I agree with many choices, disagree with many others, and can offer no opinion on the books I haven't read. As a book world insider, I smiled and sighed at the people who selected books written by friends/colleagues. And, no, I will leave that gossip undetailed! But, as far as I can tell, nobody picked a reviled book—a disturbing book—a book that is only loved by a few—a book that might resurface in 20 years as an unheralded and forgotten classic. It didn't seem that anybody tried to make a prediction.
Ted, Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels--as praised and bestselling as they are--still don't get enough respect in my view. I consider Ferrante to be an heir to Tolstoy in the breadth of her vision and her ability to connect the intimate and familial realms with the large-scale intellectual and political world. Her portrayal of the violence at every level of society is especially trenchant. I'm so glad to see MY BRILLIANT FRIEND topping the NYTimes list. I suspect some people see those colorful covers and a woman author's name and assume they are some lightweight trifle. Those readers are missing out on one of the most wrenching and memorable works of literature out there.
Agree, I was blown away when I read my brilliant friend and that was despite the hype, and my being a cynical person. I immediately bought the rest in English (I read the first in French because I thought it would be closer to the original Italian), but I needed a break to digest the first, something I have only very rarely felt.
I understand your hesitation to dive back in. It's all pretty intense! But I will say that the four books taken together as a whole are...epic, to use a terribly overused word.
It’s a list of the 100 best books of the century but without poetry, except for Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen”, which is both a poetry and an essay collection.
That’s sad: Anglophone poetry (along with English-language translations of contemporary poets in other languages) is thriving worldwide, from Australia and New Zealand to India and South Africa to Great Britain, Ireland, and North America.
In 2022, when the NYT published one of those silly articles about poetry being dead, I made a list of “Eight great twenty-first-century poems from the United States alone”:
It would be appropriate perhaps to drop Leonard Cohen's answer to the question of why poetry books are not popular. It's perhaps the best answer I've seen for the mystery of why so many of us who genuinely love lyrical language nonetheless do not enjoy reading poetry...
" I don't think it's for everybody in its pure form. It's like bee pollen It’s nice to have honey in your cakes, but there are purists who like the pollen and the propolis. There are bee cultists.I feel that way about poetry. The honey of poetry is all over the place. It's in the writing in the National Geographic, when the thing is absolutely clear and beautiful. It's in movies. It's all over. The taste of significance is what we call poetry. And when something resonates with a particular kind of significance, we might not call it poetry, but we've experienced poetry. It's got something to do with truth and rhythm and authority and music. It's all over the place. For the few cultists and purists who like to look at a page where the words don't come to the end of the line, I think that's a very specific kind of interest and a very specific kind of appetite, and I really don't think it's for everybody."
I had a similar thought. Another sign that poetry just doesn't exist in contemporary American life in any meaningful way. Not even one of the recently-departed lions - Gluck, for instance - could get a Collected or a Selected on there. Very sad.
Thanks for the wonderful writeup, as always. However, I can’t be the only one irked by the fact that NYT decided that enough of the 21st century has elapsed in order to choose the best books of the 21st century. What are they going to do for the next 76 years of the 21st century?
I’m not irked by it only because in these times of dwindling book sales, any attempt to boost the profile of good authors (and I think the Times did a pretty credible job in its picks) is welcome.
I love this book but saw it in a different way. I felt it was an amazing biography of two girls/womens relationship with all the complexity and twists and turns that entails. In addition I strongly feel that Lila is indeed “the brilliant friend”, Elena is a “grinder”(which I identified with as I am a grinder as well, not brilliant but very hard working).
I cannot thank you enough for your strong support of beautiful literature and reading, it is a blessing to our culture.
I'm reading the Underground Railroad, because my local library branch didn't have anything else that grabbed me. embarrassing what they don't have, but I can order anything from the main library downtown (Los Angeles) and pick it up within a week.
It's simply not very good. Sorry I can't access the review Ted linked. Started off fine, he can do the prose part. But then it just deteriorated. It's so exaggerated. Friend that's far more to the left, a terrific writer who majored in English at Columbia, shocked me by saying the same on a FB thread about the NYT list. Magical realism isn't so magical anymore. Made all the lists though. DEI at work. We don't do that for . . . jazz music. Or basketball.
The list was okay. I'm not fond of them in general, but when you expand to 100 books over 25 years you've got some leeway. The methodology was certainly different than having one expert chose their top 10, or 100. That can be terrific, if you already know and respect the chooser from experience. There's plenty more DEI hidden throughout the list. A fascination with writers from 3rd world backgrounds. I read a bunch of them twenty years ago before terms like DEI exited. I'm a sucker for the books with the medallions on them. Booker. Pulitzer. I figure it's like letting the pros do my filtering for me, you can't even come close to reading everything. Every one of those was disappointing.
Cormac McCarthy got 2 in the top 100. Not one of his latest. Ted has enthused about him before.
I'm not sure how I got turned on to Benjamin Labatut, but it might have been from Ted. He made the list. I'm reading, with some difficulty, "The Quark and the Jaguar" by Murray Gell-Mann, interestingly Cormac helped with the proof reading. They overlapped at the Santa Fe Institute, which sounds like one of the more fabulous places around.
The NYT had a lot of help compiling the group effort list. Sadly though the PC influence is pervasive. One of those chose didn't list a single white author, hers were all non-fiction choices about "the struggle." These weren't the top 100 works of fiction, but the 100 books that influenced you the most. Ferrante is on my list she had another close to the top 10 if I recall. Bolano is something else, but perhaps should come with a warning. Some of the violence makes Cormac look like a choirboy. Many readers just aren't into that.
Colson Whitehead is the most overrated author that I’m aware of. I am mystified by the props he gets. Underground Railroad is an overwritten nothing if a book, IMHO.
thank you. i'm always a bit nervous when sticking my neck out re unPC stuff.
i'm left of center, but there's a whole lot of us fed up with all this nonsense. I should almost qualify that to "used to be" we're actually not sure anymore. we are most definitely not voting for the opposite of a meritocracy.
turns out the straight white guys that many years ago hollered about not getting hired or promoted despite being more qualified weren't joking.
If you don't think Kamala is DEI from day one, I can't help you. She's very not smart, Jill Stein seems not so dumb next to her. I've met both from speaking at events about medical cannabis when they were also on the bill. But give me another acronym. I worked at MLK Jr. Hospital as an ER physician, left a couple years before they shuttered the place, because too many people were dying. I got news for you, DEI eventually kills people.
"Gina Dalfonzo is the author of Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, and of One by One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church, and the editor of The Gospel in Dickens. She is also a columnist at Christ & Pop Culture, and founder and editor of Dickensblog. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, Christianity Today, First Things, The Weekly Standard, Guideposts, The Englewood Review of Books, Aleteia, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, In Pursuit of Truth: A Journal of Christian Scholarship, Literary Life, and OnFaith, among others. She earned her BA in English from Messiah College and her MA, also in English, from George Mason University. Dalfonzo lives in Springfield, Virginia." Also, "How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin" beam/eye. stand up and take a bow. you know . . . nothing.
Wonderfully written and thoughtful piece as usual. (You must hate us picky English majors, but you're so elegant I can't resist pointing out that the spelling you meant is "bloc" not "block". I'll go away now.)
I am an English professor at a small liberal arts college, and I end my senior seminar with _Gilead_. When I prepare to say goodbye to my majors, I cannot think of a better literary gift to offer than Marilynne Robinson’s quietly moving & nuanced meditation on cultivating a sacramental vision of existence. Divine grace is portrayed as a fluid construct that heightens one’s appreciation of the inextricable link between sensitivity to beauty & to moral awareness.
People put these totally arbitrary lists together for three reason:s to piss people off, to get clicks, and demonstrate how cool they are. Jeez, I ain't cool, man — I've ony read one of the NYT list, Wolf Hall. Never even heard of the others,...
Utterly weird--our hero Ted coat-tailing on the NYT! For a tiresome, elitist list of "best books" that will, in due time, be swept away by other "bests." While the average reader goes on consuming stuff from authors who write for...actual readers.
All my books come from the used book store in town, so I'm at the mercy of whatever has been traded in. I've found some interesting books over the past 11 yrs. Sometimes a title or an authors name catches me, (I'm a sucker for non-English sounding names.) I've never cared about "best" of anything lists.
"It is still too heavily tilted to books in English" I do agree. To a hammer, everything is a nail. Isn't that an American saying? Well, thanks for being globally open. There is so much amazing stuff east of Boston and West of Los Angeles
Being pretty well-informed about books, I expected to recognize all of the top 10 (even if I hadn't read them all), so I was shocked that #2 on the list was entirely unknown to me (both title and author).
I was stunned to learn that My Brilliant Friend was named #1. I couldn't be more thrilled. I only got around to reading the series in the last couple of years and just finished a rereading of book 4, which is the far superior of the quartet. The storytelling is remarkable as is the way in which Ferrante take us inside Elena's head. I am Elena when I'm in that world. I have now read all of her adult works, and am always astonished by the way she takes me into her worlds. The first person narrative is so tight to the point where it feels there is no separation between me and the narrator. Ferrante has informed my writing of late, I noticed. Her book about writing "Frantumaglia" should be a prerequisite for all writers.
I agree with many choices, disagree with many others, and can offer no opinion on the books I haven't read. As a book world insider, I smiled and sighed at the people who selected books written by friends/colleagues. And, no, I will leave that gossip undetailed! But, as far as I can tell, nobody picked a reviled book—a disturbing book—a book that is only loved by a few—a book that might resurface in 20 years as an unheralded and forgotten classic. It didn't seem that anybody tried to make a prediction.
Ted, Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels--as praised and bestselling as they are--still don't get enough respect in my view. I consider Ferrante to be an heir to Tolstoy in the breadth of her vision and her ability to connect the intimate and familial realms with the large-scale intellectual and political world. Her portrayal of the violence at every level of society is especially trenchant. I'm so glad to see MY BRILLIANT FRIEND topping the NYTimes list. I suspect some people see those colorful covers and a woman author's name and assume they are some lightweight trifle. Those readers are missing out on one of the most wrenching and memorable works of literature out there.
Agree, I was blown away when I read my brilliant friend and that was despite the hype, and my being a cynical person. I immediately bought the rest in English (I read the first in French because I thought it would be closer to the original Italian), but I needed a break to digest the first, something I have only very rarely felt.
I understand your hesitation to dive back in. It's all pretty intense! But I will say that the four books taken together as a whole are...epic, to use a terribly overused word.
To be clear I did finish them all, this was a few years ago now, and I agree with you entirely. I was very happy to see it in first place.
Ah, gotcha! This conversation is making me think I need to reread all four soon.
I had the same thought!!
It’s a list of the 100 best books of the century but without poetry, except for Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen”, which is both a poetry and an essay collection.
That’s sad: Anglophone poetry (along with English-language translations of contemporary poets in other languages) is thriving worldwide, from Australia and New Zealand to India and South Africa to Great Britain, Ireland, and North America.
In 2022, when the NYT published one of those silly articles about poetry being dead, I made a list of “Eight great twenty-first-century poems from the United States alone”:
https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2022/12/eight-great-twenty-first-century-poems.html
It would be appropriate perhaps to drop Leonard Cohen's answer to the question of why poetry books are not popular. It's perhaps the best answer I've seen for the mystery of why so many of us who genuinely love lyrical language nonetheless do not enjoy reading poetry...
" I don't think it's for everybody in its pure form. It's like bee pollen It’s nice to have honey in your cakes, but there are purists who like the pollen and the propolis. There are bee cultists.I feel that way about poetry. The honey of poetry is all over the place. It's in the writing in the National Geographic, when the thing is absolutely clear and beautiful. It's in movies. It's all over. The taste of significance is what we call poetry. And when something resonates with a particular kind of significance, we might not call it poetry, but we've experienced poetry. It's got something to do with truth and rhythm and authority and music. It's all over the place. For the few cultists and purists who like to look at a page where the words don't come to the end of the line, I think that's a very specific kind of interest and a very specific kind of appetite, and I really don't think it's for everybody."
I had a similar thought. Another sign that poetry just doesn't exist in contemporary American life in any meaningful way. Not even one of the recently-departed lions - Gluck, for instance - could get a Collected or a Selected on there. Very sad.
Thanks for the wonderful writeup, as always. However, I can’t be the only one irked by the fact that NYT decided that enough of the 21st century has elapsed in order to choose the best books of the 21st century. What are they going to do for the next 76 years of the 21st century?
I’m not irked by it only because in these times of dwindling book sales, any attempt to boost the profile of good authors (and I think the Times did a pretty credible job in its picks) is welcome.
I love this book but saw it in a different way. I felt it was an amazing biography of two girls/womens relationship with all the complexity and twists and turns that entails. In addition I strongly feel that Lila is indeed “the brilliant friend”, Elena is a “grinder”(which I identified with as I am a grinder as well, not brilliant but very hard working).
I cannot thank you enough for your strong support of beautiful literature and reading, it is a blessing to our culture.
I'm reading the Underground Railroad, because my local library branch didn't have anything else that grabbed me. embarrassing what they don't have, but I can order anything from the main library downtown (Los Angeles) and pick it up within a week.
It's simply not very good. Sorry I can't access the review Ted linked. Started off fine, he can do the prose part. But then it just deteriorated. It's so exaggerated. Friend that's far more to the left, a terrific writer who majored in English at Columbia, shocked me by saying the same on a FB thread about the NYT list. Magical realism isn't so magical anymore. Made all the lists though. DEI at work. We don't do that for . . . jazz music. Or basketball.
The list was okay. I'm not fond of them in general, but when you expand to 100 books over 25 years you've got some leeway. The methodology was certainly different than having one expert chose their top 10, or 100. That can be terrific, if you already know and respect the chooser from experience. There's plenty more DEI hidden throughout the list. A fascination with writers from 3rd world backgrounds. I read a bunch of them twenty years ago before terms like DEI exited. I'm a sucker for the books with the medallions on them. Booker. Pulitzer. I figure it's like letting the pros do my filtering for me, you can't even come close to reading everything. Every one of those was disappointing.
Cormac McCarthy got 2 in the top 100. Not one of his latest. Ted has enthused about him before.
I'm not sure how I got turned on to Benjamin Labatut, but it might have been from Ted. He made the list. I'm reading, with some difficulty, "The Quark and the Jaguar" by Murray Gell-Mann, interestingly Cormac helped with the proof reading. They overlapped at the Santa Fe Institute, which sounds like one of the more fabulous places around.
The NYT had a lot of help compiling the group effort list. Sadly though the PC influence is pervasive. One of those chose didn't list a single white author, hers were all non-fiction choices about "the struggle." These weren't the top 100 works of fiction, but the 100 books that influenced you the most. Ferrante is on my list she had another close to the top 10 if I recall. Bolano is something else, but perhaps should come with a warning. Some of the violence makes Cormac look like a choirboy. Many readers just aren't into that.
DEI list? that's really nasty and absurd.
Colson Whitehead is the most overrated author that I’m aware of. I am mystified by the props he gets. Underground Railroad is an overwritten nothing if a book, IMHO.
thank you. i'm always a bit nervous when sticking my neck out re unPC stuff.
i'm left of center, but there's a whole lot of us fed up with all this nonsense. I should almost qualify that to "used to be" we're actually not sure anymore. we are most definitely not voting for the opposite of a meritocracy.
turns out the straight white guys that many years ago hollered about not getting hired or promoted despite being more qualified weren't joking.
Wow, I haven't seen so many uses of DEI in one place since the last New York Post headline about Kamala Harris.
If you don't think Kamala is DEI from day one, I can't help you. She's very not smart, Jill Stein seems not so dumb next to her. I've met both from speaking at events about medical cannabis when they were also on the bill. But give me another acronym. I worked at MLK Jr. Hospital as an ER physician, left a couple years before they shuttered the place, because too many people were dying. I got news for you, DEI eventually kills people.
It was just a comparison, but thanks for confirming who and what you really are.
"Gina Dalfonzo is the author of Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, and of One by One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church, and the editor of The Gospel in Dickens. She is also a columnist at Christ & Pop Culture, and founder and editor of Dickensblog. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, Christianity Today, First Things, The Weekly Standard, Guideposts, The Englewood Review of Books, Aleteia, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, In Pursuit of Truth: A Journal of Christian Scholarship, Literary Life, and OnFaith, among others. She earned her BA in English from Messiah College and her MA, also in English, from George Mason University. Dalfonzo lives in Springfield, Virginia." Also, "How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin" beam/eye. stand up and take a bow. you know . . . nothing.
Wonderfully written and thoughtful piece as usual. (You must hate us picky English majors, but you're so elegant I can't resist pointing out that the spelling you meant is "bloc" not "block". I'll go away now.)
I am an English professor at a small liberal arts college, and I end my senior seminar with _Gilead_. When I prepare to say goodbye to my majors, I cannot think of a better literary gift to offer than Marilynne Robinson’s quietly moving & nuanced meditation on cultivating a sacramental vision of existence. Divine grace is portrayed as a fluid construct that heightens one’s appreciation of the inextricable link between sensitivity to beauty & to moral awareness.
To be fair - The Corrections is more of a 20th century novel anticipating the 21st.
another american centric list of authors.
no indigenous
no australian
no new zealanders
no african.
one asian, and one british.
and not one book i would consider the best. reads like a good read's list.
There are some very very good novels there, and I agree with their first place, which one would you consider the best?
People put these totally arbitrary lists together for three reason:s to piss people off, to get clicks, and demonstrate how cool they are. Jeez, I ain't cool, man — I've ony read one of the NYT list, Wolf Hall. Never even heard of the others,...
Utterly weird--our hero Ted coat-tailing on the NYT! For a tiresome, elitist list of "best books" that will, in due time, be swept away by other "bests." While the average reader goes on consuming stuff from authors who write for...actual readers.
All my books come from the used book store in town, so I'm at the mercy of whatever has been traded in. I've found some interesting books over the past 11 yrs. Sometimes a title or an authors name catches me, (I'm a sucker for non-English sounding names.) I've never cared about "best" of anything lists.
"It is still too heavily tilted to books in English" I do agree. To a hammer, everything is a nail. Isn't that an American saying? Well, thanks for being globally open. There is so much amazing stuff east of Boston and West of Los Angeles
Being pretty well-informed about books, I expected to recognize all of the top 10 (even if I hadn't read them all), so I was shocked that #2 on the list was entirely unknown to me (both title and author).
I was stunned to learn that My Brilliant Friend was named #1. I couldn't be more thrilled. I only got around to reading the series in the last couple of years and just finished a rereading of book 4, which is the far superior of the quartet. The storytelling is remarkable as is the way in which Ferrante take us inside Elena's head. I am Elena when I'm in that world. I have now read all of her adult works, and am always astonished by the way she takes me into her worlds. The first person narrative is so tight to the point where it feels there is no separation between me and the narrator. Ferrante has informed my writing of late, I noticed. Her book about writing "Frantumaglia" should be a prerequisite for all writers.
Huh. I really like Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. Didn’t occur to me to look for more novels by him.