has four books. That's a lot of books. But someone else that has seven?Six. Six, I think you're thinking.What am I talking about?You're talking about our great Disgorgeer, Carl Ova, Knaelsgard.Six My Struggle Books.Six My Struggles.Not a one. Appeared on our list. I think it's not because people don't like them, but because people just voted for different ones.But then again, look at how many series books we do have on the list. I would just like to point out that Farante has two. Hillary Mantell has two from her series.So you're saying if he had bundled all of them together, you and Fawzia- I don't know. That would have been... Listeners, you can't see what I'm doing, but the book would have been this big. I don't think Binding exists.I just don't think it... I think it definitely affected him. I think it definitely affected Stephen King. But I think in other cases, people who loved all the books, look, two of four for Ante, two of three for Hillary Mantell.Shout out to Scott Thoreau, who put all four of the Neapolitan quartet on his ballot.It was amazing to see. I never would have guessed that of all the people on there, he would have been the one. But you like what you like. He loves all the legal drama in the Neapolitan quartet.There's no rule of law in Naples. Maybe that's what he likes.It has been a pleasure to talk about this project with all three of you. It's been a pleasure to work on it over the past many months with all of you, and I genuinely look forward to never speak about it again. So thank you for joining me this week on the Book Review podcast, Humana.Thanks for having me. I had fun. I don't know about you.Scott, you did it first time.I did it. I'll be funnier next time.You'll definitely be back. Tina, thank you again.Thanks for having me. Please don't start another big project anytime soon.Okay. Okay. I guess I will promise on there. Listeners, please do, if for some reason you haven't, check out our list of the 100 books of the 21st century so far, is voted on by 503 writers and other literary luminaries. You can Find that on nytems. Com. Please do let us know what you think of the list. Happy reading. That was my conversation with Scott Heller, Juman Khatib, and Tina Jordan, my fellow editors at the Bookerview about our 100 Books of the 21st Century Project. As I said, I hope you've had an opportunity to read it, to experience it, to check which books you've read, which books you want to read. You've taken our opportunity's a lot to do there. As always, it's still true. I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the Times Bookerview. Thanks for listening.

this podcast. No.

This is the guy who says around the horn, like we're on the ESPN.

You're right. I forgot him on the horn. Okay, forget it. It is non-fiction. In addition to the French writers and, of course, Balanye is on here, which was exciting to me, we even had Tova Dittliffsen, who wrote The Copenhagen Trilogy, which is a book that has stuck with me and a lot of my friends, came as a total shock out of left field. We named it as one of our 10 best a couple of years ago. So it's nice to see a really good representation from across the world. Persepolis, The Vegetarian. It's good. I'm sleeping better.

Okay. So one thing that I was maybe not surprised to see, given what some interpret as the state of the world over the past couple of decades, was several dystopian novels on here. There are ones that are incredibly dark, like Cromack McCarthy's The Road, which is about a father and son on the road. They're in a burned-out post-nuclear war America, and they're trying to survive, and they're cannibals, and it's just grim, even though he tries to leave you the flicker of hope at the end. So you have something like that. There was Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. This is a book that became very popular during the early days of the pandemic because it was about a superflu that took out most of the world, had an amazing HBO adaptation. But this, unlike The Road, is a book that leaves you feeling a little bit hopeful. A big part of the book is about a troupe of actors walking around one of the Great Lakes, bringing the last flickers of civilization, Shakespeare, to all the groups of people that they run into. And while, again, most people in the world died, and they're very sad parts of the book, it's also about the persistence of art, how we use art to remind ourselves that we're human, how we use art to remind ourselves that in the darkest of times, there's beauty in the world.

Station 11 is just a great book. And then there is Never Let Me Go, which I think I characterized it recently as the quietest dystopian novel that might ever exist. Most of it is about a bunch of kids at an English boarding school. I'm not going to ruin what the book is actually about, but once you discover what is actually happening to the kids in this boarding school, where they're living their little quotidian lives and just running, having little arguments and sniping at each other, it becomes crushingly sad. I don't know. The 21st century, has it been so sad that we care about dystopia novels more than ever.

Dystopia for Summer. No, this is part of the firmament of most good literature. It's never that far out of reach for the good writers. Do I think, I don't know, do we need some benzos collectively? Maybe. I'm not a doctor. I don't know. Scott, what do you think?

I actually would have thought that there would be more bleak stuff on the list, in fact. Sorry to say. I really did. I did. I thought the road would be higher, in fact. I don't know how you judge whether a book, how high it's ranked is how miserable people feel about the world.

It's a direct connection, Scott.

Yeah, there is. Okay. I had a conversation with the critics, and we talked about whether this list and how this list speaks to the shadow of 9/11 and what the 21st century has been about. I think the agreement was that it felt like people were picking books that took them away from the state of the world more than took them closer to I agree with that, actually, in terms of stuff that's directly connected to the political situation. We have The Looming Tower, the Lawrence Wright book was very specifically about 9/11 and its aftermath. But it's really only around edges, and in many ways not even around the edges. There's quite a number of historical novels on this list, which, of course, are still maybe about contemporary America in all sorts of ways, especially the novels that are about race and slavery, inevitably are still about now. They're not just about then. But there's something about this facet of the 21st century that I found there to be not as much as I expected.

I do agree with that, especially because for the The first half of the time period we're talking about, it was also what consumed the young adult literary landscape, right?

Like hunger games.

Hunger games, all those books. That's all there was.

The other thing I was really interested going in, and I'm still trying to figure out, is this is a list of books that were all produced in the digital first era for the most part. And do we feel like these are books that live in the shadow of the Internet that are made by and for people who don't have the attention spans to read and are actually, as we all are, listening to books and not just reading books, which is increasingly part of the way people are consuming. I was interested in getting into that with the critics, and I think the critics had some interesting answers, but I'm curious what people hear thing.

First of all, Scott, I think listening to a book is reading a book.

Thank you. Okay, I hear you.

One thing you mentioned does remind me just how popular historical fiction and historical fiction, I feel like, is possibly on the edge of being too broad a category at this point, if the '80s are starting to be historical fiction. But how popular historical fiction is as a category, as a genre, and how well represented it is on our list, from Wolf Hall to the Known World to the underground railroad to Pachinko to Lincoln and the Bardo. I mean, those arguably are all pieces of historical fiction. I think if you go down the list of 100 here, you probably have 40% or something like that.

I agree with you.

Actually, Scott, your point about to what extent the internet has influenced this list, maybe it's that it drove people in the other direction. At the same time, when we're talking about the tech boom and barreling towards relentless progress at what cost, people are being driven to historical fiction as a means of escape. That I could think... I'm willing to stand behind that.

We We have a theory.

Look, it also makes big fat novels more pleasurable to be sinking into an old-fashioned narrative, and there's many of them on this list, I think is a pleasure of this moment because we're receiving information in bits and fragments so much. To sustain a real story is a pleasure.

As we draw to a close here, I'm curious. I'd love to go around again and just ask each of you It's a stump for a book that did not appear on the list, but you are particularly passionate about. Scott?

We were talking about Funny before, and one of the funiest books that was on the other list, and I wish was on this one, is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Farris, which I think is one of the absolute funiest workplace comedies ever. And wherever you work, you're going to laugh. Then you may cry a little bit, too. But I think that's one that I really do think was on my ballot, and I wish made it into the full list. And the other one that was on my ballot, and that's just singular, and there's not that many of us who would have gone for it, but I had been the theater editor for a long time. And the best theater books that have come out during this period are these two books of Stephen Sondheim, Lierre's lyrics called Finishing the Hat. And look, I made a hat. And the more people are embracing Sondheim, the more people are going to start looking back at these books and realize that he's an amazing writer, lyricist, and an amazing critic of his own work. And you're introduced to his thought processes as he wrote some of the greatest songs in theater history, and they're incredible books.

Scott, I love those books. One's a bright pink cover. One's a bright blue cover. That's right. He annotates his lyrics. There's photos from the original productions. Those are absolutely wonderful. A good gift for anyone or for yourself.

Thank you.

Ximana.

I love Dana Spiada, colleague of George Sanders. I voted for one of her books. I think she's just incredible book to book to book. I would have liked to see Eat the Document on here. This is from 2006. It is about 1970s activists. There's a Bob Dylan reference. I love her. I wish I'd seen her, but Dana, you're on my list.

Tina, what What would you have liked to have seen on here?

I would have loved to have seen a novel called The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, which I think is probably my favorite book of the century so far. Good kick, Tina.

Really? Oh, yeah. Good kick.

It's set In Britain, in the 1920s, when things were grim, postwar years, when things were especially grim.

That's a Tina special.

Yeah, right? A young woman and her mother are taking in a loger to help them make ends meet. The loger they take in, her name is Lillian, she and the daughter of Francis fall in love. But it's set against the backdrop of a murder, which I can't get into. But there are individual scenes of such power in this book that I'll never get out of my head. There's one scene where someone is being given a shave with a straight razor, and you're certain it's going to end in that person's death. You're reading and you're just sweating because the tension is dialed so high. I don't know if you experience it like that, Jumana, but just highs and lows, but just an incredible story.

It makes me happy I don't shave my face.

Yeah.

It's making me think of Sweeney Todd.

It should, right?

Gilbert, did you have one?

No. Every book I put on my list ended up on here. Really?

Yeah.

No, I'm just kidding. I mentioned Gone Girl. I think Gone Girl is one that should be on there. I put On Writing by Stephen King, which actually I thought would have appeared on this list.

But see, I think that the reason Stephen King isn't on this list is that he has so many great books. I think he got a lot of votes. But when you write a book a year, the votes are going to get split.

Yeah. We actually should end by talking about a series that none of the books appeared on this list. People were a little bit surprised, and I think it's because there are so many of them. Frante has four books. That's a lot of books. But someone else that has seven?

Six. Six, I think you're thinking.

What am I talking about?

You're talking about our great Disgorgeer, Carl Ova, Knaelsgard.

Six My Struggle Books.

Six My Struggles.

Not a one. Appeared on our list. I think it's not because people don't like them, but because people just voted for different ones.

But then again, look at how many series books we do have on the list. I would just like to point out that Farante has two. Hillary Mantell has two from her series.

So you're saying if he had bundled all of them together, you and Fawzia- I don't know. That would have been... Listeners, you can't see what I'm doing, but the book would have been this big. I don't think Binding exists.

I just don't think it... I think it definitely affected him. I think it definitely affected Stephen King. But I think in other cases, people who loved all the books, look, two of four for Ante, two of three for Hillary Mantell.

Shout out to Scott Thoreau, who put all four of the Neapolitan quartet on his ballot.

It was amazing to see. I never would have guessed that of all the people on there, he would have been the one. But you like what you like. He loves all the legal drama in the Neapolitan quartet.

There's no rule of law in Naples. Maybe that's what he likes.

It has been a pleasure to talk about this project with all three of you. It's been a pleasure to work on it over the past many months with all of you, and I genuinely look forward to never speak about it again. So thank you for joining me this week on the Book Review podcast, Humana.

Thanks for having me. I had fun. I don't know about you.

Scott, you did it first time.

I did it. I'll be funnier next time.

You'll definitely be back. Tina, thank you again.

Thanks for having me. Please don't start another big project anytime soon.

Okay. Okay. I guess I will promise on there. Listeners, please do, if for some reason you haven't, check out our list of the 100 books of the 21st century so far, is voted on by 503 writers and other literary luminaries. You can Find that on nytems. Com. Please do let us know what you think of the list. Happy reading. That was my conversation with Scott Heller, Juman Khatib, and Tina Jordan, my fellow editors at the Bookerview about our 100 Books of the 21st Century Project. As I said, I hope you've had an opportunity to read it, to experience it, to check which books you've read, which books you want to read. You've taken our opportunity's a lot to do there. As always, it's still true. I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the Times Bookerview. Thanks for listening.