Like everyone else “into literature” and possessing an internet connection in the last week, I’ve been deeply invested in the New York Times’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” I’ve read 23 of them and included brief reviews of each below—some books are overrated, some correctly rated—but first, some takes on the list itself.
Ranked lists are inherently fascinating to people—as is the highly contested nature of what’s “best” in literature. And the choice to slowly roll out the list—20 books at a time—built anticipation and interest. As Leigh Stein noted, creating the list is not an act of literary criticism, it’s an act of content creation. The Times has “invented a fantasy football bracket for the people who are normally left out of fantasy football due to their total ignorance of football.”
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