A highlight from the (fading) summer

because lists + books = Jill's nirvana

It’s back-to-school season- but how is that possible? Where did our summer go? Mine went the way of travel (Netherlands, Belgium, Canadian Rockies), beach, bike rides and long runs and kids’ birthday celebrations. I wrote my first full-length short story in ages, and while my professor did not offer to send it immediately to a fiction editor at the New Yorker, he did compliment me on it while providing constructive direction for a revision. So, I’ll take that as a win.

Let us all enjoy this last gasp of summer

My kids will head back to school next week, and while that means more time for my writing (yay!) it also means they’re each one year closer to leaving us (boo!).

Aside from travel and time with my children, one of the highlights of my summer was the New York Times’ list, revealed in fantastically slow-played fashion, of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (so far). For five July mornings, they counted down, finally reaching the highly anticipated top 20 spots on Friday. (If you’d like to see the list of titles without having to scroll languidly, try this Reddit link.)

I loved this, everything about it. The frisson of pleasure at finding a book I adored on the list, especially one that few others have read (looking at you, The Last Samurai). The drama surrounding which books/authors would make the cut and which would be omitted (Murakami, Groff, Erdrich…). The way the Times made this feature interactive, allowing readers to mark books they’d read and books they wanted to read. The editors helpfully suggested two other books similar to each title on the list, so I came away with a swath of recommendations from both the top 100 and these other suggestions.

Not that I needed more books on my TBR list…

There was also the voyeuristic pleasure of peeping certain authors’ choices. (The Times’ methodology: soliciting lists of 10 favorite books from over 500 “literary luminaries.”) Would James Patterson buck other literary compatriots and select popular, commercial fiction as his top 10? (Yes.) Would any authors select their own works? (Yes; among them, Stephen King!) With whom would I have the most favorites in common? As it turns out, Min Jin Lee.

The Times list skews toward fiction and toward literary works over genre or commercial fiction. What was in these luminaries’ hearts when they conjured their lists? Not a book’s mass appeal, I daresay.

Happily for the list-lovers among us, The Times also solicited its readers’ picks for their 10 best, and from this dataset they compiled the Reader Top 100. Before reading on, take a moment. What would you (or did you) choose as your picks for “best” books of the 21st century?

Here were my votes:

In my own votes, I see a recency bias (I read five of my ten picks in the last five years) and my preference for fiction over nonfiction, for female writers over males. Still, all of these are books I love, books that have stayed with me, books I recommend to others on a regular basis.

There were 39 books in common between the “official” Times list and the readers’ list. The luminaries and the readers either had different tastes or different ideas of what constitutes a “best” book (or both).

My daughter was not surprised to hear how few books were shared by the two lists. She said, roughly, that literary types (the “luminaries”) get excited about words and sentences, while regular readers care about characters and plot. I think that’s true. And I think, sometimes, that people in the literary community want to recognize books that do something daring, something innovative. These might not be books that contemporary readers fall in love with, but they’re often the books that push literature forward, or slantways, into new directions. If writers only wrote books to please, then we would only have imitative works, and at a certain point, writing would grow stagnant, books would be dull and tiresome, and we might all stop reading. Instead, it is incumbent on some authors to write something that pushes, expands, challenges. The results are sometimes pleasing, sometimes not.

When readers vote for The Hunger Games as one of the 100 best books, they’re rewarding (IMO) a memorable character, a gripping plot, and an intriguing setup. They aren’t nitpicking Suzanne Collins’ writing at the line level. And when luminaries select Septology, a “700-page novel written in a single stream-of-consciousness sentence with few paragraph breaks and two central characters with the same name,” they do so with full knowledge that this book never will be a bestseller, that its plot will not become the basis of the next hit Marvel series. And that’s okay. There is space for both to exist, and I like that readers can choose. Personally, I like to dabble in both worlds, commercial and literary, and to try to appreciate the differences, even as I retain my biases for the books I love- books with beautiful writing on the line level, that also manage to transport me by way of the characters, plot, setting, and indefinable alchemy.

So, tell me: which books would you choose? What were your favorite books of the past 24 years?