The New York Times recently featured an article counting down the 100 best best books of the century so far. They generated this list by surveying writers, publishers, academics, etc., asking them to select their ten favorite books first published in English (including as English translations) after December 31, 1999. They then sequenced the list according to which books were named most often.
Of those included in their top 100 that I'd read, my top ten absolutely would have included Gilead and The Savage Detectives. It might, after much thought, have included 2666, Austerlitz, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Train Dreams, and Cloud Atlas. It almost certainly would have included Septology, a book I haven't yet finished.
But instead of posting here my definitive list, including books already on the Times list, I've decided to come up with a list of ten books that aren't even in their top 100 but are, in my view, candidates for a top-ten list.
Limiting myself to no more than one book by a given author, here are, in alphabetical order, The Other Ten Best Books of the Twenty-first Century, so far:
- Summertime, by J. M. Coetzee
- Compass, by Mathias Énard
- A Girl's Story, by Annie Ernaux
- Trilogy, by Jon Fosse
- Die, My Love, by Ariana Harwicz
- The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebcq
- Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James
- The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Maté
- Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tukarczuk
- INRI, by Raúl Zurita
With the possible exception of Gabor Maté, whom the march of science will likely leave in its cloud of dust, all of these writers, unlike most of the writers in the Times list, will still be read 100 years from now, unlike the vast majority of the writers on the Times list.
